A woman wrote an open letter to our Prime Minister, describing her difficulty in making ends meet; she's got four kids, a medium-sized student loan and her husband (a teacher) earns a little more than the average NZ salary. Apparently their debt is growing by the month, even though they don't buy luxuries and moved to Waihi just so they could have a small mortgage. At first, her story made me feel sympathetic, because she's saying that there are plenty of tax breaks for the poor (and lots of ways for the rich to avoid paying taxes) but not much for the middle-class income-earners.
But then I thought - why on earth did she have kids right after finishing her degree and before she had a chance to save up any money? Why did she go on to have four of them?
Life is certainly more expensive than it would've been in the Sixties. However, perhaps this is because it is so much easier to spend your money these days. Few people make their own clothes or grow their own veges; lots more people have computers, internet accounts, mobile phones and overseas holidays. It's not necessarily cheaper to make your own clothes or grow your own produce, but it must be cheaper to make your meals from scratch than it is to buy takeaways, right?
And another thing - the newspaper article ran statistics on the percentage of families where the male is the sole bread-winner (the 'traditional' model), but there's no mention of families where the woman is the sole bread-winner...
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