ASTON, Pennsylvania — Ivanka Trump, the daughter of 2016 Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump, told Breitbart News exclusively here that her father’s campaign is offering actual solutions for Americans.
Ivanka Trump is here with her father on Tuesday evening to roll out Donald Trump’s new childcare, dependent care, and maternity leave policies while Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign has spent the day leveling personal, nasty, and negative attacks against Trump.
This is the latest in a long line of detailed policy plans that Trump has rolled out in recent weeks, from military policy to immigration policy to defense policy to trade policy to economic policy to education policy to national security policy to law and order policy and more. Clinton, meanwhile, can only engage in nasty name-calling without offering actual policy specifics.
“One of the great promises of a Trump presidency is bringing new solutions, fresh perspective to the table in a way that unfortunately we haven’t had the benefit of for a very long time,” Ivanka Trump told Breitbart News. “I think this is one more example of that.”
Ivanka Trump, who will introduce her father before he gives the policy address here, told Breitbart News backstage when she arrived at the Aston Public Library that childcare is an “incredibly important” issue. She said:
Childcare is now the single largest expense of many American families. In over half of the country, it’s actually the single largest expense—even exceeding the cost of housing—so it’s clearly an issue that needs to be dealt with. It’s also at the root of wage disparity as increasingly studies are showing even more than gender motherhood is a predictor of wage inequality. So it’s an incredibly important issue and it’s something I’ve been deeply passionate about for a long time. The policy is innovative, it’s unique, it’s solution-oriented, it puts choice where choice belongs—which is ultimately with the family—and it’s really a comprehensive and well-thought-out plan.
The plan, as Trump aides detailed for reporters earlier on Tuesday, has multiple facets. While Ivanka and her father will go more in depth when they take the stage this evening, she offered Breitbart News a sneak peak at several of the details:
One of the major elements is allowing for the cost of child care to be tax deductible for up to four children, and it’s based on the average cost of child care in that person’s state. If you don’t pay taxes, then there’s an expansion of the existing Earned Income Tax Credit—so you get an additional refund for that. This is not only for child care but also for dependent care. Women are predominantly caregivers so that’s why this is most beneficial for women, but it’s also about helping American families.
A second aspect, she noted, is the creation of new Dependent Care Savings Accounts (DCSAs). Ivanka Trump said in her interview:
Secondly, there is the creation of a Dependent Care Savings Account (DCSA)—which is effectively like a Healthcare Savings Account (HSA)—to allow people to save pre-tax dollars, make contributions, and if you’re a low income person the government will actually match up to 50 percent of the first $1,000 contributed with a cap of $2,000 per year. It rolls over, it can be used for school choice, and it’s sort of an expansion of the school choice program in that this money can be used towards that, it can be used for adult daycare if you’re caring for an adult dependent, or for after-school enrichment activities so it’s a great way to incentivize people to save.
In addition, Trump aides told reporters earlier, the plan includes up to six weeks of maternity leave for mothers when their employers don’t offer it by amending the unemployment insurance (UI) program. This part of the plan would be paid for with offsets from the program so the government doesn’t raise taxes to pay for it.
When asked if this is a “free market program” in which the goal is to put the power of decision making back in the hands of the parents—not the hands of the government—Ivanka Trump told Breitbart News, “It is.” She went on:
The cost of childcare has actually soared in this past decade and it’s become completely unaffordable but also not overtly flexible and accessible. So if you go to rural communities, the bias toward institutional care doesn’t help you because there’s no access to institutional daycare centers. So creating a more dynamic, free market for care services and lifting a lot of the regulations and restrictions that are stymying entrepreneurs in that space will be enormously beneficial to everyone and hopefully dramatically bring the cost of childcare down and provide a lot more option. But one of the things I’m very excited about in this plan is that in revising the tax code we’re going to recognize the hard work being done by stay at home parents who are caregivers and make it a tax neutral decision. It doesn’t penalize them. It gives them the recognition that they deserve for doing very real and very hard work in the context of their homes—so in other words a person can decide if it’s in the best interest of their family to work or stay at home and raise their children.
When asked to contrast her father’s plan with Hillary Clinton’s proposals on child care, which the Wall Street Journal had written about earlier this year after Hillary Clinton offered up some details in a speech, Ivanka Trump noted that Clinton hasn’t really been specific with the public about her plan.
“There hasn’t been a lot of detail on the specifics of the plan, so I don’t know what the plan is—I know that it’s a problem that’s frequently discussed,” Ivanka Trump said of Hillary Clinton’s lack of specifics on childcare policy. “Few solutions have been proposed. It is why we’re particularly proud of the fact that we really own this issue and it’s an issue that’s so important to many millions of parents.”
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