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The idea that double-income families are bad and self-defeating is not new or limited to social conservatism. Elizabeth Warren (yes, that one) wrote a book about it back in 2003.
If anything, we're not punishing double-income families enough.
Incentivizing people not to work is in fact a bad thing. If it led to a significant spike in fertility then maybe it might be justifiable. This is not the case, however.
I'm not sure what you think Warren's book does to buttress your argument. The thrust of her book is that when people have more money from an additional worker in the family, they spend that money on things instead of saving it.
I'm pretty sure the point of that book is that life becomes worse when two-working-parent families become commonplace. They are competing with all the other two-working-parent families so stuff isn't any more affordable, while now there is no longer a parent at home to do the non-economic stuff. That's why it's called a trap.
Women entering the workforce drove down the wages of their husbands and sons.
Wages today are significantly higher than before the days when women entered the workforce.
LOL. LMAO, even.
Sure, nominal wages are higher than ever. Held constant in something like the oldest, most widely used, and most stable form of money on earth (gold) they're lower than ever. Priced in silver, before the CRA you were paid in money that was real silver, you will see the same thing.
By the way, the price of a good beef cow has pretty much always been one ounce of gold, and guess what, it still is. Houses when priced in gold are reasonably priced and have not inflated like mad. Wages are significantly higher because they're being paid in scrip that's significantly less valuable.
Wages today are higher in real terms, not just nominal terms.
Gold is a bad metric since it's highly speculative these days. The past year especially has seen gold rise at very high rates disconnected from any actual underlying material value. If gold is your metric then Obama, Trump 1, and to a large extent even Biden were great presidential terms, while Trump 2 has been an economic catastrophe. Obviously this isn't really the case.
The idea that people are poorer today than they were 25, 50, or 100 years ago is a popular populist talking point but it's just consistently wrong.
Correct. It's connected to the devaluation of the USD, not to underlying material value. The material value is held constant, that's the point, and that's why we use it to see how real goods have changed cost, not in fake currency, but in real money.
In 1975 you had to work 11 minutes to buy a pound of ground beef. Today it's 13 minutes. How is that richer? If you want real steak, sirloin was ~15 minutes per pound in 1975 and now it's 30 minutes per pound. How is that richer? If you want to buy a brand new Ford F-150 in 1975, it costs you about 21 weeks of work, while in 2025 it costs you 31 weeks of work. How is that richer?
I have not even mentioned housing, health care, child care, or education, where costs have ballooned. You might be able to go without a F-150 or sirloin steak, but you have to live somewhere, you have to get healthcare or die, and you have to get education or you'll be poor. We have not become richer in the last 50 years, not as a whole.
Just because it's a physical good doesn't mean it's somehow "true" value in a metaphysical sense. Physical goods are just as susceptible to speculative price spirals as intangible goods. It was true for tulips and it's true for gold.
Looking at a single good like beef is also bad since it mistakes perennial supply chain issues with long term trends. It's almost exactly like the comparison in egg prices people were making against Biden, which were a short-term issue that were resolved once chicken herds recovered. Beef prices are almost guaranteed to follow a roughly similar trajectory.
Yes, there are specific goods where an hour of work in 2026 might earn you less than it did in 1975. But that's not true of the prices of things overall.
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