Trump forced a one-upping contest with Clinton on child care, not a balanced discussion of costs.
Last week, Donald Trump capsized the settled political order yet again when he announced his plan for government-subsidized family leave and child care. Historically it was always Democrats who ruled the roost when it came to both entitlements and so-called women's issues, and understandably, they were quick to protect their threatened territory.
“Democrats correctly pointed out that there's... no evidence that a Trump administration could be successful at cleaning house in what is actually a state-administered program.”
But by pointing out the flaws in the Trump plan – and there are many – the Clinton campaign inadvertently exposed the bloopers in its own while highlighting yet another downside of populist politics in an election season full of them.
Let's start with the Trump plan. The Republican proposed six weeks of paid leave for mothers, to be paid for by curtailing waste and fraud in the current unemployment insurance system. He would also allow working parents to deduct child care expenses – and elderly dependent care – from their income taxes; oddly, stay-at-home parents would have access to the same deduction. For lower-income parents, he would offer rebates on child-care spending through the earned income tax credit.
Democrats correctly pointed out that there's no precedent for uncovering such a windfall in a government program and no evidence that a Trump administration could be successful at cleaning house in what is actually a state-administered program. As it happens, unemployment trust funds are already running low in a number of places like California. And ironically, though successful at both promoting work and boosting the incomes of lower-income families, the EITC is itself known to be plagued by fraud.
Clinton's far more extensive family proposals are even more pie-in-the-sky. To come up with the money for twice as much leave (12 weeks instead of Trump's six) and for both mothers and fathers (Trump would limit benefits to mothers), Clinton would tax households earning over $250,000 a year. These are the same folks she plans to tap to pay for her Sanders-lite free four-year college tuition plan for families earning under $125,000. She would also compensate families spending more than 10 percent of their income on child care, increase the pay of child care workers, double government investment in Early Head Start, award scholarships to 1 million college students with children to defray costs of care and expand quality child care on campuses. It may come as a surprise that as Nov. 8 looms, the campaign has yet to explain in detail how it would pay for these attractive policies.
Regardless of the election results and what promises to be an (at best) ambiguous party legacy, Trump's plunge into the family leave and child care arena will be difficult for Republicans to disown in the future. Seventy percent of mothers with kids under the age of 18 are in the work force; that includes 62 percent of mothers with children under one year old. Employed mothers now contribute 43 percent of household income in married-couple families. And those women are increasingly decamping for the Democratic party.
But if the easy lesson in all of this is that Republicans avoid family policies at their peril, there's another, harder lesson. Bidding-war politics of the sort Trump has brought into the Republican party poses its own dangers. In other words, the public wants maternity leave, and I'll give them six weeks. Well, the other party will give them 12 weeks. You offer maternity leave? They'll up it to maternity and paternity leave, and throw in child care subsidies and pre-K for good measure. That these policies would be popular and maybe even beneficial is beside the point. The question is what are the trade-offs and, in particular, their economic costs?
The best leaders try to balance realism with optimism, pragmatism with idealism. It's a quality conspicuous in its absence in these populist times.
This piece originally appeared at U.S. News & World Report
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Kay S. Hymowitz is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. She is the author of the forthcoming book, The New Brooklyn: What It Takes to Bring a City Back.
Photo by Andrew Burton / Getty
This piece originally appeared in U.S. News and World Report