Ivanka Trump grew testy during an interview this week with Cosmopolitan magazine aimed at promoting a child care and maternity leave plan proposed by her father, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
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The plan also calls for Trump to discuss political topics that are of interest to the “Dr. Oz Show” audience, like efforts to fight the Zika virus and Trump’s new child care policies.
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”.
Economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who runs the right-leaning think tank American Action Forum, worries that this kind of proposal invites employers to drop their paid maternity leave policies and “stick it to the taxpayer”.
“She is the one who has been pushing for it so hard: ‘Daddy, Daddy we have to do this, ‘” Trump said in Iowa earlier Tuesday.
The Republican presidential nominee, breaking with some conservative orthodoxy, would guarantee six weeks of paid maternity leave to employees whose firms don’t offer leave already.
The campaign estimates the program would cost about $2.5 billion a year, but said it would pay for that by ridding the unemployment insurance system of fraud, which it valued at $3.4 billion.
As Simon Maloy, points out over at Salon: “T$3 he centerpiece of [Trump’s] plan is a provision letting parents deduct the costs of child care from their taxes”.
Trump will also lay out plans to create new “Dependent Care Savings Accounts” that would allow families to set aside money to look after children or elderly parents. Federal law allows 12 weeks of unpaid “family leave”.
Maya Harris, a senior policy adviser for the Clinton campaign, described Trump’s child care plan as “half-baked”, with financing to come from other programs like unemployment insurance.
No such luck. First question: “Why did the Trump campaign wait so long to release this policy?”
“The policy is fleshed out online, so you can go see all the elements of it”, Trump said, adding, “but the original intention of the plan is to help mothers in recovery in the immediate aftermath of childbirth”. “The measure, a pillar of the real estate mogul’s child-care proposal, bears close resemblance to an idea floated by Bill Clinton in 1999”.
Asked for clarification on whether that means gay dads would be excluded from the plan, Ivanka Trump said, “Well, those are your words, not mine”. To achieve this, Clinton would seek to boost federal spending on child-care subsidies and provide “tax relief for the cost of child care to working families”. She is largely responsible for getting her epically misogynist father to embrace paid family leave and subsidized child care, which he did in a short speech on Tuesday evening. Clinton’s offers positions on 38 issues for potential voters to read.
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Clinton declined to support a Democratic backed paid family leave bill in 2016 because it would raise payroll taxes for workers and companies by 0.2%, or about $1.38 per week for the median wage earner.
