The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents are Going Broke by Elizabeth Warren

[TomCADem]

If you want to get to know about Elizabeth Warren, and get beyond the caricature and stereotypes created by Fox News and Trump, check out the book that put her on the map in the first place. I read it when it first came out in 2004, and it does a great job of explaining why the middle class has become so precarious in the modern age. Fox paints Warren as an out of touch lefty without any real policy chops. The fact of the matter is that she is as serious a policy wonk as anyone running for President.

https://www.amazon.com/Two-Income-Trap-Middle-Class-Parents-Going/dp/0465090907

In this revolutionary exposé, Harvard Law School bankruptcy expert Elizabeth Warren and financial consultant Amelia Tyagi show that today's middle-class parents are increasingly trapped by financial meltdowns. Astonishingly, sending mothers to work has made families more vulnerable to financial disaster than ever before. Today's two-income family earns 75% more money than its single-income counterpart of a generation ago, but has 25% less discretionary income to cover living costs. This is "the rare financial book that sidesteps accusations of individual wastefulness to focus on institutional changes," raved the Boston Globe. Warren and Tyagi reveal how the ferocious bidding war for housing and education has silently engulfed America's suburbs, driving up the cost of keeping families in the middle class. The authors show why the usual remedies-child-support enforcement, subsidized daycare, and higher salaries for women-won't solve the problem. But as the Wall Street Journal observed, "The book is brimming with proposed solutions to the nail-biting anxiety that the middle class finds itself in: subsidized day care, school vouchers, new bank regulation, among other measures." From Senator Edward M. Kennedy to Dr. Phil to Bill Moyers, The Two-Income Trap has created a sensation among economists, politicians, and families-all those who care about America's middle-class crisis.

[Sherman A1]

1. I would also suggest

The War On Normal People by Andrew Yang. He discusses the changes in the economy that automation will bring and he is a declared candidate for President.