September 15, 2016 | No Comments
Trying to critique a Donald Trump policy announcement can feel silly, like trying to analyze an icicle before it melts, or trying to build a sculpture of an optical illusion. Trump has made it clear that his few specific policies, even his famous immigration policies, are all negotiable, and as far as fact-checking goes, his barrel is overstocked with fish. In the past few days, Trump has started accusing Hillary Clinton of “running a policy-free campaign,” which is pretty brazen, considering her website has four times as many policy proposals explained in 12 times as many words as Trump’s wsebsite has. When Trump released his new childcare plan on Wednesday in Aston, Pennsylvania, he actually claimed Clinton had no childcare plan; in fact, her detailed plan was posted online in June 2015.
But there is an important point to make about Trump’s plan to pay for his childcare reforms, even though the reforms are clearly a political ploy to woo suburban moms, even though it’s possible that next week, Trump could change the plan or, conceivably, deny that he’s ever been to Aston, Pennsylvania. That important point is that Trump does not plan to pay for the reforms. He says he does, but the actual plan makes it clear that he does not. This matters not only because Trump could become president, but because he’s taking a familiar rhetorical scheme to a misleading new extreme, and it’s important to snuff it out before campaign “pay-fors”—the Washington jargon for “how you fund your idea”—become a totally meaningless concept.
Trump didn’t specify how much his proposed tax deductions, spending rebates and other childcare benefits would cost. But he did suggest that his plan to guarantee six weeks of paid maternity leave—Clinton pegged her plan for 12 weeks of paid leave at $30 billion a year—would be paid by somehow reducing unemployment insurance fraud, which one study estimated at only about $3 billion a year. That’s a dubious and inadequate pay-for, but at least it’s a pay-for. However, according to this fact sheet on his website, the bulk of his childcare reforms would be paid for by “additional growth”—by an economic boom spurred by his separate (and not yet fleshed-out) tax reforms. As Trump always says: “Believe me.”
We should all hope a major tax reform will spur additional economic growth and therefore additional federal revenue, just as we should all hope to live long and healthy lives. But what Trump is really saying is that he won’t raise taxes or cut spending elsewhere to pay for new spending on childcare. His plan uses another bit of Washington jargon, the “offset,” to describe how new growth would cover its costs—it actually claims the costs “can more than be offset”—but that’s not a real offset or a real pay-for. Clinton proposes to pay for her childcare plan by raising taxes on the rich; you may not like that pay-for, but that’s an actual pay-for. If you have a plan to buy a dishwasher, it doesn’t necessarily need to include selling a sofa or canceling a vacation to pay for the dishwasher purchase, but it does need to include something like that if you want to call it “paid for.” You can’t just say you’re hoping to win the lottery or get a better-paying job next month.
That kind of magical thinking has become a staple of the broader fiscal plans proposed by conservative Republicans like Paul Ryan, who tend to assume that massive tax cuts will stimulate such massive growth that they will just about pay for themselves, even though George W. Bush’s massive tax cuts did nothing of the sort. All 17 candidates in the GOP presidential primary proposed plans along those lines, although Trump himself took this magical thinking to fantastical extremes, proposing $10 trillion tax cuts while promising to wipe out the national debt in eight years, sending the nation’s fact-checkers into cardiac arrest.
In recent years, Republicans have used their belief in the fiscal power of tax cuts to justify “dynamic scoring,” directing the Congressional Budget Office to consider the hard-to-predict economic impacts of legislation when it analyzes their budgetary costs. They also have revised Capitol Hill’s “pay-as-you-go” rules, which used to require deficit-neutral offsets for all new spending or tax cuts, but no longer require them for tax cuts. It’s a fiscally problematic approach.
But Trump is now dragging it into the realm of logically and linguistically problematic. The wild claims Republicans make about the fiscal impact of their tax plans are only problems with their tax plans. Trump is using those wild claims to give a veneer of fiscal rectitude to his childcare plan. One could rationally argue that child care is so important that it shouldn’t require pay-fors to offset its impact on the deficit—that it’s worth doing even if it makes the deficit go up. One could even rationally argue that Trump’s tax plan will be so terrific that he won’t need to bother with pay-fors to offset his childcare plan’s impact on the deficit, because deficits won’t be a problem anymore. But Trump isn’t making those arguments: he’s arguing that his childcare plan is paid for, even without money to pay for it. The New York Times, demonstrating admirable skepticism, said there was “uncertainty” about how Trump would pay for his reforms. Really, though, there’s certainty. He won’t.
This is admittedly an obscure nit to pick in the Year of Trump. It’s not even the most glaring problem with his childcare policy, which includes maternity but not paternity leave, encourages employers to ditch their own paid leave programs to qualify for government assistance, and provides greater benefits for better-off moms. And his childcare policy, a soccer-mom outreach effort that would have dismal prospects in a Republican Congress, is far from the most consequential proposal from a candidate promising to slap a 35 percent tax on foreign goods, bomb Iranian sailors who behave rudely and repeal most of the Obama era.
Still, the custom of presidential candidates laying out how they intend to pay for their proposals—or not—is a good custom. If Hillary Clinton claimed her plan to help middle-class families afford college was paid for because she thought some unspecified infrastructure building plan would create a magnificent boom, fiscal conservatives would go justifiably berserk. And if Trump pays no price for classifying his hand-waving about growth as a pay-for, it’s hard to see why any future candidate would ever specify a real pay-for.
After all, it’s fun to propose new spending and new tax cuts for soccer moms and other voters. It’s much less fun to explain where the money would come from. In an ideal campaign, or really any campaign with a more respectable ratio of policy to absurdity, candidates would have to come up with more plausible explanations than “believe me.”