LEAVE NO PARENT BEHIND.("The Two-Income Trap")(Book Review)

To hear American politicians tell it, nothing matters more to good public policy than the family. Bill Clinton campaigned under the slogan "Putting Families First." George W. Bush promised to "Leave No Child Behind." John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, and Howard Dean are squabbling over what they will do for "working families." And in the past two weeks Washington has shown its high regard for parenting by sending out twenty-five million tax-credit checks to people with kids. Roughly speaking, this means that eighty per cent of taxpayers are subsidizing the twenty per cent who are eligible for the checks.

You might, then, expect American families to be luxuriating in good fortune. But, compared with people who don't have children, people who do are in worse economic shape than they've ever been in. The Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren and her daughter Amelia Warren Tyagi demonstrate, in their forthcoming book "The Two-Income Trap," that having a child is now the best indicator of whether someone will end up in "financial collapse." Married couples with children are twice as likely as childless couples to file for bankruptcy. They're seventy-five per cent more likely to be late paying their bills. And they're also far more likely to face foreclosure on their homes. Most of these people are not, by the usual standards, poor. They're middle-class couples who are in deep financial trouble in large part because they have kids.

In the past two decades or so, the cost of having children has risen much faster than the cost of being childless. Conventional wisdom aside, this has little to do with spoiled kids, acquisitive parents, or PlayStation 2. Instead, it's the result of two things: housing and education. According to the Federal Reserve Board, between 1983 and 1998 the price of housing for married couples with children rose seventy-nine per cent in real terms, roughly three times as much as it did for childless people. One reason is that houses are bigger now. But, according to Warren and Tyagi, the real reason is that parents get into bidding wars for homes in safe neighborhoods with good public schools.

Then, there's college. Thirty years ago, middle-class parents could feel they'd done a good job of raising a child if he or she made it through high school--decent jobs for unskilled and semi-skilled labor were readily available. Today, such jobs are much harder to find, and college is considered a necessity. Needless to say, it is also extremely expensive.

The solution seems simple enough: have fewer kids or none at all. This may seem coldhearted, but it's a choice that many Americans, particularly in the middle class, already find themselves making. Between ...