A Fighting Chance

But if anything went wrong—anything at all—they were out of luck. A job layoff, a long stretch of unemployment, or a serious illness, and the family careened off a financial cliff. They had no savings to fall back on. And because so many of the costs that ate up every paycheck were fixed, there wasn’t much room to “cut back.” They couldn’t just lop off the fourth bedroom for a few months or buy half a health insurance policy until Dad found a new job. They were stuck, and now the trap’s teeth cut a lot deeper.

Amelia and I turned in the first few chapters of our manuscript for The Two-Income Trap, and the publisher seemed to like it, except for one thing. It’s so depressing! Who wants to read such a bleak book? Make it happy! Make it hopeful!

We tried, we really did. But I felt as if someone were asking me to deliver stand-up jokes at a funeral.

Worse, we hadn’t even come to the really tough stuff. The remaining chapters of the book told the hardest part of the story: Once families ran out of money, they turned to debt. Credit card debt piled up—and up and up. Payday loans popped up everywhere and sucked in people who were in a crunch. And when someone missed a payment or fell behind on the debt treadmill, they got socked with staggering increases in their bills. The result? Fifteen million families filed for bankruptcy in a single decade and uncounted millions more were hanging on to the cliff by their fingernails. Home foreclosures were also starting to climb, even back in the 1990s and early 2000s. All we needed was the music from Jaws to signal that this debt monster was going to hurt a lot of people.

During the months when I pored over the research and carefully wrote that book, I came to some painful conclusions. America’s middle class was under attack. The nation’s broad prosperity had been forged by people like my parents—people who knew hardship and conflict and who kept on fighting, determined to pass on something better to their children. But the strength of the middle class was not unlimited. I felt as though I were looking at a once sturdy house that was crumbling: the windows were broken and the roof was caving in.

It wasn’t a happy story. Instead, the book was an alarm, a warning that our country was headed in a terrible direction. As we finished the book, I felt deeply, deeply worried.

Tell Someone Who Could Do Something

Apparently, I wasn’t the only person who was worried. Amelia and I had written a book that was aimed at the policy crowd (after all, I was still a professor at Harvard and the book had fifty pages of footnotes). But when it came out, in September 2003, The Two-Income Trap struck a nerve. Newsweek ran a three-page spread about the book, complete with a picture of Amelia in her backyard. The Today show brought me on to talk about the trap. Within days, the book was covered by CBS News, the Boston Globe, NPR, and CNN. In its first two weeks of publication, the book focused more attention on the economic security of America’s families than I’d been able to generate in nearly a decade of fighting the bankruptcy wars.

I figured we were onto something, and the optimistic part of my brain believed that suddenly I had a chance to make a bigger difference. So I tried reaching out to several of the men who were running for president in 2004: Howard Dean, John Edwards, General Wesley Clark, John Kerry. I also asked a favor from a well-connected Republican friend from Harvard. Could he get me a meeting with someone on the staff of President Bush?

My plan was to give each of them a copy of the book, tell them some key facts, lay out some policy ideas, and hope for the best. I had visions of long, thoughtful policy discussions, not unlike the first conversation I’d had with Senator Kennedy. Only now the conversation had to go beyond bankruptcy. Now I wanted to talk about a seismic shift in the middle-class family balance sheet, and I wanted our leaders to know that America’s middle class was in big trouble—and the trouble was growing.

In those days, I didn’t have the faintest clue about the pressures on someone running for public office. First they’d spend hours reading my book, and then we’d have long policy talks? Clearly I didn’t know squat.

Then one day in early 2004, I was walking through an airport when my cell phone rang. My caller identified himself as John—John Edwards. He said he had read The Two-Income Trap and wanted to talk about it. I was so surprised that as I wrestled with my roller bag, my phone, and my iced tea, I dropped my backpack on the floor. The zipper on the outer pocket wasn’t closed, so even as I was talking to Senator Edwards, I was scrambling to pick up the thousand things that had spilled everywhere. But the ideas in the Two-Income Trap clearly interested the senator, and he seemed to be thinking hard about them.

Not a relaxed, detailed conversation, but not bad. And over the next several months, Edwards called a few more times, and I was also able to talk with staff members from some of the other presidential campaigns.