What has changed in the last 20-30 years so that it now takes two incomes to maintain a household?
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As the workforce globalizes, people need to compete with lower income workers worldwide. Factories have been moving to cheaper countries. Office jobs are being sent overseas.
To counteract this, the government has been stimulating growth by dropping interest rates for the last 40 years. But it hasn’t been enough to cause wages to keep up with costs, so the living standard a single person can provide has been dropping steadily.
The situation is intensifying rapidly in the last few years. Because recessions are defined by GDP, and government spending is included in that calculation, the government simply spends what it needs to, to prevent a technical recession from happening. This has been happening since after the great recession in ’08 and ’09.
Because we would have had a massive depression starting in 2020 due to covid economic disruption, this is causing government debt levels to skyrocket to extreme levels (currently in excess of 120% of GDP).
The extreme spending is causing very high inflation and accelerating impoverishment, especially in housing costs. The 3 and 4 income household will soon become the norm, as cost increases continue to outpace income growth.
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