Utter, worse case scenario crap.
There is no allowance for employer health insurance. As you go up in income that chance increases substantially.
There is no allowance for family help in ASSUMED eternal childcare.
The entire premise is a welfare mom with 2+ kids and no family help.
Yeah, but even employer health insurance is unaffordable if you have a family and are making, say, $60k. Add on the rest of the family and the employee’s contribution then goes through the roof. And even then the coverage sucks.
Exactly. Roughly 90% of American workers work for wages. That means they generally have access to health insurance through their employer. While the quality of that insurance obviously varies, for the most part it's good enough.
Not only that, but some of his numbers are suspect. The author gives a number of $32k/yr for two kids, or roughly $1333 per month per child. He gives no indication of how he arrived at that number.
A quick google search indicates that the average monthly daycare cost for an infant is $1282/mo, which is lower than his but still reasonably close. However, daycare for a toddler, typically defined as a 1-3 year old, drops to $1200/month, and it drops down to $800/mo for a 4 year old.
A reasonable 2 year separation between children would mean the costs would be about $29,784 the first year, assuming a newborn and a 2 year old. The 2nd year (1 year old and 3 year old) would be $28800 and the third year (2 and 4) would be $24000. By the fourth year, cost would drop dramatically as the older child is now in school and no longer needs all day daycare, and the youngest child would be 4 years old and costs would be about $9600/year. By the fifth year, child care costs would be negligible relatively speaking. All the while, the family income continues to increase.
“Entire?” It really isn't. And let's not forget that women now aged 80 are the ones that entered the mainstream workforce back in the 1960s, meaning that neither mom nor grandmom is available for childcare, because they are still working to pay off that mortgage before retiring—and great-grandmom (the 80-year-old) may only be marginally capable of running after toddlers. We have become Sovietized.