Just because one of you earns the paycheck doesn't mean that person should lord over how the money is handled.
After about six months, I told my mother that I wanted the lessons to stop, and she was intelligent enough not to force me to continue. Besides, the lessons cost money, which was anything but abundant in our household.
Nowadays it's not who wears the pants in the family, but who carries the credit cards.
If your kitchen table is like mine, you sit there at night before you put the kids to bed and you talk about what you need. You talk about how much you are worried about being able to pay the bills. Ladies and gentlemen, that is not a worry John McCain has to worry about. It's a pretty hard experience. He'll have to figure out which of the seven kitchen tables to sit at.
In the 1950s, men were the bread winners and women worried about the price of bread.
Payday at my house is like the Academy Awards. My wife says: May I have the envelope please.
The average household income has really stagnated since 1971.
Those who analogize the federal budget to a family's budget must know nothing about either.
Real median household incomes in the U.S. were basically the same in 1989 as in 2014. But we are also seeing similar challenges in the U.K. in the stagnation of real wages.
Women oftentimes are the ones making those economic decisions, sitting around the kitchen table and trying to figure out how to pay for rising gas prices or food prices or the health insurance costs. And I think that they see where they expect their leaders in Congress to also make those tough decisions.
Regardless of the gender of the highest wage earner, the balance of power in the relationship will suffer if the higher earner uses control of the purse strings as a system of reward and punishment. It will also suffer if the lower earner takes a chippy, haughty attitude to spending money they haven't actually generated themselves.
In their hearts women think that it is men's business to earn money and theirs to spend it.
My husband used to take care of the business part of this, and after he died I found I wasn't really any good at it. I hate remembering who owes me what and bugging them if they haven't paid me.
There are several ways to apportion the family income, all of them unsatisfactory.
