Child Care

Eric Boehm | 9.6.2024 12:15 PM

By now, most of us who pay attention to politics have grown accustomed to tuning out the word-salad responses that former President Donald Trump frequently offers when asked a specific, policy-oriented question.

But even by Trump's standards, the answer he gave on Thursday when asked to explain how he'd propose to lower child care costs was a doozy.

"It's a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I'm talking about—that, because, look, child care is child care—you know, there's something you have to have it in this country. You have to have it," Trump began. "But when you talk about those numbers, compared to the kind of numbers that I'm talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they're not used to—but they'll get used to it very quickly—and it's not going to stop them from doing business with us."

It goes on from there. Read the whole thing here or watch it here.

If you're being very generous to Trump, you might conclude that he's proposing to use tariff revenue to cover child care costs—though it's not clear how much he'd spend or what the mechanism for redistributing that money would be. In short, what it seems Trump is promising here is a huge expansion of taxes on Americans to somehow pay........

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