Some of this is going to sound real sexist here, but things began changing moreso after the hippy generation. During the early 70's my mother never worked. My father made enough to support all of us, 3 brothers, a sister and of course mother. By the end of the 70's hyper-inflation hit and my mother was forced to start working to help ends meet.
I'm not blaming women entering the workforce, I'm blaming govt. policies that forced both parents into the workforce.
Elizabeth Warren did a study for the Clinton administration covering bankruptcy in the US from the early 70's into the 90's. The study showed that most American's filing bankruptcy were not people living outside their means, it was the cost of everything skyrocketing. When mothers stepped into the workforce en masse, the cost of general living expenses went up when babysitters and daycare became the norm. Her study showed that a family used to be able to survive on one paycheck per week and still part of it was able to be put aside. By the end of the study, the family required two paychecks to remain solvent. When savings were depleted and the bankruptcies started, most were due to unexpected medical expenses and unforeseen circumstances, natural disasters, et.al. See
Middle Class Myths and her video,
The Coming Collapse Of The Middle Class (long), from a lecture at UC Berkley.
A lot of us are old enough and most likely grew up with at least one parent at home and we benefitted from that. Today with all of the single parent homes or both parents in the workforce, kids don't have the benefit of learning from a parent. Have you noticed how much more undisciplined children are now compared to those of us who benefitted from having at least one parent home while being raised?
Sometimes we need to take a step back and look at the whole picture. There isn't any one person or group of people that put us into this mess, it is a combination of a lot of bad decisions by a lot of different people. When you start to see the big picture you might actually see that all of the problems we now face are the results of years of abuse of our political system by
everyone inside the DC beltway.