>Unless you are in the upper 5%

20% of US family households with children under 18 years of age have a household income over $200,000/year. (Source: HINC-04). A large percentage of this forum earn more than that individually. You also don't need nearly that much to live close to work. And that's across the whole US.

So it is definitely not only the top 5% that can afford to choose where they live. You know you don't need a McMansion! You don't need a single family home in an area designed around 1h commutes.

>Painting this as a choice around stranger danger is similarly ignoring that children need to get to school before they are capable of traveling independently

Right but one of you working part time for a few years until the kids are old enough to get themselves around vs one of you working part time until the kids are adults? Big difference. A lot of teenagers in the US are carted around by their parents everywhere partly because their parents choose to live in car-dependent suburbia.

>Neither of these claims are true. Teachers, like many other jobs, have set schedules. If they need to be at their worksite before school starts and at or after the time it gets out, that does not leave time to travel somewhere else.

Teachers have among the most flexible and kid-friendly schedules of all professional or semiprofessional workers. They don't have weird night shift schedules half the week like nurses or 60 hour weeks like lawyers. They have pretty flexible hours when they aren't actually teaching. Because they are largely unionised and mostly women, they have negotiated flexible hours and openness to part time that you just don't find in many jobs.

You also ignore that even if they have to be there from say 8:30 to 4pm, that still means they have drop off flexibility with the kids at one end, and, obviously, in many cases the kids go where teacher-parent works!

>This is well studied and I’d tend to go with the academic consensus over your opinion. For example, this is in constant dollars:

As always this propaganda relates only to "production and non-supervisory workers". You can't just exclude large parts of the economy and call it proper analysis.

>One key thing to think about is whether paying less for a cheaper TV every decade is saving you as much money as higher housing, healthcare, education, and retirement costs have cost

It isn't just TVs but everything else. Appliances are better and cheaper across the board. Cars are cheaper. Houses are far bigger and families are smaller, so food and shelter are cheaper per earner. Clothing is virtually free, and decent clothing is still much cheaper than it was.

Education is free - no, tertiary education doesn't count because the expensive options are luxuries and move the average up a lot. Communication is cheap: remember long distance calls costing dollars a minute? Remember texts costing 79c each? And that was only 10 or 15 years ago.

Housing is more expensive largely (no, not entirely, but largely) because people's tastes are more expensive. You could build uninsulated damp houses with single glazed windows for a pittance if you want to spend what people spent in the 50s.

Retirement costs are up because people live longer. Cry me a river.