Over at Mark Thoma's Place

Over at Mark Thoma's place (Economist's View), there's an interesting discussion underway about the origins and intellectual foundations (or lack thereof) of supply-side economics. I strongly recommend reading Marks original post and the comments.

As usual in comment threads, things get off-track a bit. One of the commenters argued that maybe we'd be better off without so many women in the labor force, citing as evidence how things had gone downhill since his father earned $4 per hour in 1956. Now, $4 per hour in 1956 was more than twice the average annual wage in manufacturing in 1956 (about $1.75), and is the equivalent of more than $29 per hour today. I suspect any number of people are raising families in reasonable comfort as the sole wage-earner in the family--if, that is, they're making $59,000 per year.