Trump, an unlikely champion of accessible, affordable child care
In his address to Congress Tuesday evening, President Donald Trump leaned on some of his standard crowd pleasers: immigration, jobs, terrorism.
But he also revived one of his more surprising proposals, first introduced on the campaign trail last year: “My administration wants to work with members of both parties to make child care accessible and affordable,” he said.
That rhetoric makes Trump sound more like Hillary Clinton than Ronald Reagan. And a potential debate over child-care policy could offer the rare opportunity for the president and Democrats to cooperate — or at least have a dialogue — over the coming year.
Trump is not the first Republican president to demonstrate an interest in child-care policy. During his 1968 campaign, Richard Nixon promised to expand access to government-funded day care. But three years later, influenced by the rise of the Christian right, Nixon vetoed the only universal child-care bill to pass Congress.
Although a few of today’s mainstream Republicans, such as Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, have promoted child-care proposals, the official GOP platform does not mention the issue. Conservatives tend to view government-funded child care as an expensive and unwanted intrusion into family life. The position of House Speaker Paul Ryan — whose support Trump would presumably need to enact a child-care plan — is a case in point. In his 2014 report on poverty, Ryan fretted over the results of research on Quebec’s public child-care program, which is known for its lax educational standards. Such subsidized care “encourages married women to enter the labor force,” the Ryan report said, leading to “a number of negative behavioral and health outcomes for the children.” (What Ryan didn’t mention: a competing body of research showing that high-quality day care helps children thrive academically.)
Arguments about the wisdom of working motherhood tend to ignore the fact that working motherhood is the norm. More than half of U.S. mothers work in the year after giving birth, as do 64 percent of women with children younger than 6, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Working parents require child care, and the typical U.S. family spends 29 percent of its after-tax income on childcare costs, compared with 10 percent or less in many other Western democracies, where child care is provided for or heavily subsidized by the state. Average annual tuition at a U.S. day care center is nearly $10,000, and as much as $30,000 for a high-quality program in cities like New York and Los Angeles.
In the past, both Trump and Vice President Mike Pence spoke critically about mothers who work outside the home. But the childcare cause is important to Trump’s older daughter, Ivanka. In recent weeks, Ivanka Trump has met with business leaders and members of Congress to promote the child-care proposal her father first rolled out last September.
Under the plan, individuals earning up to $250,000 per year, and couples earning up to $500,000, would be able to deduct from their taxable income the average cost of child care in their states. The benefit would be modest; for example, a reduction of $840 in federal taxes for a family earning $70,000 per year and paying $7,000 for child care. The plan would offer low-income workers child-care rebates, paid once a year through the earned-income tax credit. The proposal also calls for dedicated savings accounts in which families could invest pretax income to cover child care and elder care costs, as well as incentives for employers to provide child care in the workplace.
Those without wages, like unemployed single parents seeking work or attending job training, would not benefit from the Trump subsidies and are underserved by existing programs.