Book Recommendation of the Day

[kyburg]

The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke

Presenting carefully researched economic data to support their arguments, the authors contend that, contrary to popular myth, families aren't in trouble because they're squandering their second income on luxuries. On the contrary, both incomes are almost entirely committed to necessities, such as home and car payments, health insurance and children's education costs. When an unforeseen event such as serious illness, job loss or divorce occurs, families have no discretionary income to fall back on.

A nice companion book to this would be Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

If you think unions are a thing of the past, you've got another thing coming. It was societal stressors like these that birthed them in the first place. They still suck? Imagine how much louder the suck can get -

Comments

[bigbigtruck.livejournal.com]

There was an interesting article similar to this one posted to a newsgroup a while back... lemme find the link...

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/10/13/bankrupt_parents/index_np.html

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

Yup, I saw that. I don't pay to read Salon's articles (and day passes just piss me off), but it did contain enough information in the abstract for me to go dig it up on Amazon -

Loved the tag line from Salon, though - "Your biggest risk of bankruptcy is having children."

Noooo kidding.

Pro-life, my ass.

[storvik.livejournal.com]

Does that book mention that another major reason for two-income families is taxes?

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

I didn't see that in the abstract.

*takes a look at her last paystub*

And if I didn't have to pay taxes, I still wouldn't have enough coming in without both of us working.

Not to mention all the invisible things those taxes pay for - like police, fire, roads, etc.

[makeitepic.livejournal.com]

I have read Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America - it's a great book :)

*sighs*

[ceolyn.livejournal.com]

And Rey wonders why I stress about if we'll ever be able to afford to own our own home (not on our current incomes). Or start and support a family (also not on our current incomes). Things like this are why I get twitchy about his impulse spending. Every time I read about things like this I despair of ever being able to do those things. Feh.

~C

Different things

[coldjones.livejournal.com]

NPR had a piece on the two-income trap about a week ago - the main point the authors talked about was not that there wasn't sufficient money for the family unit, but that people had no emergency planning for when disaster struck, and that, unlike a household with a stay-at-home parent, there was nobody else to send out to work in an emergency. They seemed to suggest pretty strongly that a two-working-parent household could work fine if the parents could A) build up an emergency fund, and B) have definite ideas on what expenses could be cut in such an emergency (sacrifice one of the cars, etc.)

In contrast, N&D was about how single people working at bottom-rung jobs in the US were totally screwed... which is an entirely different thing from a middle-class double-income household. And while I think N&D made some good points, some of the preconditions of her experiment seemed a little odd - it's not possible to be working at Wal-Mart and have your own apartment, true, but it's not the worst thing in the world to have a roommate in that situation, either.

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

Oh, the single person trap has been known since I was a sprout - back when "cradle to grave welfare" existed. That was a joke, BTW - if you were single and without children, even in the heyday of those programs, the assumption was you had no reason to live.

It was pathetic. That was, nearly 30 years ago. 1979. For a short time, I hung out with a woman ten years older than me - I was 19 - and learned a whole lot about being broke. One, there was no family for her to fall back on. Two, they rented "wetback shacks" for $50 a month and she lived in one (think one big room with a kitchen and bathroom off each side - but it's a house), bathroom tissue came from the Denny's if I took her out for iced tea and conversation (they used rolls instead of sheets, so thank you!) and if you add a touch of cumin to boiled pasta, you can almost taste the butter you don't have to put on it!

You can live that way, but it was a total whack job. That was 30 years ago - today, she'd be homeless - likely, dead.

The recent myth is that if you form a family unit - a couple - and get down to business, you'll evade that trap. The whole sad point of the book is that today, you're screwed. Single, married, whatever. Particularly, whatever - if you manage to find a way through it, if it ain't a man and a woman - there's a whole week now to tell you how wrong you are.

What people are thinking eludes me.

[coldjones.livejournal.com]

The recent myth is that if you form a family unit - a couple - and get down to business, you'll evade that trap. The whole sad point of the book is that today, you're screwed. Single, married, whatever.

Well, no - even the author of Nickle & Dimed pointed out some good statistics about how much of a difference there is between the bottom 10% and the second-lowest 10% of income earners. Two people can get by ok in $30k a year, barring any truly catastrophic event. True, she also mentioned families earning $40k a year who were in "the trap", but that couple was a prime example of what the two-parent income article is talking about - a reasonable amount of money coming in, but all the money's tied up in day-to-day expenses, making it difficult to change the underlying circumstances.

I'm not disagreeing with you that the social welfare system in the US is dysfunctional, or that the US is a very difficult place to live if you're not making a fair amount of money, or that it can be difficult even if you are making a fair amount of money, if you don't carefully manage your expenses. Economists and conservatives babbling about GDP growth aside, I'd probably rather have a setup like Canada, where being poor isn't nearly as terrible an experience.

But the upshot of all this is that people in the US A) have to bust their asses to stay competitive in the job market, (i.e. strive not to be economic roadkill) and B) have to be careful with their money almost regardless of how much they make (i.e. savings good, credit bad). Neither situation is ideal, but neither situation is anywhere near impossible for the vast majority of people.