The Tax Reform That Will Help Working Families Is Taxing Ivanka Trump
Ivanka Trump tweeted on Wednesday that she would like to help working families through “tax reform,” a wonderfully useless phrase deployed by political bullshitters of all types.
Trump is of course wrong that a tax credit like this would do much to help working families, since middle- and low-income households need more than a once-yearly refund to compensate for the truly staggering failures of our current system, from the rising cost of childcare and a lack of universal access to healthcare to austerity measures that defund public education and stagnating wages that lock parents into poverty or cycles of economic precarity.
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The proposals the Trump administration has put out so far would only further entrench a system that already showers wealthy parents with the largest tax benefits. But the good news for Ivanka Trump, a millionaire many hundreds of times over, is that there is a major tax reform that would go a long way toward filling in some of these deficits: taxing Ivanka Trump.
Taxing the rich is politically popular, and politically necessary at a moment when childcare is more expensive than a college education in a majority of states and nearly half of the country doesn’t have the cash on hand to cover a $400 emergency expense. This kind of tax policy also makes rich people feel angry and picked on, another good outcome among good outcomes.
It is also maybe something that Trump’s father and boss, the president of the United States, could probably be tricked into supporting if he were isolated in a room for a while and cut off from speaking to Paul Ryan.
Yes, let’s take Ivanka Trump’s money and redistribute it to help fund programs like childcare for all families and universal preschool. Then she can stop attending panels with Grover Norquist and return to her true passions—collaging self-help books and being mistaken for a good person—I can stop writing the same blog over and over again, and working parents will have more of the material support they need to take care of themselves and their families. Relief at long last.