The number of Americans employed has been rising steadily during the months of 1977, but the number of unemployed has not significantly declined. The explanation for this apparent inconsistency is the tremendous influx of women into the labor force.
It’s not merely young women just graduating from high school or college who are responsible for the statistics. That has been going on for several decades. What is different now is the larger numbers of wives who are leaving their homes and entering the job market, plus the women who are not departing from the job market after they marry.
There are a variety of reasons why women have made their individual decisions, the most important of which is probably the need or desire to increase spendable income. The result, however, is a national trend of major consequences to our social and economic system.
There are today some forty million adult women who are not in the labor force. What if a fourth, or a third, or half of those women decide to enter the job market? Where are the jobs? What will be the economic and social consequences? Should it be our public policy to encourage or to discourage this movement?
Over the last decade, Sweden instituted changes in the tax structure and in income-linked social benefits that resulted in moving practically all the wives out of the home and into the labor force. As the first numbers of wives took paying jobs, they reaped a temporary increase in family income because they became two-wage-earning families.
Over the period of several years, however, equalization of wages resulted in a relative deterioration of men’s take-home pay, and now most Swedish families claim they can no longer afford to live on a single income. It seems to take two wage-earners to live as well as the family could formerly live on the husband’s wages with his wife in the home. — Wives feel compelled to take jobs when many would prefer to remain at home.
Who, then, are the principal beneficiaries of the social movement of wives out of the home and into the labor force? Clearly, the advocates of Big Government.
If a woman cares for her own children at home, cooks her own food and washes her own laundry, no money changes hands and hence no taxes are paid. However, when a woman buys packaged foods and ready-made dinners, uses commercial laundries, eats in restaurants, and puts her children in child-care centers, more taxes are paid. Big Brother in Washington gets his tax bite on every transaction.
The American people are fed up with high taxes. Every chance they get, voters are defeating officials who vote for higher taxes. Housewives are the last frontier for expanding the labor force, and hence expanding the income of Big Government, and its potential to hire more personnel convinced that they are the Supreme
Problem-Solvers to manage our lives.
Mack A. Moore, professor of economics at Georgia Tech, hit the nail on the head with his conclusion that “this churning of the national money crock is clearly the objective of the professional reformists in Sweden and in the U.S., in order to … provide funds to support the problem solvers” whom he calls “parasites capitalizing on the public crises industry.”
Contrary to popular mythology, there is no rising demand for government services from the public. There is, however, a rising demand for government spending from those who propose to supply the services. The housewives who move into the labor force will pay the taxes that finance bigger and bigger government spending.
