Quote:
Originally Posted by peter12
The whole dual income professional class stuff is a bit of nonsense. Those aren't the people drowning in debt. Besides a household earning 220k is in the top 1% of Canadian households. We're clearly talking about the bottom 1/3 here.
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It has moved the window of what people regard as middle class behaviours. I used the example of elite sports teams. Spending on sports and recreation for kids has quadrupled in the last 20 years. Who are these people dropping 5k+ a year per kid on intensive sports activities with travel, hotels, etc? It started out as those upper-middle-class, dual-income professional households. But as tends to happen, now the middle-middle-class considers that kind of behaviour to be just a standard part of being Canadian parents, so they've followed suit. Even though they can't really afford it. Maybe it's a downside to the egalitarian pretenses of our society, but fewer people in Canada today seem to recognize that A) there are dramatic differences in income even among families who regard themselves as middle-class, and B) we should tailor our spending to what our income affords us.