Ivanka Trump spoke shortly after her father, Republican nominee Donald Trump, called for guaranteeing new mothers six weeks of paid maternity leave and suggested new incentives for employers to provide their workers with childcare.
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Tax and budget experts, meanwhile, have their share of concerns about how the proposals would work, how much the plans would really cost and who’d benefit most.
But as with any policy proposal, many ask who’s going to pay for it. Trump says he’d pay for his proposal by fixing fraud and improper payments from the federal unemployment insurance program.
Child care is one of the biggest expenses many USA families face, surpassing the cost of college and even housing in many states. Introducing her father, Ms. Trump said she considered it a priority for her father’s presidency to improve a child-care system that was “too expensive, too outdated and too inaccessible”.
The real estate mogul has credited daughter Ivanka with urging him to come up with a plan on the issue. “She has been working so very hard”, Trump said in his speech. This is “triple the average paid leave that new mothers receive, and it will do so without raising taxes”, she added.
The plan would expand some tax deductions for employers and encourage them to provide on-site child care.
Ivanka Trump says that the United States needs “to create policies that champion all parents”. Democratic presidential candidates have won Pennsylvania since 1992, but Trump hopes to flip the battleground to win the White House in November.
Alan Viard, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who was cited favorably in Trump’s policy proposal, said he has “never before heard of “child care” being defined as limited to ages 0 to 4″.
Apparently, 1-year-old Tristan Murphy liked the sound of it. Critics argued a wealthy parent could deduct the cost of a nanny, while working mothers whose income falls below the income tax threshold would see no benefit. And Ivanka was always saying, “Dad, we’ve got to do something about child care”. Such accounts would be universal and used for after-school or traditional child care, with a government match of $500 a year – a minuscule amount given the cost of such care, and given the difficulty that lower-income families have putting away money in such accounts.
“While his plan would undercut women in the workplace, it also provides no relief to working families”, Harris said.
Clinton has said she wants to significantly increase direct subsidies and tax breaks so families don’t have to spend more than 10% of their income on child care.
Clinton’s paid leave plan relies on increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans. When Hillary Clinton ran for president in 2008, she also put forward a paid family leave plan. These new accounts are available to everyone, and allow both tax-deductible contributions and tax-free appreciation year-to-year-unlike current law Dependent Care Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs), which are available only if it is offered by an employer and does not allow balances to accumulate.
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Trump said she finds the issue of child care an important one. “Republicans have been reluctant to move in that direction” on child care, she noted.
