Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Why are we setting what Senator Elizabeth Warren has described as a dual income trap? In America, the experience was that incomes doubled because everybody started working, but disposable income fell due to a bidding war for property and the costs of health care, transport, tax and child care went up. Couples were left worse off. They were working all the time but were poorer and exposed. Where one person lost his or her job, the couple faced bankruptcy, which has happened wholesale in the USA, unable to cater for a family member who fell sick or children with special needs or any other variation from the hard-nosed economic model of getting everyone working all the time. That is what we are doing in our tax individualisation system, with our lack of care for caring work in our social welfare system and, now, in the new policy initiative which discriminates against the very parents who are most at risk in the dual income trap, those left on a single income. Why are we doing that?

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