Spreading Love

Why pay for the cow ... Kieran Healy quotes Leon Kass from the University of Chicago who bemoans the decline of marriage. Okay, I am really immature, but I think that I have to find a way to integrate the word "bastardy" into more of my blog posts.

Elizabeth of a Half Changed World does some leg work and finds that families with stay at home moms are most likely poor.

The income categories most likely to have a SAHM are those with annual family incomes between $10,000 and $25,000.  The women in these households are likely to have low potential earnings, and between child care costs and the phaseout of some tax breaks, it probably doesn't pay very much for them to work.  I would also guess that many of them are from cultures that highly value at-home mothering.  At the other end of the spectrum, married couple families with incomes over $100,000 are slightly more likely than those with incomes between $75,000 and $100,000 to have a SAHM.

She also sensitively puts this information into context.