Quote:
Originally posted by ltl/fb
I know that people run up credit cards, but anyone who runs up credit card debt that they know they won't be able to pay within a relatively short time obviously is not stressed out about being in debt. Unless they lost their job, etc. etc. and their only source of funds is the credit card, but then they're so stressed out that the unsecured debt really isn't the problem, it's more a symptom of the problem.
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It's interesting that the discussion about the article morphed into a group musing about conspicuous consumption. I thought the point of the article is that MWKs find themselves on a debt treadmill
largely because of a bidding war for suburban housing and schools that made dual-income households
necessary to compete for subsistence.
To me, it seems like the vast household income growth we experienced in the late '70s, '80s and early '90s was wholly attributable to families becoming dual-income. It doesn't take an economist to figure out that those gains would be entirely eaten up by price inflation in the markets in which those MWKs participate as consumers, like housing. Plus, we weren't really thinking about the economic and social costs of dual-income households, like paying others to perform domestic tasks.
I'm all for women having identical freedoms to men. But we didn't really consider the option of having the man stay home as primary caregiver, or other ways of addressing the problem. Now we've just suffered from the impact of inflation, pure and simple. For example, single working mothers wouldn't be as fucked as they are if they were competing in the resource marketplace with Ward Cleaver, Breadwinner alone. Or June Cleaver, Breadwinner, I don't care.
