It was just last September, in rural Pennsylvania, that Ivanka Trump first introduced supporters to her father’s promises of six weeks’ paid maternity leave and tax relief for child-care costs. These were policies she hoped to shepherd. A year later and an hour away in Bucks County, she held a town hall to sell another, lesser benefit for tax-paying parents.
At a senior center in Richboro, Pennsylvania, on Monday afternoon, Trump—now a White House adviser—told roughly 250 people that expanding the child tax credit was the way to go. The cost of raising a child has risen “dramatically” while wages stagnate for middle-income families, she said, thinly echoing 2016’s talking points: Trumpian tax reform, with the child tax credit expansion folded in, offers them “much-needed relief.”
The tax plan—some yet-to-be-defined combination of lower corporate rates and bigger individual brackets—offers the best of both worlds, Ms. Trump told her Bucks County audience. “For me, this tax plan really couples two things that are core values as a country, which is work and supporting the American family,” she said.
A few chosen attendees asked questions, which Trump answered with her trademark soft confidence and poise. Defending the expanded Child Tax Credit, she said, “It enables the family to decide what it is the right investment for them and their child.”
The idea of a child tax credit expansion, which Senator Marco Rubio first proposed in 2014, found a new friend in Ivanka Trump as she adjusted to the pace of progress in Washington. Paid leave as once promised may have created a coalition—call her the Ivanka Voter—but it would never pass a Republican Congress.
Those who took Ivanka Trump at her word, however, may be disappointed. Doubling the child tax credit does technically help a wider cohort of Americans than candidate Trump’s paid family leave proposal, in that there are more families with children under 18 than there are new mothers and fathers in any given tax year.
But a bigger, better child tax credit ought to be an additional benefit—not a substitute for the policies the Trump campaign proposed—according to American Enterprise Institute scholar and poverty expert Angela Rachidi. “I don’t believe that the CTC that is being discussed is a good substitute for the paid leave and child care assistance proposals that Ivanka Trump and the campaign originally supported,” Rachidi told me. “Politics requires compromise. But the CTC expansion is a bad compromise.”
Ivanka Trump wants the CTC, a $1,000-per-child refundable tax credit for parents with children ages 17 and younger, at least doubled. Like most compromises, the proposed expansion either goes too far or doesn’t do enough, depending whom you ask. Less disputed: It’s a much milder offering than the parental leave plans variously proposed by moderate Republicans in recent history—and prohibitively insisted upon by paternalistic progressives for years. And, as such, it’s expected to pass the House with the rest of the Senate’s tax reform package.
Staffers for Rubio and Lee, CTC expansion’s chief proponents on the Hill, say that the Republican leadership is coming around to the idea. Conn Carroll in Lee’s office said he’s “not heard any firm pushback.” At a press conference this Wednesday, South Carolina senator Tim Scott will stump for the child tax credit, too, I’m told—and with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell expected to stand by in at least tacit approval.
It helps that the CTC expansion is an idea born on Capitol Hill. Compared to a slimmer benefit with congressional credentials, the think tank pipe dream of paid family leave didn’t stand a chance.
The CTC expansion, at least, helps shoehorn a typically Republican tax package into its marketable middle-class-friendly mold: “There are many elements squarely targeted at creating jobs, creating growth, and offering relief to our middle-income families,” Trump said Monday in Bucks County, per pool reporters.
Her job on Monday afternoon, and again that same night in an interview set to air on her father’s favorite show, was to sell that third priority—“relief to our middle-income families”—as convincingly as she did this time last year.
