When I was a kid, only rich people had more than one car, or a color TV. Heck, if you had more than one black-and-white TV you were doing pretty good. The bar has been raised a bit, for sure.

Anybody notice on that chart which chunk eats a much larger percentage of the family income now, compared to the other costs, which are largely stable?

Anybody notice that the word "taxes" doesn't even appear in the article?

Let's have some fun with the chart, and I'm working ONLY from the chart, which is supposedly adjusted for inflation. What if the percentage of income taken by taxes now was the same as it was in 1973? 24%? (You don't want to know how low it was in the 1950s)

Now the tax bite on $67,800 is $16,272. Add up the righthand column again and you get $44,792 in expenses, which would give you $23,008 left over. Looking a lot better, isn't it?

Notice how a single income ($38,700) still would leave you over $6,000 short. But wait...what if Mom or Dad stays home with the kids? Lose the daycare (how the HELL do you spend almost $10,000 a year on daycare??), and you end up with the righthand column expenses adding up to $35,122. Well, whaddaya know...not a heck of a lot left over from a single income (only $3,578), but we're seeing some light at the end of the tunnel.

We can quit one job, if we really want to.

Get rid of the extra car, or buy an old used one? Now our disposable is up to $6,638. Still not rolling in it by any means, but one parent is raising the kids, which is better for the kids.

The chart is not clear over whether the mortgage cost increase is for the same sized house or not. If the assumption was that today's family went for the larger house named in the article, we could pick up a little savings there too, but since I don't know if that's where the increase comes from, we'll leave that out. That crap about the wealthy forcing everyone to spend more money is a hoot.

Oh, wait a minute! I forgot something! If you drop to that single income, with a tax rate of 24 percent, taxes are now $9,288 instead of $16,272. Disposable income now goes up to $13,622. Still $4,212 short of what the one-breadwinner family had left over in 1973, or $3,423 short of the disposable income of our two-breadwinner family, but I think we can live with it. Don't eat out so much.

The taxes paid by the modern family are ruinous compared to what they were when I was a kid. It's a crime that the article never even brings this up as an issue.

And a two-job family is about twice as likely to lose one job as a one job family? Duh.