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Free Childcare! From a Republican!
Donald Trump has figured out suburban women. He is going to guarantee six weeks of paid maternity leave for every new American mom. And if we vote for this compassionate man, we’ll also get tax credits for daycare and the government will help us set up “dependent care savings accounts” to support future generations from cradle to grave. Soon, all our of kids will have trust funds as big as Ivanka’s.
Provide 6 weeks of maternity leave to new mothers – The United States is the only developed country that does not provide cash benefits for new mothers. According to the U.S. Department of Labor: “Only 12 percent of U.S. private sector workers have access to paid family leave through their employer.” Each year, 1.4 million women who work give birth without any paid leave from their employer. The Trump plan will enhance Unemployment Insurance (UI) to include 6 weeks of paid leave for new mothers so that they can take time off of work after having a baby. This would triple the average 2 weeks of paid leave received by new mothers, which will benefit both the mother and the child.
That’s so awesome. Why has no one ever thought of this sort of initiative before? Ummm… wait. They have: They’re called progressive Democrats. And I’m a Republican woman because I have long-spurned policies that sound good but lead to rational discrimination, new entitlements, and exploding debt that will crush future generations.
Look, I understand kids are expensive. I’ve struggled in the past with childcare costs. I actually set up my very own “dependent care savings account” with the spare change I earned as a waitress when I was a young, single mom. (The bills that folded went to bills, you see; nickels and dimes went into the college fund.)
So, how can I explain my reaction to this latest proposal? It’s like when I was handed a New Coke as a kid. “It’s a better formula,” they said as I spat it out onto the sidewalk. I remember thinking that, if I wanted something that tasted like Pepsi, I would have just bought a Pepsi. Is that a hard concept for a businessman to understand?
Just asking.
Published in General
Yes. My vote will depend on estimating how much Trump will drag conservatism leftward versus how much Hillary will drag the country leftward. At the time that Trump won the primaries, it seemed pretty clear to me that the damage Trump would do would be greater than any good that he might do. I didn’t even see a glimmer of possibility that he would do anything to advance conservatism. Picking Mike Pence and the stands he’s taken on the police and on school choice have been encouraging. I was starting to lean towards voting for Trump, but now I’m thinking, “Who will be more effective at passing progressive legislation? Hillary or Trump?” She’s more progressive, but she’s also a terrible politician. In contrast, Trump is really good at this. He could be a more effective progressive than she is, the way Nixon passed a great deal of progressive legislation. Can anyone reassure me that this won’t happen?
Hmmm, Godwin’s Law at work.
At a time when deregulation of businesses is desperately needed, Trump’s proposal is just one more straw in the pile.
I have always felt sorry for small businesses. How are they supposed to cover a key person’s absence for six weeks? Big companies can shuffle people around, but small companies can’t do that.
And we wonder why H1B visa workers are so attractive to companies.
I would offer incentives instead. They work as well.
Donald Rumsfeld took a lot of flak for using mercenaries and private “security” firms in waging the war against Al-Qaeda, but his doing so made me laugh. Even the government itself is afraid to hire people because of the lifelong commitment it entails and all of the uncontrollable, unpredictable, and expensive strings attached.
We have become a freelancer gig society, sans employee benefits of any kind, for good reason.
We need to go back to good old days when it was easy to hire and fire people.
If there’s one thing I was hoping for from Donald Trump, it was a move toward deregulation. Oh well. Dream on.
Only if you don’t understand Godwin’s law.
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/fact-sheet-donald-j.-trumps-new-child-care-
plan
The above link goes to Trump’s website and his child care plan. From what I can tell, it consists mostly of allowing parents to deduct child care expenses from their taxes, in much the same way mortgage interest is deducted. There are apparently also measures to make it easier for employers to provide on site day care, but I see nothing that mandates employers to pay for maternity leav or child care. I have not done an in depth study of this-am popping into Ricochet on short breaks from work, but am I missing something? As far as I can tell, Trump isn’t forcing employers to pay for anything.
Trump’s plan for maternity leave would involve the government paying for maternity leave for women whose employers don’t provide it; he says this will be self funded with money saved from cleaning up fraud and abuse in unemployment. You can disagree with this, but it isn’t mandating employers to pay for anything.
Where do you think unemployment insurance comes from? It doesn’t come out of thin air.
Whenever anyone tells you they will pay for something by cleaning up fraud and abuse you should just read it as “I’m just going to spend extra money”.
Nothing comes out of thin air :) Trump is claiming that he can do this without having to raise anybody’s taxes, by cleaning up fraud and abuse. I can totally understand being skeptical of that claim, but some seem to think that small businesses will be required to directly pay for maternity leave; I am pretty sure that belief is mistaken, and that is what I was addressing.
I’m sure @skipsul can add to this, but a company’s unemployment insurance taxes are based on the number of claims an employer generates. Therefore, increasing the number of unemployment claims the employees bring does in fact increase the employers tax rate. And makes it that much harder for any employer to justify hiring another employee.
At least in California you can be charged a higher UI rate if your account balance goes negative. This theoretically could happen under the Trump plan.
ok, I stand corrected :)
The problem is that any time the government places punishing strictures on people, human nature will bubble to the surface every time, and people will find ways around it. This is often the source of the unintended consequences of good intentions, as in my example above (#51). When maternity leave has a negative impact on a business, people will not want to hire women, and the unintended consequence results in fewer jobs for the people the program is trying to help. The left always underestimates human nature. They even believe they can socially-engineer it away. But they can’t.
I can only assume you’ve never been in a situation where the boss wanted to fire you but couldn’t afford for you to file unemployment. It’s amazing the things they will do to give you the hint. :D
Note:
Needlessly personalizes the issue.I never want to hear another complaint from you about how Bush, Rubio, or any other Republican isn’t conservative enough. You clearly don’t actually care about such distinctions.
I haven’t done an in depth study of everything TKC has ever said, but I am assuming that his priorities are just different from yours. Different conservatives have different priorities; this is why I don’t like arguments about who is a “true conservative” and who isn’t.
Many conservatives are willing to forgive Republican politicians who are lax on illegal immigration because they agree with those politicians about other things; I willing to forgive Trump for this maternity leave stuff because I agree with him about other things. All kinds of different people are conservative for all kinds of different reasons, and we have all kinds of different priorities; doesn’t mean we don’t care about distinctions. :)
Meh. I’m not worried. Trump will appoint solid Constitutional conservatives, and the court will overturn these overreaches of federal power.
Note:
Gratuitous insult. Also, we see no threat, implied or otherwise.Hi Frank. Cranky again I see.
You are finally grasping the essense. Please cite where I ever accused the collection of swell fellas above of not being ‘conservative’ enough.
I accused them of not being American enough. Open borders is tantamount to treason to me.
Frankly , I find conservatism as practiced today so politically ineffectual I can hardly use it as a yardstick for action on much of anything important.
And drop the belligerent tone, sonny. Cheap threats require a cheap suit to utter them.I vote for (A) as worse, the one where we conflate “six weeks of childcare” to becoming a “conservative” value. That’s a lie.
That monster (B) supports a monstrous policy is another matter entirely. It’s repugnant but consistent.
I do not want to be any part of that desecration of semantics and ideology.
I wanted to say thank you to everyone who has contributed to this conversation. I really enjoy these dialogues, and I feel as if I am truly enriched by both the people who have helped me flesh out my positions on this issue and the people who have challenged those positions.
I am currently home from work grabbing some lunch, and my dog wanted some of what I am eating. I gave him a blueberry. He held it in his mouth. He rolled it around on his tongue. He put it on the ground. He sniffed it. He looked balefully at me again.
This action made me think of this conversation. ;)
But wait a second. The two reasons I’m can’t get behind Trump are his temperament and his Left-leaning policies. So because he’s alienated so many conservatives, he decides to move father to the Left? What’s funny about our opposing him more?
This is exactly the move that, if Mitt Romney or John McCain had done it, all of us would rightly be up in arms about the moderate squish going Left. I was ticked off at both of those moderate squishes in 2008 and 2012. So why shouldn’t I be ticked off at this moderate squish in 2016?
No sale.
For me (speaking personally here), it was never that Romney or McCain were necessarily squishes (heck, by modern standards Reagan was a positive lefty on lots of issues), but that McCain routinely savaged his own party in nasty ways and Romney was weak spined and incapable of putting up a fight.
Trump does this. I can’t say he is “incapable of putting up a fight” though. ;)
There is no threat anywhere in my comment. Nothing even resembling one. As always, you must debate imaginary opponents in order to to stand a chance.
Watching you tie youself into intellectual knots to defend your cult of personality can be entertaining at times, but is often just tiresome.
Ivanka’s in the WSJ this morning with an op-ed on the plan. She cites the inequality in male-female pay – another issue ceded to the Left – and says the solution is government intervention. Here’s the telling graf:
“What if one parent staying home to raise the children is the best option for a family? This is the praiseworthy choice of many, yet there’s zero value or recognition by our government for this hard and meaningful work.”
Yeah, that’s what annoyed me about being a stay-at-home dad. No validation from the government. She goes on:
“Under my father’s proposal, stay-at-home parents will receive the same tax deduction as their working peers.”
Why? I can understand the rationale for a deduction to defray the cost of day care, but why should a stay-at-home parent get a deduction when they’re not spending money on day care?
Because this is how people who are progressives view “fair.” Everything must be the same. This is the thing that bothers me the most about this policy. I am like the dog with the blueberry in his mouth. Except I taste New Coke. And I recognize that’s just Pepsi.
(Sighhhh….)
Are you trying to say that you do not owe the government any tax? I disagree on this rhetoric. Everyone should pay their share, which is why I agree on the flat tax idea. But to say that you getting to keep more of your income compared to others is not a subsidy is wishful thinking.
Most programs and incentives the government has right now are of that nature. Tax incentives are subsidies of certain behaviors.
I, for one, would like to see all subsidies gone. My tax plan is that both people and corporations would pay whatever percentage needed to fund government programs on all revenue or income, no deductions
This is another example of wishful thinking. People owe the government whatever the government needs to run the country. The only question is how to distribute the burden. No company would say that you had to pay for a service only if you could afford it. The company would instead not serve you. However, the government must serve all people, so all people owe the government some of their wages/wealth.
Wait, so if a member personalizes the issue to make a point in their favor the person responding to that personalization gets an editor’s note? Give me a break.