One income households commonly were enough to support a family of 3-5 comfortably. Now, 2 incomes in most households with kids, get even less than what one did. I can't verify this number because it's purposely not tracked, so I'll go with an approximate mode wage of $12-15 an hour. If minimum wage kept up with inflation, we'd be somewhere between $30-$35 an hour minimum wage. So when correctly adjusted for inflation minimum is compared to today's mode wage, we've essentially lost half or more of our income. Now, add in the fact that you no longer have one person at home, doing the work at home ie. taking care of the kids, the house, etc, AND now paying for childcare, after school programs, etc, we've essentially lost 75% of our income. Even though we only lost 50%-60% in buying power because we have two people working now, we lose the other 15%-25% in childcare services and the time lost from still having to do all the things that need to be done at home that the person at home normally would have done.
These people wonder why less people are having kids? You stole 75% of our income in the last 50 years or so, people can't afford 3-5 kids anymore with 75% less income, and 40+ less hours available to raise such kids. Who wants to have kids they can't afford, can't raise, and only get to see enough to spend legitimate time with on weekends? Elon claims more money won't help because rich people have less kids. First off no one is talking about making everyone rich. Second, more money is exactly what would fix the issue, he's just so out of touch with reality that he sounds stupid as fuck. So apparently there's absolutely no correlation between having a family, and being able to afford a family? Weird.