Careful on the Child Care, Mr. Trump

On Tuesday, Donald Trump rolled out his approach to the issue of child-care support, which was a particular exercise in walking the tightrope between the needs of citizens and a conservative approach to government.

And, of course, to the Law of Unintended Consequences. 

Admittedly, when I heard that there even was supposed to be a Trump plan for child care, my first reaction was that I wanted to ensure that its basics (as we know, by the time a "plan" becomes a "bill", things change a bit) were not the kind that would encourage people to have children they couldn't afford, or in any way encourage behaviors that were risky or otherwise negative for the family or the economy.

So here, according to the Trump website, are the main elements:

- A child-care tax deduction for expenses for child care -- and elderly in-home dependent care
- Flexible spending accounts to apply pre-tax dollars to child care and elderly in-home care
- Regulatory reform encouraging businesses to provide child-care solutions, and to promote community and family-based child-care solutions
- [Presumably] government-guaranteed paid maternity leave for working mothers up to six weeks

Now I know I have to repeat myself and note that this is a plan, not a law.  When a campaign presents a plan, we, as voters, can only look at it as something that the candidate would try to push for as president.  By the time such plans get through Congress, things change; all you can do as a voter is look at the plan and infer the candidate's priorities from it.

For me, my main issue is the debt.  We owe $20 trillion to China and elsewhere and are not paying down the principal.  Every single penny of spending in the government needs to be evaluated against the notion of whether or not it is so valuable that we should borrow money from China to pay for it.

So my first takeaway from Mr. Trump's plan is that he probably went about as far as he could go economically.  Maybe a bit too far -- I do not think it is the Federal government's role to pay for women to take maternity leave (or for men to take paternity leave, if that creeps into the proposed law), if they are working in the private sector.  Maternity leave is a benefit that should be a point of competition by employers to get the best (female) employees.

The rest of it is a trade-off between encouraging families (a good mission) and net lowering of tax revenues or raising of Federal expenses.  It's hard to evaluate, because Trump pointed out specifically that he was planning offsets in spending within the existing versions of these programs to make the changes financially neutral.  I would add that since the debt is the problem itself, any additional spending or reduced revenue needs not only to be offset but more than offset, because the debt is the problem.

He tried.  Trump tried particularly not to sound like he was adding a big, expensive Federal program because big, expensive Federal programs are the problem.  And the plan, while it was just a plan, was indeed a plan, if you know what I mean.  There was another window into his mindset and the influences around him.

And I do believe that to include in-home care for elderly dependents was important, that the encouragement for families to keep the elderly at home rather than draining Medicare and Medicaid (i.e., taxpayer) resources is a double benefit, as I wrote here.  That will not be discussed much by those assessing the plan, but it should be.

Most importantly, though, I believe that Mr. Trump seemed to be able to avoid putting much into the plan that would unintendedly promote behaviors that the government should not be promoting and certainly not subsidizing.  He seemed to do that, but I hope that as he continues to present further plans and approaches, he continues to assess those unintended consequences, and for him, the need for the pay-down of the debt and a balancing of the budget must be omnipresent.  And that he assesses all of that.

Someone has to.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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