In a surprisingly testy exchange with Cosmopolitan magazine, Ivanka Trump, the daughter of Donald Trump, defended her father’s recently announced maternity leave and child care proposals while seeking to redirect some questions about whether the plan would benefit same-sex couples.
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“You know, she had a baby like five days ago”, the candidate said at a rally in NY with his daughter.
The campaign said the rest of the proposals would be paid for through the economic benefits of Trump’s overall tax plan.
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.
Clinton’s senior advisor for policy Maya Harris said that not including paid leave for fathers was a demeaning throwback to an era “where only women are taking care of infants”. Only 11 percent of American workers are covered by paid family leave programs.
Some companies, however, offer paid maternity leave of varying duration.
For women who do stay in the workforce, the next challenge is paying for child care. Trump accused Clinton – who started her career at the Children’s Defense Fund and who’s considered child care a signature issue of her political career – of not having any proposals for parents anxious about their child care challenges. “Single fathers? Families with stay-at-home dads?” The annual cost of day care in some regions can be as much tuition at a public college.
The average cost of daycare in the U.S. is $11,666, according to the National Association of Child Resource and Referral Agencies, though the cost varies widely by state. The campaign says the payments would be provided through existing unemployment insurance – though it has yet to spell out how the system would cover those costs. Good luck with that.
Read Trump’s full plan here. “She never will and if it ever evolves into a plan, it’ll never get done anyway”, he said.
Trump’s plan calls for making child care expenses fully tax-deductible, capped at the average cost of child care in the taxpayers’ state of residence, for up to four children.
Families could save up to $2,000 each year.
Trump will also lay out plans to create “Dependent Care Savings Accounts” that would allow families to set aside money to look after children or elderly parents. When Hillary Clinton ran for president in 2008, she also put forward a paid family leave plan.
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Cutting social safety net programs has been a core mission of Republican leaders for decades, and prominent conservatives including House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) have argued that it would be too costly for the federal government to support national paid family and sick leave. Perhaps that’s because they have been framed as women’s issues, when in fact they’re important to the economy, social justice and the future prospects of millions of young Americans.
