Clinton proposed to make “preschool universal for every four-year-old in America” by spending more tax dollars to provide a “living wage” to “America’s child care workforce.” Her goal was to “significantly increase” government expenditures, which she termed “investments,” so that “no family in America has to pay more than 10 percent of its income to afford high-quality child care.”

Trump called for “rewriting the tax code to allow working parents to deduct from their income taxes child care expenses for up to four children and elderly dependents.” He would also “provide low-income households an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit—in the form of a childcare rebate—and a matching $500 contribution for their savings accounts.”

Both wanted to expand the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, which requires employers with 50 or more employees to provide 12 weeks of unpaid leave. Trump proposed six weeks of paid maternity leave; Clinton would have required employers to pay for 12 weeks.

Boushey leads the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a think tank founded by John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chair. Boushey was named chief economist of Clinton’s presidential transition team in August. Her book can be summarized in one sentence: taxpayer-subsidized child care is a pressing economic issue.

She links taxpayer-subsidized child care to changes in the domestic economy. She argues:

American businesses used to have a silent partner. This partner never showed up at a board meeting to make a demand but was integral to profitability. That partner was the American Wife.

She goes on to note:

In 1960, two-thirds of children lived in a family where their parents were married and only their father worked outside the home. This kind of family was common across all income levels.

Today, women’s greater labor force participation influences upper‑, middle‑, and lower-income household decisions, demanding “a rethinking of the social contract between governments, firms, and families.”

Middle-class households, she contends, face lower expectations. “Most middle-class children now grow up in a dual-earner or a single-parent family,” she writes, leading households to lower economic expectations, make “Mom the New Breadwinner,” or increase debt loads. Low-income households face a “lack of income-mobility,” their members confronted with “erratic and unpredictable schedules” that force them to turn to “extended kin networks” for support. Professionals also face challenges. For many of them, Boushey writes, “maintaining their place in the economic hierarchy requires a great deal of time and effort.” This leads to “face time” demands at work and disregard for life outside the office. All three groups are affected by American businesses’ loss of their silent partner.

She cites 1930s-era New Deal legislation as precedent to advance her case for policy changes in 2016. Among those precedents are the 1935 Social Security and National Labor Relations acts, and the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act. Clinton’s policy agenda would have added taxpayer-subsidized child care as well as paid sick days, short-term time off, and “paid family and medical leave.” Boushey wants to add greater scheduling predictability and a limit on what she calls “overwork.” “An option to telecommute may not help a working parent whose home office has been turned into a playroom or the receptionist and line workers who must physically be at work,” she writes. “But better scheduling practices may be especially helpful to all these workers.” Her arguments advance an ambitious agenda.

The most ambitious goal is universal child care. She links “early childhood education and the quality of care” to economic growth and argues for free or low-cost universal access to pre-kindergarten for all 3- and 4‑year-olds. She notes approvingly that the U.S. Senate and House passed legislation in 1971 that would have “established a network of nationally funded, locally administered, comprehensive child-care centers.” President Richard Nixon vetoed the measure, though today’s Republicans might embrace the idea if they can be convinced to view the issue through the lens of economic, not social, policy.

How to pay for these programs? Boushey claims that “my proposals will cost taxpayers—and businesses—very little.” Elsewhere, though, she concedes that “there are some added costs for businesses when implementing work-life policies,” though they aren’t quantified. She argues that “flexibility saves firms money” and that the stock market tends to respond positively when firms introduce workplace flexibility. She tries to persuade business, citing a 700-firm study that found employers consider adoption of workforce flexibility policies to be managerial common sense.

Some firms and the U.S. government provide care onsite or have flexible work schedules. “About eight in ten firms allow some employees some flexibility over when they start or end work.” The problem? It’s still “far from the norm in the workplace for all or even most.” Boushey cites real-world examples: San Francisco and Connecticut’s paid sick-day policy; Alaska and Minnesota’s prohibition on employment discrimination for family responsibilities; and paid family leave in California, New Jersey, and Rhode Island (financed by a tax on employees). Do these policies boost family incomes? Data through a complete economic cycle are not presented.

Unfortunately, she does not discuss a host of other important matters: firms’ current economic incentive to be flexible in scheduling to retain skilled labor; federal economic policies’ contribution to the weak jobs growth described in the book; the role of churches, service clubs, and other voluntary organizations in providing support to families; and robots as household labor savers.

Interestingly, Arkansas—home of several real-world Clinton policy experiments involving labor and families—is not discussed. Arkansas per-capita personal income was stagnant from 1983 (when Clinton chaired the state’s Educational Standards Committee) until a decade ago. In 1983, Arkansas’ per-capita personal income was 75.4% of the nation’s, and it hovered in the mid-70s through 2006, when it was 76.8%, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. In 2007, state lawmakers voted to reduce Arkansas’ regressive grocery tax. That appears to have helped; in the last few years Arkansas’ per-capita personal income has been around 80% of the nation’s. Interestingly, Clinton’s husband raised that tax when he was Arkansas governor.

My wife and I read Boushey’s book and were left with the impression that the author considers parents like us helpless to craft voluntary solutions to the time constraints we face balancing work and family life. These solutions range from voluntary decisions to reduce consumption in support of increased education spending, to the use of time-saving technologies that increase efficiency and productivity at the household level. Parents seeking voluntary solutions that fit their unique situations will likely be disappointed by those important omissions.