For those working: why so much?

“Something else has to happen”

So if a subset of American families is under increasing economic pressure — for reasons not of their own choosing — what else, beyond Salam’s supply-side approach or Fagan’s proposed subsidies, can be done to make a middle class lifestyle affordable on something less than two incomes?

Chuck Donovan is a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that works on both social and economic issues. He takes a gloomy view of the situation. Families in financial stress have three coping mechanisms, he said: one parent can work more, a second parent can enter the workforce, or they can borrow. In recent decades, they “have done all of that,” he said.

And while he has long experience lobbying for adjustments to tax law, unlike Fagan, Donovan holds out little hope for substantial gains through further tax shifts. “I don’t think you can do much more in terms of tax policy for middle class families with kids,” he said.

Instead, Donovan said, “something else has to happen, and in my view it has to be in the area of job creation” — and the jobs created must pay a “sufficient wage” to allow parents to spend less time at work.

But how to achieve that goal — especially for the “losers” in Winship’s account — is a vexing question. Jason Fichtner is a senior research fellow at the free-market think tank the Mercatus Center, and until last fall was one of the top officials at the Social Security Administration. Like most of the people interviewed for this story, Fichtner sees rising costs mostly as a reflection of rising consumption levels, especially among the upper-middle-class. He is skeptical of labor-market or trade regulation, and of greater redistribution. And while the decline of manufacturing means the era when “you could afford to pay higher wages” for people who had not gone to college is over, he believes the challenges of the information economy can be met by greater investment in education.

But where does that approach leave Americans today who are in their working and child-rearing years, and who don’t have a college or graduate degree?

“That’s a great question,” Fichtner said. “I wish I had a better answer for you. I wish I had a real answer for you. I don’t.”