Trump’s childcare plan is a great thing. I don’t understand people who bash the plan just because they detest Trump. It’s wonderful that paid maternity leave and credits for childcare are becoming part of the GOP agenda. Elections come and go but this crucial issue transcends today’s concerns. Even just having a Republican candidate talk about this is a beautiful thing.
Trump’s Childcare Plan
Clarissa's Blog 
Here’s a link toTrump’s press release
Here’s a link to Clinton’s plan
Judge for yourself which plan is better and who is more likely to work to get their version of the plan passed.
Also I thought you were militant against the idea of stay home parenting being a job:
Mr. Trump’s plan will ensure stay-at-home parents will receive the same tax deduction as working parents, offering compensation for the job they’re already doing, and allowing them to choose the child care scenario that’s in their best interest.
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Clinton’s plan actually punishes professional women by capping the eligible income at $125,000 while Trump goes up to $250,000. I don’t understand why I, for instance, have to be excluded from the benefit under Clinton’s plan but ok, whatever.
What’s really great, though, is that we are not discussing whether this needs to be done. It now seems a foregone conclusion that it does. Now we are talking about the details of what it should look like. And that’s huge.
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Clinton, if elected, would be almost certainly be a lame duck president in her first two years, so her plan has almost no chance to pass. In his case, Trump would almost certainly have a majority in Congress and in the Senate with many Democrats with him on this topic, so he would have no excuses.
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President…
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Don’t have time to figure it out now for sure but these tax relief based plans, especially the Trump one that appears to be based on a “dependent care savings account”, may not mean anything practical for people who don’t have a lot of discretionary income. The “health care savings account” already exists but you must a) have the cash lying around to put in it and then b) spend the account down. So you must be both rich and ill. In the case of childcare you would spend it, but you’d have to have the cash in the first place. And just in general I am not sure tax relief will really fund parents to stay at home — I think it might turn out to just be another tax benefit for the already well off, while the less well off still have to work 2 jobs, etc.
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We have a “dependent care savings account” at work. Which I still haven’t opened for myself because I never have the time to go to HR. The way it works is that instead of paying the money directly to the daycare, you deposit it into an account first, as a monthly withdrawal, and then it’s deducted from the taxes. Nobody needs to be rich to do that.
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You have to have the cash. I don’t. Don’t have it to deposit in one of the health care savings accounts, wouldn’t to deposit in a dependent care account. For health care I use insurance not the kind of mega-savings people with more disposable income use. I don’t spend as much and don’t get the tax advantage. For child or other dependent care I would need low cost up front. Repeat: these savings accounts are primarily ways to get tax breaks on approved expenditures, not subsidies, cost reductions, etc.
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If people have a child in day care, they pay the bill on a monthly basis. This plan helps them to avoid getting taxed on the amount they will pay either way.
“Repeat: these savings accounts are primarily ways to get tax breaks on approved expenditures, not subsidies, cost reductions, etc.”
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All it does is eliminate taxes on day care costs. It isn’t an actual subsidy of those costs, which is what the majority would need.
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“All it does is eliminate taxes on day care costs.”
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I’m guessing there is no subsidy in the world that I would ever qualify for, so once again, it’s a strategy to punish women like me for procreating. And ok, whatever but I am glad to see that at least sometimes somebody considers the possibility of not punishing us yet again.
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Both of these plans have elements which suck.
I mean, if you were going to fault Bernie for only referring to mothers when he talked about childcare you definitely fault Trump for only proposing maternity benefits (there is nothing for fathers) if you feel that semantics are important. Also connecting maternity benefits to UI is problematic because 1) employers hate UI taxes and think “oh these women are going to jack up my UI costs” regardless of whether it’s borne by all workers. Again, UI is partially through the state with all of the problems that may entail. Expect to see a lot of employers increase fights for UI or find ways to “fire” women for cause when they take this leave and for a significant number of employers who have these leaves as benefit to drop them.
Clinton’s plan to finance whatever rebate of 10% of family income is partially through block grants to the states, which means if you have a shitty governor/state legislature you won’t even see this modest benefit/reduction. It’ll be just like Obamacare all over again.
Who knows, maybe both plans would just result in an inflation of price in childcare rates because of assumed “subsidies” or “tax rebates”.
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The most important thing is that people need to accept this as normal. And once both parties begin to compete in who can offer a better deal on childcare, this does a lot to normalize the entire phenomenon. Aside from the specific details that can be debated, this is an undoubted instance of progress and cause to celebrate. Everything always begins with normalizing a concept. If this ridiculous election cycle at least does this, it will even almost be worth it.
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How long will it take people to accept Obamacare as “normal”? All I hear is stupid screeching and plays at “repealing and replacing” and it’s been 6 years since the PPACA has been passed.
All this stupid cycle is doing is normalizing all kinds of ridiculous absurd nonsense.
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Does Obamacare actually work? Really?
Also, no Republican have ever supported a plan like Obamacare, contrary to parent leave.
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If Trump came out with ” Let’s make Obama care EVEN better”, wouldn’t that be a big deal? Just like the Republican nominee coming out with “my maternity leave is even more generous than yours” is a big deal.
I don’t understand why there is such a resistance to accepting that it is a momentous change.
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Also, no Republican have ever supported a plan like Obamacare
Well, Romney had a complicated history with health insurance and signing health care bills that he tried to downplay like mad.
If Trump came out with ” Let’s make Obama care EVEN better”, wouldn’t that be a big deal?
Yes, because he’d be giving Obama some kind of credit instead going on about what a horrible evil doer he is.
Just like the Republican nominee coming out with “my maternity leave is even more generous than yours” is a big deal.
Except it’ not better. Clinton offers twice as much and it’s paid parental leave.
I mean Overton Window aside, the federal government did fund childcare before.
The
federal government granted $52 million for child care under this Act from August 1943
through February 1946. Communities, mostly through user fees, contributed an additional
$26 million. At its July 1944 peak, 3,102 federally subsidized child care centers, with
130,000 children enrolled, were located in all but one state and in D.C.
More <a href=”https://thinkprogress.org/heres-what-happened-the-one-time-when-the-u-s-had-universal-childcare-c965a3178112#.txypydy9u’>here
But when it passed, the Lanham Act, which took some of the wartime stimulus funds and handed them over to local communities to build and staff their own child care facilities, Herbst said it was a “break from that.” Because every community got the money, “The services were open to high-income, low-income, high-education, low-education, married mothers, unmarried mothers, the employed and the unemployed.” And access was basically universal: there was no official work requirement and care was heavily subsidized, costing parents just between $9 and $10 a day (in today’s dollars) for 12 hours of care in a center.”
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Neither Hillary’s nor Trump’s plan is perfect. But they are better than what exists now. Why is that not good news?
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Obama care is not normalized because no major candidate on the right accepted it as normal.
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Exactly!
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Clarissa, if you intend to send your child to public school or university, that is a subsidy that you qualify for. If you take her to a public park, etc. So, public daycare.
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Of course, I mean a subsidy under Hillary’s plans.
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As for public daycare, I’ve seen how it works in Canada. My niece recently was offered a spot as her place in line has arrived. She is 6 years old and started school. The line took 6 years to get to her. But the amount in taxes her parents pay in a year is larger than my entire yearly salary.
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Public daycare in Québec is a joke. For normal people, this is a lottery, and this system is so corrupt that some apparatchiks get their places first.
As a leftist, I disassociate myself from my leftist comrades in Québec on this issue.
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Exactly. I’m glad we agree on this. And so true about the apparatchiks. My sister used to live in the Old Port, and all the children whose parents work in the government buildings there got placed in daycare immediately. While the residents were sent to hell.
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I am for thinking of childcare as a public good. Perhaps cost could be indexed to income if universal and free is impossible, but I’m still for universal programs.
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And nothing that is not universal and free right now should be accepted or contemplated?
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Above I said index cost to income. What I am not excited about are these tax break, tax credit, and savings account schemes — I doubt they’ll make a great deal of difference. They’ll lower some peoples’ taxes a bit, but they won’t make the difference between affording childcare and not. The wages-for-housework via tax code change might do more (although I would want to Do The Math before believing it would make it economically feasible for someone who needs to work now to stay home).
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They would make a difference to me. And women like me are consistently punished for procreating in every developed country in the world. Undeveloped countries obviously don’t let us exist at all. If finally somebody says something about maybe trying to do something for us for a change, I say that’s a good thing.
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But who are you defining as women like you? Who are the women not punished for procreating?
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The conversation started with a discussion of the fact that Clinton’s plan excludes women whose family income is over $125,000 and Trump’s plan raises the bar to the family income of $250,000. Clinton’s plans (including the one on free college) excludes me and everybody in this income bracket. It wouldn’t exclude me if I quit my job.
Trump’s plan allows me to get tax relief without having to quit my job to do so.
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What I don’t understand is how this can be controversial for anybody but ultra-conservatives. This will not deprive anybody of anything. All it will do is include another category of women in a possibility of a small tax relief. What’s the downside? The US Treasury will go bust if a few more women get tax relief?
Or is it simply “If Trump says it’s Tuesday, I say it’s Monday”?
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My point is more that the Trump plan only benefits the well off. Not being taxed on money spent on child care isn’t enough to make child care accessible to the majority. My secondary point is that I wouldn’t agree that women with incomes above $125K are the most “punished” for procreating. Downside: tax deduction for child care being passed off as a good or comprehensive child care plan isn’t a useful intervention. The deduction itself is fine, and the fact that this is on the GOP agenda is fine, I just don’t think this “plan” is enough of one
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So I’m “Well off”? It would be nice, of course, but I seriously doubt it. 😃😃😃
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Family income above $125K is well off, I would say, yes. I think the median household income is somewhere in the $50Ks, so $125K is over twice median. I’m not saying that’s rich but it puts some things within reach that wouldn’t be otherwise
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😄😄😋
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I have three kids and have spent about $300k on pre-K childcare for the three of them (on average $20k per kid per year; when they are infants it’s much more, like $30k per kid per year), nearly all post tax. This is like paying off a house. I would have appreciated it being pre-tax, this is a ridiculously huge expense that the society should have some skin in. I am a prof at a public school; I am paid well, but nowhere near what I would make in industry. My husband has a MS and makes about half what I do. We are not wealthy, we are middle class. Raising kids is expensive. For instance, our eldest kid will probably go to the school we teach because we can actually pay for that; even with in-state tuition, if he lives in a residence hall, it will be $25k/year. For those keeping score at home, that’s another $300k by the time all the kids are done, but those can be tax-deductible. Why are college costs deductible but daycare or afterschool care isn’t? We cannot send Eldest to a $60k/year school, we simply cannot afford it, and I am not convinced of the value of such overpriced education. I also think it’s ridiculous to saddle a kid with so much debt when he can actually get any degree he wants at the R1 state flagship where I teach and can graduate without debt.
I do not consider us rich by any stretch. We might be well off 20 years from now, when all the colleges and house have been paid off. Daycare, house, and college = about 3 houses. Not to mention all swim team fees, and summer camp fees, etc.
Kids are expensive. Raising high-achieving kids is very expensive. The society should have some skin in the game.
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I am for free childcare, just as I am for free public schools with books and school supplies included. I’m not arguing against it & you still pay a lot for it even if you get some refunded from taxes. I’m also not against being glad when you can get a tax benefit. Nor am I not recognizing it’s good this is on the table for discussion. I would, however, like to keep free childcare in sight, and not establish the pretax as the horizon of expectation.
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In order to have the slightest hope of free childcare one day, we need to start with getting everybody used to the idea that it’s normal to give people some relief for childcare expenses. And finally having candidates of both major parties accept that is a great step in the right direction. Which is what my post was originally about.
I’m incapable of comprehending why people are refusing to acknowledge that this is a major big deal. The chances that a Republican candidate would come out with a proposal for free childcare for everybody was nil. But this plan is better than what we have seen from any Republican up to now.
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Well, there already is a Federal tax credit (too low) and there are both federal and state subsidies as well (too small and patchy), and the flexible spending account exists (doesn’t solve all problems) so this is why I’m impatient. But sure, improvement is needed and welcome, and having this be on issues lists is welcome. I just don’t see the Trump proposal as being so much of a new tone – perhaps I am too critical
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That’s exactly what I’m saying. What’s so horrible about giving this very modest assistance to people who will raise brilliant kids who’ll contribute greatly to society?
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Relatedly:
Trump’s most sympathetic female surrogate can’t answer legitimate questions put to her about the plan without getting super defensive and cutting the interview short.
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The questions she didn’t want to answer were clearly not about the plan. The interviewer was a cheap smart-ass. I hate such people. They think they are getting revenge on Trump when all they do is try to kill the idea that parental leave is important. Freaks.
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This is my latest blog post. It focuses on the lack of support for paid maternity and paternity leave in America. I provide my own story with some useful resources and information on paid and unpaid maternity leave and would love your feedback! This is a topic that I am very passionate about and I hope this comes through in my writing.
https://aladyhoodjourney.wordpress.com/2016/12/05/maternity-leave-in-america-the-story-of-the-struggling-mother/
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