I am not offended by people's choices. I am not offended at the choice that some families make to have both parents work. I AM offended at the insinuation that having a SAH parent is some kind of luxury accessible only to the 1%. People get by on far less because having a SAH parent is important to them, and they don't feel "luxurious" while driving 15 year old cars and clipping coupons. So don't say you can't afford the luxury when the truth is you CHOOSE not to.
Well, there are shades in this. So maybe someone with $400K in income is probably being disingenuous, but there are many reasons why a family who would appear from the outside to "obviously" be able to afford it might not really be able to without taking some irresponsible risks.
In our case, the issue is retirement. My mother (a SAHM, btw) ended up disabled, and my father died young, before his pension properly vested. She died when I was 35, and from age 18 until her death a very large chunk of my income went to supporting her. I'm in my 50's now, and I'm desperately trying to play catch-up with retirement funding and insurance plans, because the one thing I'm absolutely sure that I need to do for my kids is to NOT depend upon them to support me in my old age. As it is, I won't be able to retire until I'm 70, presuming that I live that long.
DH and I were both laid off in the past decade (DH twice), and DH now makes about 60% of what he did five years ago, yet he still significantly out-earns me. However, I carry our health insurance, and DH doesn't have access to a group plan, because that is the norm in his profession. If I SAH we would have to pay OOP for health coverage, and that would mean dropping our life insurance policies and still probably paying out more than I currently take home (as so much of my income goes to insurance and retirement funding -- again, so that our kids will never have the burden of financially supporting us. The money isn't going to give us a luxurious retirement, but it should be enough to keep us off their financial backs.)
Yes, we spend about $4K a year in travel, but as we both had parents who died young, we want for our kids to have that opportunity WITH us, to grow in that sense and to get outside their comfort zone. The travel expenditure is a conscious choice for that reason, because you never know when lightning may strike. However, we live in a very tiny paid-for home, we carry no debt now (though we both had student loans that also took a large chunk out of our income until our mid-30's), we drive cars until they wear out, and we dress from thrift stores whenever possible. We don't smoke, we don't drink, and we don't have any otherwise expensive hobbies other than the travel. We don't live large, but we still need my income for the future.
Besides all that, the fact is that I simply don't have the temperament to be a good SAHP. I lack patience, and even when I WAS a kid I didn't much like spending time around kids. DH would be better at it than I would, by far, but again, he's the primary earner by a long shot, and besides that, even though he would be decently good at it, he really doesn't want to do it, which AFAIK, is something that no one has ever asked him to justify. He likes working, and somehow that's OK for him.