The “Seven Fat Years,” as Wall Street Journal editor Bob Bartley calls 1982-1990, were a time of sustained economic growth – according to the usual measurements. Why, then, does the middle class feel poorer, with each succeeding generation struggling harder for a comparable standard of living? What happened to the bloom on the eighties rose?
For part of the answer, we can look at the economics of family life. There, crushing taxation, relentless inflation, and the march of the regulatory state have conspired to enact a devastating social revolution.
The ideal for most Americans was the father as breadwinner and the mother as homemaker. In John F. Kennedy’s first term, two-thirds of married women didn’t have to work outside the home. Then, most families could live on the husband’s income. Today, only one-quarter can afford to do so.
Feminists claim that the old order reflected misogyny and discrimination. But that doesn’t explain why, during the same period, 80% of single women worked, the same percentage as today.
In fact, for single women in some age groups, overall employment is actually down. That’s partly because it was easier for younger women to get a job in 1960 than today. Now, civil rights lawsuits and mandated benefits like “family leave” make employers shy away. Yet these are the women who are most likely to want work.
As for married women, it’s not civil rights laws that have drafted them into the workplace; it’s government interference in the economy. In 1950, the average American family paid 2 % of its income in federal taxes. Today, it is 25 %. And adding in state and local taxes, families pay nearly 40%. The long march of tax increases didn’t even slow down in the eighties.
Thirty years ago, women knew that a main benefit of marriage was freedom from the workplace. Today, women can no longer count on that, because men can no longer offer it. This has reduced the economic value of men.
Today, the burden of preparing for long careers leads women to put off marriage, and when they do marry, two-thirds of their salary goes to help pay the family’s federal taxes, points out Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, with the other third often going for daycare.
The social revolution is most striking for married women with young children. Before Kennedy’s first term, less than one fifth had to leave their children for work. Today, two-thirds find they can’t afford to be full-time mothers. This is called “liberation” by the feminists, when it actually represents a massive decline in living standards.
The worst decline took place from the mid-70s through the 80s, when the number of working married women increased by half. Leftists approve, but they don’t talk about it for fear that it would reflect positively on Republicans. The Right, on the other hand, doesn’t bring it up because they fear it might reflect negatively on Ronald Reagan.
The Right and the Left have thus engaged in a cover-up. In his paean to the 80s, Bartley praises the 18 million new jobs created during the “seven fat years.” He doesn’t tell us that 4.6 million of those represented married women forced into the work force by economic pressures.
Left liberals like to make fun of the “traditional” family. They’re right when they say it’s no longer a social norm; in only a quarter of households is the husband working and the mother home taking care of the kids. But leftists are wrong to say that it still doesn’t represent the ideal. It reflected a rational division of labor under freedom; the new system has been foisted on us without our consent.
In the last four decades, taxes on families have increased 300%. Single people have not escaped the crush, of course, but in a relative sense they have suffered less. The Social Security tax is killing us as well. The perpetrator, aside from Franklin D. Roosevelt, is Reagan. In 1983, he appointed the Greenspan Commission, and then, under its bipartisan cover, pushed for the perpetually increasing taxes that “saved” the system.
The real income of most American workers peaked historically in 1972, right after Richard Nixon destroyed the remnants of the gold standard. Real earnings have been on the decline ever since, even during the 1980s.
The Left says the eighties created “disparities” of wealth. But as William Quirk and Randall Bridwell explain in Abandoned, the real problem is the decline in middle-class income, increases in the prices of goods and services middle-class people really care about (e.g. higher education and housing), and the consequent decline in living standards.
This explains why middle-class families are so angry and cynical. Those families were the basis of Ross Perot’s support in 1992, and they are the ones most likely to lead the coming revolution against Washington. That revolution will require, for starters, scrapping several dozen government agencies, eliminating income taxation, cutting and capping the budget, gelding the central bank, and deregulating the economy.
That would unleash tremendous entrepreneurial energy and cause an explosion in prosperity. As women again saw marriage as a means of escaping the burdens of professional life, the value of men in the economy would be restored. Families would grow larger, with children raised as only a mother can raise them.
We’ll know we’ve arrived at 1950s levels of prosperity, not when we see more jobs “created,” but when we see 23 million married women quitting the jobs they have now. Official data will record this counter-revolution as jobs lost; Americans in their private lives will see it as prosperity regained.
