To keep child care costs low, the Democratic presidential nominee, who has made paid leave and child care center central planks in her campaign, is proposing families don’t pay more than 10 percent of their income for child care.
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Facing a stubborn and significant disadvantage with female voters, Donald Trump will announce that as president, he’d seek to mandate a six-week paid maternity leave for new parents.
“The first part of my childcare plan allows every parent or family in America – including adoptive parents and foster parent guardians – to deduct their childcare expenses from their income taxes”, Trump said in his speech in the town of Aston on Tuesday night. While her business offers eight weeks of paid leave, officials at the Trump Organization have yet to say publicly whether it offers paid family leave and there are no official materials saying that it does.
In need of the women’s vote, two months later – and less than two months before Election Day – Trump has unveiled his plan. She has been closely tied to his child care proposals.
The Trump campaign hit back, arguing that their plan is more complete than Clinton’s.
Angela Rachidi at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, said that Trump’s proposals show he seems to share Clinton’s goals of helping families pay for child care. “She intends to reach that lofty goal with tax credits and subsidized child care, both of which would require an enormous public investment'”.
In remarks before her father’s speech, Trump’s daughter said the issue of affordable childcare has been a top concern of hers and she seized the opportunity to address the issue because her father is “in a very unique position to do something about this problem”. The tax deduction would be capped at the average cost of childcare in each state and would apply to single parents making less than $250,000 per year, or couples making less than a combined $500,000 per year.
Ivanka Trump: So it’s meant to benefit, whether it’s in same-sex marriages as well, to benefit the mother who has given birth to the child if they have legal married status under the tax code.
Almost every developed country also guarantees paid job leave to care for a sick child or other family member, unlike the United States.
Trump’s policy also doesn’t explicitly help male same-sex couples who have children or men with primary child rearing duties. Unused balances could be rolled over from year to year, and anything left when the child turns 18 could be put toward college expenses. Trump insisted taxes would not need to be raised to fund it.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign has criticized Trump’s maternity proposal for focusing only on women and not fathers.
But there already is a Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit, which would remain in place under Trump’s plan.
Trump wants to create a Dependent Care Savings Accounts (DCSAs) that allows all families to set aside up to $2,000 a year for “traditional child care, after-school enrichment programs and school tuition-contributing to school choice”.
“So total out-of-pocket child-care costs amounted to about $142 billion, which a Trump administration would either have to make up with higher taxes or add to the budget deficit”.
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She has called for universal prekindergarten for 4-year-olds, increased pay and training for preschool teachers and doubling spending on Head Start and a related child care program. Federal, state and local government spending on those services is less than 0.4 percent of gross domestic product.
