For those working: why so much?

Competition between families and the market?

A somewhat — though not entirely — different perspective was offered by Pat Fagan, director of Marriage and Religion Research Institute at Family Research Council. The FRC is known for its conservative perspective on social issues, and Fagan outlined his view that traditional families are in competition with what he called “fractured families” — who, he said, are making greater demands on “the common purse.” But, he acknowledged, there can also be competition between families and the marketplace.

Fagan had no more interest in labor-market regulations than did Ghei or Simpson. But while Ghei suggested doing away with policy programs that make it easier for mothers to work, Fagan proposed the inverse, extending them to one-earner families.

For example, the tax code offers credits to parents who pay for child care; the same subsidy should be available to stay-at-home parents, Fagan said. “Where child care is concerned, you give to one, you give to all. You give it to the child, because every child’s going to be taken care of by somebody,” he said. And “you could play that right across the whole board, on all social and educational services.”

Obstacles to such a policy shift included a series of special interest groups, Fagan said, a category that he defined to include “ideological feminists” and poverty advocacy groups who championed competing family structures.

But there was another group that fell under that heading: employers. Because they make it easier for both parents to work, and thus expand the potential supply of labor, programs like the child care tax credit are best understood as a subsidy to businesses, not families, he said. “It makes the woman more employable to the employer. That’s a huge constituency on [Capitol] Hill and everywhere else.”

Winners and losers in the modern economy

If the Cato Institute and the Family Research Council represent the libertarian and family values wings of the right-wing coalition, Reihan Salam, a writer for National Review, has a reputation as something of an unorthodox conservative. Grand New Party, a book Salam co-authored in 2008 with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, gained attention for its focus on appeals to working-class “Sam’s Club” voters. And his analysis of the source of pressures on families overlaps with Warren and Tyagi’s. What has happened, according to Salam, is that as education has become more important, Americans are increasingly vying for the chance “to live in above-average school districts in high-cost metropolitan areas” — and as families with two full-time earners devote both incomes to that competition, the price of those scarce slots is bid up.

But Salam is not especially persuaded by stories about market reforms leading to wage stagnation, or proposals to guarantee income security for working families. Instead, he says, the best policy response would be “a relentless focus on the supply side” — in other words, an attempt to produce more of those slots families are competing for. On housing, that means relaxing land-use regulations that limit how many homes can be built in attractive communities; doing so, Salam said, could provide some relief to upward pressure on prices. (He also favors reforming the mortgage interest deduction, which he said “mainly benefits the rich and provides zero benefit to non-filers,” while exacerbating high housing costs. Reforming the deduction, he said, would also be part of a program he supports to raise average taxes — though not marginal tax rates — on upper-end households.)

But the biggest potential to create opportunities for families to opt out of the two-income model, he said, is in education. Salam has praised a voucher-style proposal by Rick Scott, the new, Tea Party-backed governor of Florida, to offer all parents funding equivalent to 85 percent of what their children’s public-school education would cost; those “education savings accounts” could be used for an array of educational services, from private school to virtual education to prepaid college plans.

The controversial plan has been criticized even by some parochial school leaders for undercutting public schools. But Salam said it, or others like it, would offer families more choice, and, by decoupling housing from education, would allow households with children to choose lower-cost housing while steering clear of weak public schools. (That move would also bolster “down-at-their-heels cities” by making them more attractive to middle-class families, he said.) It is a strategy not to insulate families from the market, but to bring the market to housing and public services. “A rigidly free-market perspective is badly needed,” he said, “and I don’t think we have enough of it.”

Salam’s account dovetails with the story offered by Scott Winship, a demographic researcher and blogger with whom he has collaborated. (Winship, much of whose research is devoted to challenging liberal critiques of economic trends, describes himself as moderate, and has written for outfits like the Progressive Policy Institute).

The changes over the last generation, Winship argues, have been marked by a sort of large-scale social choice: lower living standards and less work on the one hand, and on the other, a more expensive quality-of-life — in particular, the chance to live in a high-cost area that provides not just good schools but “intangible” benefits — that requires two earners. And families, he says, have “unambiguously chosen the latter.” A household’s second income may not translate to extra money at the end of the month, but seen broadly that is a result of “choice and consumerism,” not “stagnation and hardship.” (He justifies that claim in part by challenging traditional calculations of wage stagnation.)

Against this backdrop, some families with children do still successfully maintain a traditional one-earner lifestyle; in other families, of course, both parents work because they want to achieve certain career goals. (In that 2007 NBC/WSJ poll, one-third of married women with children under 18 did not work, and about another one-third said they preferred working to staying home, according to Winship’s analysis.) Overall, he said, “the middle class is not as bad off as a lot of people would have you believe.”

But, Winship acknowledged, there are losers in this arrangement: families who would prefer a more traditional work/family balance, and who would accept a 70s-era living standard, but who no longer have that choice because their consumerist peers have bid up the cost of living.

His analysis of the survey data, he said, suggests that this group probably amounts to no more than one-quarter or so of married parents, a set he described as “relatively small.” But the families most likely to be in this category are those whose earning potential has not kept pace. “It’s pretty undisputed that the real folks [for whom] the last couple of decades have been truly lousy is less-educated men,” Winship said. “In some sense, that’s kind of the group that loses out when most people are pursuing this other model.”

The upscaling of middle-class life, he said, “probably has made it harder for a lot of the working-class and lower-middle-class to pursue a more traditional lifestyle, to the extent that that’s what they’re looking for.”