Free The Two-Income Trap by Elizabeth Warren; Amelia Warren Tyagi Page B

describes the bankruptcy process as follows: “What has caused the acceleration of bankruptcies is the painlessness of the operation plus little avenues of abuse attractive to high-class bankrupts. . . . You come back one day from the corner lawyer and say, Whee! I don’t owe anybody anything!” 23 We are not sure who was on Mr. Buckley’s interview list as he developed his insights into how families respond to financial failure. We are pretty sure it was not one of the thousands of children who have just lost the home they grew up in. We also suspect it was not one of the millions of devastated parents who are watching the symbols and security associated with their children’s place in the middle class crumble away. But we know that every person who read that column and who did not call Mr. Buckley to task for his cheap cynicism helped make life a little harder for a whole lot of children and their parents.

Playing by the Rules
    The families we studied weren’t so different from our own. There were people who made everyone laugh, people who dreamed big, and people who made some really stupid choices. More than anything else, the families whose lives animate this book worked hard, played by the rules—and failed. They made many of the same choices we made—they went to college, they bought homes, they sent both parents into the workforce—but they got caught in a trap
of circumstances that would not let them go, and they ended up in a study of financial failure.
    We believe in these families. But the rules they played by are no longer the rules that govern financial success for the middle class. In a single generation, the world has changed, and families are struggling to adapt. They committed themselves to thrift and hard work in exchange for a promise of economic security and a better future for their children. That promise has disappeared. There was a time when families sent mothers into the workplace only in times of distress. Today, women go to work every day just to maintain a tenuous grasp on a middle-class life. Plenty of families make it, but a growing number of those who worked just as hard and followed the rules just as carefully find themselves in a financial nightmare.
    The collective pressures on the family—the rising costs of educating their children, the growing insurance payments and medical bills, the rising risks of layoffs and plant closures, and the unscrupulous tactics of an unrestrained credit industry—are pushing families to the breaking point. America’s middle class is strong, but its strength is not unlimited.
    The evidence we assemble is unrelenting, but we remain optimistic. The American middle class was forged by families who knew hardship and conflict and who dreamed of giving their children something better. It has survived wars, scandal, epidemics, the Great Depression, and massive transformations in the U.S. economy. It is under assault, but the families that make up the great middle are not quitters. They are ferocious fighters, for themselves and for their children. Their willingness to send 20 million mothers into the workplace had unintended fallout, but it was rooted in a powerful desire to create a better future for their children. Their failure to demand accountability from their politicians and the organizations that purport to speak for them has left them weakened. But we believe that collectively and individually these families have the tools to change the structure of their schools, to bring their politicians to heel, and to fight back against big businesses that would steal their economic vitality. They can release the trap.

APPENDIX
    The Consumer Bankruptcy Project, 2001
    In 1999 and 2000, a group of scholars began to assemble the pieces of what would become the Consumer Bankruptcy Project of 2001. A dozen professors from seven different research universities contributed to the design and implementation of the study. Dr. Teresa A. Sullivan, Executive