Real Wages, which accounts for inflation, have barely budged. If real wages have barely budged, it means precisely that it is exactly as affordable to buy a ba

Real Wages, which accounts for inflation, have barely budged. If real wages have barely budged, it means precisely that it is exactly as affordable to buy a basket of goods as it used to be. You can't argue both that all costs have outpaced wages, and that the real wage hasn't budged, because this is just logically contradictory. It seems like both parents work to pay for child costs that exist because both parents work. Yes, it is often the case that the income of one parent is just about enough to cover the cost of child care necessary to enable this work. This is usually justified by positing that this is necessary for the career growth of the second parent. This makes perfect sense, but my point is that people used to expect less in the past, and one of the things that they didn't expect was good career growth of both parents.