Actually it is. If you want to live like a 1950 single wage earner. But most people don't want their kids sharing a room, having only one bathroom, not having a dryer, no TV, one car, eat 99% of their meals at home, movies only as a special treat, have a garden, send your kids to public school and mend your clothes rather then buy new ones.
The problem is that people want more then that. And they are not willing to wait until they can afford it.
I repeat there is no such thing as a "living wage" when you insist on spending 125% of your income.
But I'm saying that if what they're saying is right, then think may 50-60% or more of that income on housing. If it's a problem, in what is otherwise genuinely a crooked field of bankers and lenders. I don't think it was a hardship that one family in the 50s could afford only BW and the other the new color tv, any more than someone was an early adopter of VHS when decks ran maybe $1000 (or more?), and others were not. But I do think that the difference between the same house - the same house - if its likely cost was 35K in 1955 and is now 600K in 2005 is a far greater increase than the likely increase in salary of the sole breadwinner for the household, 1950s again, but having recently purchased such a property.
Instead, my sense is, regardless of the article, that both parents HAVE to work, in most cases, because their costs are out of control. It's not that they live extravagantly, which is I think your complaint. It's that they are trying to provide a bare minimum which unarguably is hampered by government taxation, regulation, and by corrupt banking practices and greed, and also arguably seems to have come much easily for many families 40 years ago, with the benefits I mentioned. And you didn't comment on that, either.
And you also didn't comment on my comment about the hypocrisy of professional moneylenders. Bankruptcy is irrelevant to those people if the potential borrower has sufficient cashflow. If they stopped THAT practice, and punished bankruptcy filings for the same number of years and FOR ALL, regardless of income, and only they can do that, they wouldn't have had their argument, it seems, for this legislation which seems to target an entirely different group of borrowers.