If you’re interested in the topic, I recommend the MIT living wage research [1]. They’ve got probably the most useful calculator, letting you compare multiple scenarios.
Hmm just ran this for my area (Essex County, MA) and it spat out that NO job pays enough on average to have 3 kids (required 130k, max job average 121k for “management”). This seems a bit pessimistic, as I know plenty of people with 3 kids and pretty typical jobs…
> This seems a bit pessimistic, as I know plenty of people with 3 kids and pretty typical jobs…
"Living wage" may include having enough margin to save such that one may retire at something resembling a typical retirement age. If so, it's very easy to under-cut it and still be apparently doing fine, until age 70 when you have to keep working, through illness and pain, as a Wal-Mart greeter.
This also means responsible savers have to compete with borrowing-against-their-future types with no retirement savings, for things like housing or (relatedly) various scarce benefits for their kids. IMO it's a pretty strong argument against "freer" personal retirement account systems being the main mechanism of retirement savings, and for mandatory, strong public pension schemes.
>"Living wage" may include having enough margin to save such that one may retire .
Doesn't seem to be.
>[The living wage model] does not provide a financial means for planning for the future through savings and investment or for the purchase of capital assets (e.g., provisions for retirement or home purchases).
Must be childcare costs & housing making it so high, then. I gather childcare costs vary quite a bit from city to city, and in my cheaper location those are easily the two biggest expenses, with childcare eclipsing housing by a fair margin, for 1-parent and 2-parents-both-working categories on the calculator, with 3 kids.
FWIW only the "management" category's average income is (barely) above the "living wage" for a single-adult household, for three kids, here. Since that's pre-tax income, yeah, I'd say that's about right. Kids are crazy-expensive.
Yeah they probably have two income that get pretty close to 130k, or they get government subsidies and credits to make up the difference. Raising kids is extremely expensive but also subsidized heavily, and those are probably not accounted for in the "required salary" from this tool.
> it spat out that NO job pays enough on average to have 3 kids
No single job that earns enough, I think is what you found; this doesn't preclude that dual-income families can afford to have three kids, with average or above-average income jobs.
I can imagine it would be very difficult to make ends meet in this situation as a single parent with 3 or more kids. (I suppose you would either need an exceptionally high paying job, or another major source of income besides that job.)
This is a great resource. I'd nitpick that the childcare expense is IMO a terrible evolution of society. People used to take care of eachother's kids while they were at work (eg, work less hours or compressed days and trade day care days with a friend. ). It's far better for children to have stable adult support (ie same small set of people stably over time) than a revolving door of new employees, whomever is working that shift etc. So we're being less resourceful _and_ giving a worse setup to the next generation.
children used to just go to the workplace with adults and/or spending time nearby playing with other kids. it's the separation of children from adults that creates a problem, not the accounting of it (e.g., childcare cost figures), an extension of a victorian sterility to public life, trying to cast perfect images of idyllic lives for others to admire rather than living carefree.
Most of the historical community building was done at faith communities, and by stay-at home parents in the past. As a society we fell hook line and sinker for "The two income trap," and are unwilling to contemplate the horrible idea of allowing families to collect the childcare subsidy to pay the parent providing childcare is upsetting to enough different groups to be a non-starter.
Right wingers are upset because "it's socialism" and folks on the left who I've discussed the idea with have repeatedly expressed fear that it will undermine feminism.
[1] https://livingwage.mit.edu/