Especially when a bunch of that extra income just goes to childcare and services to make up for having less time to manage the house. And then much of the rest is eaten in competition for housing, with prices increased by all the extra money from those second incomes.
I'm skeptical that we'd be much worse off, in actual experienced fact, if the norm were single-income households. I wouldn't be surprised if measures of contentment or happiness actually increased, overall.
Not at a policy level, really. Women could prefer stay-at-home spouses, to protect their own financial independence, though, even in a world so extremely into single-income households that such arrangements were somehow legally mandated (which isn't workable and probably isn't desirable anyway, but, even in that extreme, there'd be options, provided regulations weren't, themselves, sexist).
It's all hypothetical, anyway. We're not going back to that. Outside chance a few other countries do (some are still much farther that direction than we are) but the US never will, barring tyrannical theocracy or something like that. I do think we're buying rather less happiness than one might hope, for all this extra paid labor, but I also doubt that's a solvable problem, realistically.
I'm skeptical that we'd be much worse off, in actual experienced fact, if the norm were single-income households. I wouldn't be surprised if measures of contentment or happiness actually increased, overall.