White House senior adviser Ivanka Trump stepped up calls for government-enforced paid family leave following the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board saying the administration should not administer such a program.
“The reality is that in 63% of American homes with children, all parents work. Providing a national guaranteed paid-leave program — with a reasonable time limit and benefit cap — isn’t an entitlement, it’s an investment in America’s working families,” Ivanka Trump said in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in response to Stephen Schwarzman and the editorial board‘s pieces.
The editorial board wrote on June 24 that it did not oppose family leave for mothers and fathers, but did not want the government in charge of implementing such a policy.
“As the Journal also so aptly points out, ‘a growing economy is the best antidote to inequality.’ I agree. Women’s increased participation in the workforce in recent decades has been an important driver of middle-class incomes; in fact, research by the Council of Economic Advisers suggests that the vast majority of middle-income growth since 1970 is the result of increased female labor-force participation and education,” Trump wrote.
“Meanwhile, we agree wholeheartedly that government benefits should not be a substitute for private-sector investment. We see a national paid-leave benefit as the necessary floor from which private sector companies and state governments can build,” added Trump.
Trump said she will continue “working with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to design a paid-leave policy that provides a targeted benefit to help the people who need it the most and are least likely to receive it from their employer, without discouraging larger companies from developing more generous policies.”
Trump, a mother of three children, met with Republican Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Deb Fischer of Nebraska last month. She has called for six weeks of mandatory paid leave for mothers and fathers. The policy has struggled to gain support from conservatives but has won backing from some centrists.
While campaigning, Trump’s eldest daughter touted plans to introduce reforms, incentivizing employers to provide childcare at the workplace and rewriting the tax code to allow working parents to deduct childcare expenses from their income taxes.
