It’s been a good week, rhetorically, for those who care about reducing inequality. Last Tuesday, in his first papal exhortation, Pope Francis bewailed the unequal distribution of global wealth, using language that sounded, at times, quite Marxist: “But until exclusion and inequality in society and between peoples are reversed, it will be impossible to eliminate violence.” On Wednesday, President Obama cited the Pope’s argument in a speech that laid out his economic priorities for the rest of his second term, adding, “But this increasing inequality is most pronounced in our country. And it challenges the very essence of who we are as a people.”

Rhetoric is one thing; action is another. One difference between the Pope and the President is that the latter has a hand in setting economic policies that could help to solve the problem. Notably, Obama didn’t say much in his speech about his policy plans, other than reiterating his call for a higher federal minimum wage. What else can the government do? A memo issued on Wednesday by the Hamilton Project, part of the Brookings Institution think tank, suggests some answers to this question.

The Hamilton Project focussed on what it termed “lower-middle-class families” with annual incomes between fifteen thousand dollars (roughly the federal poverty level for a two-person household) and sixty thousand dollars, according to the memo. (To know how your own income level compares with the federal poverty level use this government Web site. You will see that in most states, for example, an annual household income of a hundred thousand dollars for a four-person family is four times the federal poverty level.) About thirty per cent of families belong to the lower-middle-class group:

Compared with the poorest families, lower-middle-class families are more likely to be headed by married couples and to benefit from two incomes:

They are also more likely to include a family head who has attended college:

So far, so good: studies have shown that children who live with two parents are more likely to be more economically secure and to be healthy, as well as to graduate from high school; other studies show similarly positive effects for children of college-educated parents. And parents benefit, too.

And yet, many of these lower-middle-class families are still struggling to get by. About sixty per cent of families below the poverty line receive food stamps (shown in the chart below as SNAP, for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program); so do more than twenty per cent of lower-middle-class people. All told, more than thirty per cent of lower-middle-class people receive food stamps, unemployment benefits, welfare, or other benefits: