Ivanka Trump wrong about leave policy

The plan itself? Like so much of what Trump has said during the campaign, the proposal falls short on details, including how to pay for these new benefits, and it's woefully out of touch with the needs of many families.

Chris Christy of Clive, who has had her picture taken with a certain New Jersey governor with a similar name, said she thinks businesses ought to make their own decisions.

An undated employee handbook from the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas obtained by the Huffington Post says workers are only eligible for unpaid family leave, as mandated by federal law. Even though a 2012 St. Louis Fed study pegged such fraud at $3.3 billion, eliminating nearly all of it to pay for maternal leave is iffy, at best.

Hoping to improve his appeal to women voters, Trump on Tuesday proposed that the federal government guarantee six weeks of paid maternal leave.

Employees at Trump hotels in NY and Miami, as well as at the billionaire's luxury Mar-a-Lago estate and club, also told the news site that they are not eligible for eight weeks of paid parental leave.

Currently, families can set aside up to $5000 annually for child care expenses or elder care but not for school tuition and cannot carry over the amount in the account. The campaign argued that "child care" refers to ages 0 to 4 - before "early childhood education" begins at age 4 with preschool.

TRUMP: So it's meant to benefit, whether it's in same-sex marriages as well, to benefit the mother who has given birth to the child if they have legal married status under the tax code. Did Trump forget that Obamacare put some employers into a position that they dropped covering medical insurance? Good luck with that. "Maternity leave" isn't just antiquated language. That only enforces an outdated family model in which mothers are the primary caregivers, giving employers a disincentive to hire younger women, and it denies fathers the opportunity to bond with and care for a new baby.

While Hillary offers more time off than Trump (12 weeks, to be exact), she's also offering leave to both mothers and fathers.

"Instead what he wants to do is project onto Hillary Clinton what his own policies project onto him, attempt to deflect, and then insult the entire African American community by suggesting that we have allowed a party to take advantage of us", he said of Trump, accusing the candidate of "essentially trying to play a game with the most serious issue of race and racism". On Tuesday, he expanded that proposal to allow families with a stay-at-home parent to qualify for the deduction and to include costs associated with caring for elderly dependent relatives. Couples with income of more than $500,000 and individuals with income exceeding $250,000 would be ineligible.

This was something that Donald Trump repeated in his rally last night: "My opponent has no child-care plan". For them, Trump would provide up to $1,200 a year in tax rebates through the existing earned-income tax credit. Trump's "moms only" proposal fails for families with two dads or one single dad - the number of single father households in the United States has increased about ninefold since 1960, from less than 300,000 to more than 2.6 million in 2011. Subsidized care could be a big help to the parents who are paying 30% and 40% and even more of their income for day care, but it would also be very expensive. Wealthy families could simply pay their child credit back on the tax returns that show their high income.

The U.S. has failed to keep up with other industrialized nations on family leave and child care.