Letter - Family 1st - Women work for luxuries? - Feb 19

Fox

Mon, Mar 03 2014, 12:04 pm

bigsis144 wrote:

Perhaps if we compare to that generation (1950's-1960's) specifically, but that era was actually an historical anomaly in terms of women staying out of the workforce.

Think of the immigrant generations at the turn of the century: women working in sweatshops or doing piecework at home to keep bread on the table.

In the Old Country, plenty of women worked as shopkeepers, seamstresses and other jobs. In more rural areas, women's work on the farm was just as necessary as any man's.

I remember Fox writing one of her trademark eloquent and logical essays on this... wish I could find it and link.

Honestly, imamother is getting worse than my kids! All of you know what I'm going to say before I say it -- because I've said it a million times before!

And, yes, this is exactly what I was thinking as I read all the responses.

The post-WWII economic boom led to the development of lifestyles with virtually no historical precedent. To quote P. J. O'Rourke, "Opportunity knocked, it jiggled the doorknob, and it would pry open the window if you weren't home."

Home ownership for middle-class families? One or even two automobiles per family? Vacations -- even a "vacation" to visit relatives a couple of hours away? Washing machines? Dryers? Vacuum cleaners? These things were unimaginable to previous generations, and the newly-invented items came about only because a market with the disposable income to purchase them now existed.

Health insurance was provided by virtually every employer and included coverage for the entire family. Generous pensions were common, too, and were supplemented by Social Security and, later, Medicare.

When the economic boom began to wind down in the 1970s, we had a whole generation of Baby Boomers who had been raised with expectations of a pretty swell world, economically speaking, and who weren't willing to let that go. So when, as a society, we couldn't continue to keep up with new demands on our disposable income, we sent women to work. The dirty little secret of the feminist movement is that it succeeded not because it was right (which, on many issues, it was), but because it was economically necessary.

Now the belt has tightened even further, and it's not because of greedy bankers or Wall Street shenanigans. It's primarily because we want more health care and retirement income than we can pay for. Now, granted, health care and the dignity of our elderly are more sympathetic expenditures than, say, Louis Vuitton bags for everyone. But economics doesn't really care if we're spending our money on preventing little old ladies from starving or on designer handbags: it's just numbers, and if the expenditures are greater than the earnings, somebody, somewhere, has to pay.

Since we've already gotten the women to pay, we're now left in the unenviable position of hitting up someone else for our doctor bills and bubbe's new orthopedic shoes. If you listen to the economics-educationally-challenged, we should hit up "businesses." However, the Laffer Curve is accurate enough to show us that this is a short run for a long slide. A flat-rate tax system would fix this, but that proves unpopular with everyone who gets a tax deduction for covering his mouth when he coughs or whatever loophole snuck into the tax code. The Chinese have been very helpful by buying a lot of our debt, and in gratitude, we go shopping at Wal-Mart.

So, "do women work for luxuries?" In a sense, yes. Every single one of us lives a lifestyle that was unimaginable even to royalty less than 150 years ago. With tragic exceptions, our lives are not hard, brutal, nor short.

Ultimately, though, we are going to have to face history: most of us will not be able to live as well as our parents, and if we do (often by relying on inherited assets), our children or grandchildren will not be able to live as well as we do.

My parents are in their mid-80s; I am in my early 50s. My 19-year-old daughter came across an article recently on the topic of, "how adult children without pensions can relate to elderly parents with pensions." She said, "Wow. I didn't realize this was a whole generational thing. I thought you and Ta just weren't that financially smart or successful." It stung, of course, to be branded as "not financially smart or successful," but she realized that, as just one example, the fact that we pay $10,000 a year for insurance plus $400 a month uninsured medical costs makes a huge difference in our ability to save and invest.

That, IMHO, is the lesson that everyone needs to "get." Not just Jews. Not just frum Jews. Not just kollel families. Our economy is unlikely to support the level of disposable income among the masses that most of us consider "basic," and we are going to have to adjust. Most of us, of course, have pretty firm opinions about where those adjustments should be made. For example, for a host of reasons, I think money spent on a house is a better choice than money spent on a chassunah. I think that money spent on sterling silver is better than money spent on expensive shaitels. We argue endlessly on imamother about all these things.

But these are minor side arguments -- fighting over the placement of the deck chairs on the Titanic, if you will. In democratically-run countries, we have been unable to resist the temptation to vote in favor of being rich. Now we just have to find someone to make it so, and as the late Margaret Thatcher pointed out, eventually you run out of rich people. Barring that, we may have to grow up and face the fact that we're simply not as rich as we'd like to be -- individually, in our country, in our hemisphere, or in the world.