The Dual Income and the Poor

An interesting take on the economics of the working family. (Not that I care for Adam Smith.) 

The dual income, of course, has an equally disastrous effect upon housing affordability.  In past generations, a man could buy a small home with his own savings.  Today, not only has the housing market become radically inflated through government-sponsored usury, but since home prices are essentially monopoly prices, selling for the maximum amount the market will bear, having two breadwinners in a majority of homes can only make a landed lower class even less possible.  According to the same Census Bureau report above, the quintile most likely to have only one income (the poorest quintile) constitutes one third of all renters.

Americans do not often consider that such a trend toward dual full-time incomes -- and subsequently, toward the impracticability of properly raising a traditional family with two children -- has already harmed this country substantially.  Conservatives complain of the unfathered children of the most criminal classes, yet they often neglect to propose that a missing mother could harm the family as well.  They complain about a public school system's advocacy for increasingly bankrupt leftist causes, but they will not encourage mothers to fulfill their duty to raise their children.  They complain of the incredible burden associated with an aging population without wondering whether it is actually affordable anymore for traditional families to properly raise more than one to two children.  Simply put, the economic (and thus reproductive) power of the individual household is vital to a host of conservative causes, and yet, for reasons neither logical nor moral, the sacred cow of feminism takes precedence over all of them.

It may perhaps be complained that the woman's worth is not realized when she remains at home, that she is disempowered in her motherly duty.  But the wise know -- not just with their minds, but also with their hearts -- that a mother's value is not reflected solely in the peace of the home and in the stability of nations.  On the contrary, if a society of women arise to their honorable calling, they are amply rewarded in the fortified paychecks of their husbands, and in the affordability of their homes.  This was yesterday's America, steeped in the honor which accompanies the dutiful.  Yet today, the husband depends upon his wife to sustain a wealth they once had without her leaving the home -- a deteriorating financial and reproductive state of the American household for which leftists, of course, propose "remedies." (Read entire article.)

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