More than 200,000 working families in Wisconsin with one to three children under age 12 don't earn enough income to afford a "basic family budget" the amount a family would need to earn to afford food, housing, child care, health insurance, transportation, and utilities. That’s one out of every five such families in Wisconsin struggling to make ends meet. Nationally twenty-nine percent of working families in the United States fail to earn enough to afford a basic family budget. Hardships in America: The Real Story of Working Families, released today by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, DC and analyzed by the Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS) at UW-Madison, shows that the majority of these families are two parent families, often with one or more workers, and for the most part earning incomes above the official federal poverty level. The report examines the cost of living in every community nationwide and determines separate basic family budgets for each community. In Wisconsin, basic family budgets for a two-parent, two-child family range from $33,135 a year in the Superior area, to $38,091 across the border from the Twin Cities in Minnesota. All of Wisconsin’s communities are near the national median of $33,511, which is roughly twice the official federal poverty line of $17,463 for a family that size.