This has nothing to do with taxes.
The advent of the two income family coincided with the explosion of the cost of the nice house in the suburbs with the good school district as middle class whites poured out of cities in the 70's. That house costs two paychecks. Period.
You hit the nail on the head. My wife is actually due today with our first child. She's on 12 weeks maternity leave. Unfortunately, living in Boston, we have no chance of affording our house without her full-time job. Moving to the suburbs is all well and good, but the houses are just as expensive. We're going the au pair (SP?) route.
Why not move? If not to New Hampshire, then a whole other region where someone else is not raising your children.
That's becoming increasingly true. Homeschooling is *not* an option for everyone, and I don't see it ever being more than a few percentage of all school age children. However, the advantage of homeschooling is that it frees the family from being tied to the high cost of a "good school district."
In St. Louis County, just about the only "cheap" housing left in good school districts is in traditionally black neighborhoods, and those are rapidly disappearing as they're either gentrified or entirely bulldozed for shopping centers. Were my husband and I earning equivalent salaries today (adjusted for inflation), we wouldn't be able to afford our house or the neighborhood we live in.
Move out of Boston. You can still get a nice house in Texas for $100-200K.