Trump Child-Care Plan: Whose Child, Who Pays, Who Benefits Sure Not the Needy

Her New Product Line: “Child-Care Я Me”

Who Benefits from the Trump Plan 

(Kinda leaps off the chart as obvious)

The Trumps always manage to look and sound good with their proposals, at least on the surface, but be careful before diving in to join them – Bingo!!! Shallow pool – case in point: Their plan to revamp child-care programs across America.

Introduction: Let me be really clear on a key point. Government is not a business and cannot be run like a business. 

A lot has been drawn from these two very good articles CNN money here and from Bloomberg here. And this excellent analysis and more key points from TIME.

Background – two key points:

1.  Making childcare more affordable is one of Donald J. Trump's signature promises to voters. It's listed in his contract with the American voter. Just about everyone agrees that child-care costs in America are astronomical. It now costs more to put a kid in childcare than college (if you get in-state tuition).

Now daughter Ivanka is running with her ideas and apparently a plan. 

Now I refer you back to the two charts above for a taste of the town as it were.

2.  In January, Ivanka Trump-Kushner invited Sheila Marcelo, founder of www.care.com to dinner at the home of Wendi Deng (I Note: The ex-wife of Rupert Murdoch – yeah, that Rupert Murdoch) to discuss her plans to focus on women’s empowerment. At the dinner were top female executives: from IBM, CEO Ginni Rometty, from Xerox Chair and CEO Ursula Burns, and from Deloitte CEO Cathy Engelbert.

Now Ms. Trump-Kushner she is a full-fledged government employee (special assistant to the president) and it’s still not clear whether she is or will find much appetite on Capitol Hill for her $500 billion proposal (covering 10 years). 

A deduction for child care expenses is both costly and regressive because it would favor wealthier families with two working parents. The deduction would cost the federal government $500 billion in revenue over a decade, according to an estimate by the Tax Foundation, a politically conservative, nonprofit research group.

Experts weigh in: “The child care proposal is generous and broad; almost everyone with young children will get some benefit from it. However, the largest benefits will go to relatively affluent dual-income families using paid child care,” says Alan Cole, an economist with the Tax Foundation (a politically conservative, nonprofit research group).

The heart of the Trump plan is to significantly expand the tax deduction that families can take for child-care expenses for kids under 13.

Anyone making less than $250,000 ($500,000 if married) could deduct the average cost of child care in their state. (The average would be based on the age of their child, since it usually costs more to care for infants and toddlers).

That sounds great, but families have to pay income taxes to Uncle Sam in order to take advantage of the deduction. Many working class families pay nothing in federal income taxes because they earn too little in income to owe anything.

On top of that, Trump wants to create a “dependent care savings account” (DCSA) to allow families to save up to $2,000 tax-free that could be used to pay for care for kids or elderly parents. Parents could even use the money to pay for summer camp.

Again, it sounds good, but poor families that desperately need a break on childcare are unlikely to have extra money to put into the savings account.

Again I refer you the chart above – so who makes out the best if is this proposal gets passed and signed into law… pretty easy to see the Flim-Flam family at work again, isn’t it?

So, why should we, or would we expect anything less from a billionaire top-heavy run government? No reply needed.