Sheesh.
And an annual vacation to a place of her choice.
A big part of the problem is that out-of-control government regulation has made many of the self-help entrepreneurial routes illegal or blocked by government-protected union contracts. Fifty years ago, this woman could have set up a home-based business preparing meals to deliver to working families — now she’d need a dozen licenses, and an industrial kitchen that meets the laundry list of requirements for those licenses, and certification that she’d taken and passed some government-mandated food safety training program, and the whole project becomes financially impossible. Or she could have set up a home child care business, but now that requires a home that has been remodelled to meet all sorts of requirements, certification, very new cribs, strollers, high chairs etc (because the regulators and their industry lobbyist cronies keep changing the “safety” standards every year, forcing caregivers and thrift stores to throw out all their inventory and buy new), additional staff in many cases even if only a very small number of children are being cared for — all far beyond what people are required to have in their own homes to take care of their own children. There are a lot of other types of self-employment that are closed off too. And those that aren’t generally already have a huge oversupply of people trying to make a living doing them.