Household Income Up - Thank Mom
I heard on NPR and later read that according to a study released Tuesday, the income divide between black and white households has widened over the past 30 years. But that wasn’t what was most interesting in the report to me.
What was most telling about the report was exactly how families, black and white, managed to grow their income at all. It was the women in the family that made the difference. Almost all of the gain in household income over the last thirty years is because more women are working outside the home.
That is a depressing statement if I’ve ever heard one. And it masks what I think is a serious problem in the U.S. - income polarity. The gap between the wealthy and everybody else has widened and it seems no one minds.
It’s kind of like the fact that a majority of Americans favor repealing the estate tax (or, ‘death tax’ for some). This makes no sense. The vast majority of Americans will never come anywhere close to amassing the wealth necessary to be affected by this tax. Why in the world would Joe sixpack want to get rid of a tax that would leave a multi-billion dollar hole in the federal budget? Makes no sense.
So here we are in 2007 with many families only able to maintain their real buying power by sending more people (read women) into the workforce. A quick calculation tells me that this model is unsustainable. Last time I checked, at most a family had one mom and one dad. Maybe we restart child labor?
