These proposals include changes in the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit to benefit families with incomes of less than $100,000 (while reducing the benefits of the tax credit to the affluent) as well as the reduction or elimination of tax breaks in education savings plans for the affluent to generate revenues to boost Pell grants for poorer students.

Sawhill and Rodrigue don’t shy away from what they see as a necessary step in combating economic inequality:

If we could empower young adults to only have children when they themselves feel ready to become parents, we could reduce unplanned pregnancies and out-of-wedlock births. That alone would reduce poverty and lack of mobility. The solutions here are often nongovernmental and involve changing social norms around the importance of responsible, two-person parenthood.

They go on:

Some have called for a new generation of government-sponsored marriage or relationship programs and for reducing marriage penalties in tax and benefit programs. But with some exceptions, these do not appear to be a cost-effective way to bring back the two-parent family. More promising are efforts to make the most effective forms of birth control (IUDs and implants) more widely available at no cost to women.

An additional contribution to a progressive economic agenda comes from Lawrence Summers, an economist at Harvard who is a former secretary of the Treasury. Summers has emerged as a leading advocate of major government infrastructure investments — in roads, bridges, airports and other public facilities.

In Sunday’s Washington Post, Summers contends that

the specter of secular stagnation and inadequate economic growth on the one hand, and ascendant populism and global disintegration on the other, has caused widespread apprehension

amid fears that “the global economy is entering unexplored and dangerous territory.” And when economies worldwide stagnate, the result, Summers writes, is that “electorates turn surly.” The way to counter these negative trends, in his view, is to abandon “austerity economics in favor of investment economics.”

Some of the most interesting developments in the formation of a Democratic agenda can be found in the evolving work of Jason Furman, the 46-year-old chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers.

Furman focuses on a pair of crucial factors underlying slow growth: a lack of corporate dynamism and the weakening of competitive forces in the marketplace. Diminishing vitality in the marketplace has become a mounting concern among economists and policy makers.