Trump proposes child-care tax break
Plan includes maternity leave, help with elderly family
Donald Trump visited a key political area Tuesday — the Philadelphia suburbs — to pitch a plan on paying for child care, ideas addressed largely to suburban female voters.
The “Child Care Affordability Plan” would allow parents to deduct child care expenses from their income taxes, guarantee six weeks of paid maternity leave, and create new “Dependent Care Savings Accounts” to help finance items from childhood development to elderly care.
“It’s pro-family, it’s pro-child, it’s pro-worker,” Trump told a supportive crowd in Aston, Pa., near Philadelphia. “These are the people we have to take care of.”
The New York businessman also said “there is no financial security in our country,” and concern about child care is one reason.
Daughter Ivanka Trump, who has been pushing child-care issues in her role as adviser, introduced her father, telling the crowd “we need to create policies that champion all parents.”
Trump continued to attack Hillary Clinton for saying some Trump backers belong in a “basket of deplorables,” slamming her both in Pennsylvania and at an earlier rally in Iowa.
“While my opponent slanders you as deplorable and irredeemable, I call you hard-working American patriots who love your country and want a better future for all of our people,” Trump said in Des Moines.
During a speech Monday in Baltimore, the Republican presidential nominee said, “You can’t lead this nation if you have such a low opinion for its citizens.”
The Clinton campaign responded with a television ad juxtaposing that comment with Trump’s attacks on voters, including this comment from last year about then- GOP primary rival Ben Carson, who is now a close ally of Trump: “How stupid are the peo- ple of Iowa? How stupid are the people of this country to believe this crap?”
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 such as unemployment insurance. Harris said “the lack of seriousness of this proposal is no surprise given his history of disrespecting women in the workplace and the fact there’s no evidence he ever provided paid family leave or child care to his own employees.”
Radio ads unveiled by the Clinton campaign ahead of Trump’s speech highlight what the campaign called her “life-long commitment to fighting for children and families.” Among the Democratic nominee’s proposals is a plan to make preschool universal for 4-year-olds.
Pennsylvania is a key part of Trump’s effort to claim the 270 electoral votes needed to win, though it has not backed a GOP presidential candidate since 1988.