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deminks

(11,017 posts) Tue Mar 14, 2017, 12:07 PM Mar 2017

Trumps Childcare Plan Will Only Help the Rich

https://www.thenation.com/article/trumps-childcare-plan-will-only-help-the-rich/&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialflow

President Trump portrays himself as an expert at marketing designer ties and gourmet steaks, but now, as chief executive of federal social policy, his new childcare plan might be a tougher sell. The promise he has made of universal childcare, accompanied by a marketing campaign led by his glamorous career-woman daughter Ivanka, sounded family-friendly enough on the campaign trail. But to childcare advocates, the vague talking points he laid out in his first speech to Congress last month don’t add up for working poor parents.

According to the broad outlines of the plan reported so far, Trump wants to fund childcare through the tax code with a package of cuts and deductions. This would skew benefits toward well-off married couples, while offering the poorest parents perhaps just a few dollars a month.

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Critics warn that Trump’s limited benefit scheme would only further polarize privileged and working-poor families, who in many cases are already priced out of care altogether. The Tax Policy Center calculates that, through the combination of credits and deductions Trump is promoting, “About 70 percent of benefits go to families with at least $100,000 and 25 percent of benefits go to families with at least $200,000.”

This highly regressive payment structure, moreover, would provide extremely low benefits, from about $10 annually for poor families up to about $460 at most annually for higher-income families. A typical single mom earning minimum wage in Michigan would receive less than $50 per month, for example, for childcare fees that often add up to well over $8,400 annually. The bottom line for parents is that work doesn’t pay: “(C)hild care expenses would still be 51 percent of her income, providing her little incentive to work in the paid labor force instead of caring full time for her child herself.”

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Trumps Childcare Plan Will Only Help the Rich (Original Post) deminks Mar 2017 OP

Imagine this. Igel Mar 2017 #1

Igel

(35,350 posts)

1. Imagine this.

Reply to deminks (Original post)

Tue Mar 14, 2017, 03:21 PM

Mar 2017

A (D) presidential candidate makes some vague proposals. A lot of people think they sound good.

Then a group of people opposed to that candidate takes those vague proposals and tries to come up with how they'd play out. To do so, they quantify what the proposer didn't; they add in assumptions and stipulate how things must work. However, they specifically want to show that that candidate has his head up his butt and isn't just their ideological enemy, but the foe of all right thinking people. In the end, their thought-out proposals are compatible, they think, with the original vague outline.

They present their thought-out, quantified proposal as the candidate's. And, they say with the hushed tones of revealed truth, the plan is bad, providing specific numbers to show how bad it is.

Would any sane person accept this? First, the candidate's plans and proposals are inconsistent. They had to choose which proposals to use. Based on their goals, which was to make the candidate look bad. Second, they had to make choices that the candidate likely hadn't even considered, and might have done differently--to the point of revising his proposal. And, of course, the choices are made knowing that the end goal is to produce an unworkable, biased plan. Third, they then take the plan they've produced and try to figure out how, exactly, it would play out. This requires more assumptions about how reality is currently structured and how the world will change in the near and medium-term future. Which assumptions they make based upon the need to show that the plan sucks.

It's like having a trial for some guy accused of murder, and the only witnesses allowed are the police who believe he did it and people that have hated him for the last 10 years. Then saying, "Now, would they lie?"

(And, yes, I think this was as bad a method of finding truth when the (R) did it as when (D) do it. First truth, then deal with the consequences. It's polemic and advocacy masquerading as truth, and they're fundamentally incompatible sorts of things.)

I'd go on, but the analysis also lacks perspective and leaves out a lot important facts.

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