elicpa: well written! but i have a few comments:
maybe for shluchim it’s not a necessity, I could be wrong but i seem to recall that the gedolim did say that we should send our girls to Bais Yaakov (Sara Schneirer times). I believe that the same goes for boys as well.
Cell phones for children under a certain age can be considered a luxury – what happened to pay phones? Schools still have pay phones and even stores are nice enough to allow use of their phones (sometimes for 25 cents).
A second car can also be considered a luxury in most cases-what happened to public transportation or walking?!