She is very smart. I mean duh, literal PhD professor and all:-).

What I know about the situation is that way back in the day, having a family was something that the US government decided needed to be incentivized, hence tax breaks were offered to those who participated. While WAAAAY back in the day before that, like feudal England times, marriage - as in certificates, formalized ceremonies where people would travel to attend, divorce prohibited under the law and such - was only for royalty, whereas nobody gave a crap about peasants. The latter just said "let's do it" and shacked up together, and that was that. That doesn't negate the very real experiences they lived - just that the government did not get involved down to that level, b/c the peasants were basically the "property" of the landlord, so if e.g. an injustice was done, it would be up to them to right it (assuming they were not the cause of it in the first place, or too bored/scared/drunk/horny/whatever). Maybe that is all in the book - probably, or at least she surely knew the back-story as she wrote:-).

Anyway my point is that ever since radio and especially TV, politicians have gotten really good at pulling the wool over people's eyes - and surely they did quite a job of that before then too:-P - and I don't think the politicians even cared about family income vs. non-family income, so much as it likely seemed a great way to hide the real truth: that a massive transfer of wealth from the common man was being increasingly shifted into the hands of a few. Calling it "family" allowed them to basically double the amount someone could receive before wondering why they were not doing well off (except it's so complex b/c they WERE doing well-off, but that was b/c the USA wasn't bombed all to hell during the World Wars, and also technology especially medical care had improved tremendously; also, women do not earn equal to men so really it's not "double" and more like 1.7). And then after that there are so many other tricks too - e.g. people having to work longer hours to meet the same standard, or old people having to refinance their mortgages to pay off their kids college or house loans or whatever, and all the while they had people convinced that even though they were NOT okay, that somehow it was mysteriously just them in isolation, rather than a major societal upheaval affecting us all (though not equally).

I am not very smart, and not very well educated in these matters - really - but that much at least I see. What the forces of globalization and mechanization mean, essentially, are that most humans are now irrelevant (to the REAL "Humans", the powers behind this little ~~democracy~~ plutocracy of ours), so we can just fuck off and die - if not all then at least most of us. The pandemic made this crystally clear, to anyone who was listening.

So yeah, if we aren't one of THEM then we are merely peasants, and can only get by as best we can. The only thing I can add is that not all places in the USA are moving towards this end at equal rates - e.g. women in certain states cannot receive life-saving medical care if it involves the uterus in even the most tangential of ways (like an ectopic situation), but women in more liberal states still can. Not everyone can pick up and move, thus many will simply (and fully, I mean literally in every sense) die instead.

The USA is not a first-world nation anymore.