Quote:
Originally Posted by zeek
Expenses that have gone up starts with housing and the cost of real estate, of homeownership. And then, it continues on with health care, which is, as you know, astronomical and then schooling. A public university cost double what it did in 1996. And that's not a fancy private school. So I think that's kind of very telling, and a lot of the people are weighted down by educational debt. If we think about what it means to be a professional, it often means having, at least college and then potentially graduate school. So a lot of professionals are struggling to pay off six figure college loans.
Surveys show that women with children make less money. It's probably due to employe prejudice that they're going to be less productive. We have such limited maternity leave compared to most industrialized countries. Only 13 to 14% of Americans have paid family leave in their jobs, so that's very small. Employers feel like, oh, once I hire somebody who has a kid, this is going to be a cascade of latenesses and absences - things that are really often untrue and just bias. Yet there was a Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis survey that found moms were more productive in their jobs than women without children.
And right now, two-thirds of women with kids under 6 are working. So that is a huge number. And those are kids who are often too young to be in kindergarten or even preschool. So that means that they're going to be needing day care. Of course the average cost varies from state to state. The Economic Policy Institute said the annual average cost of infant care in New York state is $14,000. So a New York family with one child pays 21 percent of their income on child care on average, and for two kids, that rises to 38.7 percent.
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We had all of these issues in 1975, you haven't demonstrated that the economy is worse now than it was then.
Any reasonable person would agree that the life of the Average American is greatly improved from 200 years ago, and from 100 years ago. As the time frame gets shorter it is more difficult to see the drastic improvements. But there is plenty of evidence. My brother has a 1953 chevy pickup in excellent condition. No seat belts, no air bags, no side mirrors, and it is far less efficient.