“As president, I will propose a tax credit to help family members offset up to $6,000 in caregiving costs for their elderly family members”, Clinton said.In New Hampshire, support for Clinton has increased among seniors and she now has the edge over Sanders among this group.
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The credit would max out at $1,200 for qualifying families each year, according to a fact sheet on the plan, while the Social Security expansion would allow Americans to accrue credit toward their Social Security benefits when they are out of the paid workforce due to caregiving requirements.
The caregivers credit comes as part of a series of middle-class tax benefits Clinton is beginning to unveil as part of her campaign.
The Laborers’ International Union of North America announced Tuesday that it was endorsing Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid, making it the latest big union to throw its support behind the Democratic front-runner. Clinton’s campaign estimates that the economic value of the unpaid work provided by family caregivers of the aging and disabled was $470 billion in 2013.
All week, Clinton’s and Sanders’s camps traded barbs over middle-class taxes, an issue that Clinton’s campaign believes is a proxy for broader differences between the two candidates.
Bernie Sanders acknowledged on Saturday that he’d lose the Democratic primary to Hillary Rodham Clinton if the election were held now. Her previous proposals have included tax cuts for small businesses and middle class families.
And others said they considered her alleged accent change “offensive”, claiming it mocked people from the south.
Clinton spoke to more than 400 people at a town hall meeting here, a one-stop campaign trip to Iowa where she is leading in the three-person race for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.
“I’m going to campaign in Tennessee to try and turn it blue in November 2016”, she said.
In Memphis on Friday, Clinton touted a tax credit of up to $5,000 for families and $2,500 for individuals she proposed earlier this year.
The endorsement was something of a surprise because Clinton recently came out in opposition to the Keystone XL Pipeline project, a proposal that would ship oil from Canada’s tar sands down to the Gulf of Mexico. “We are there miracle workers”, Lizabeth Bonilla, a home care worker from Las Vegas, told Clinton about her job.
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“We can manage to do that while preserving the accomplishment of the Affordable Care Act”, she said.
