REALITY CHECK: Clinton Gives Working Parents $10K/Year Trump Only Gives $1.5K-Easy Choice (VIDEO)

Throughout Trump’s campaign, his biggest demographic of supporters has been working class white people with enormous child care expenses. In a way, that’s understandable. His message is to scapegoat other races for the problems of the working class, and those who believe him buy into the notion that if Trump makes America great (i.e. white) again, that means economic prosperity for them.

trump working class
Image: screengrab from YouTube video

Isn’t it interesting then, that the candidate who is actually in their best interest is the one they’re against?

Let’s look at Trump’s plan for providing tax exemptions for child care costs.

Trump’s plan would allow parents to deduct the average cost of child care for their state from the amount they owe in taxes. For low income families, who often don’t owe anything for their taxes, the amount would be deducted from Social Security taxes.

The problem with this lies in Trump’s fundamental misunderstanding of exactly how much child care costs for working class families. In a family with two parents making minimum wage, the amount of their income that is spent on child care is 39 percent. For a single parent, that jumps up to 70 percent.

For a single parent that makes $20,000 a year, the maximum amount they could deduct would be about $1500. This is much less than they spend on child care in a year, and it comes far too late for them to actually ease the cost of daily living.

Meanwhile, the wealthy end up saving about 40 cents for every dollar they pay for child care with Trump’s plan.

Hillary Clinton plans to ease the financial worries of minimum wage workers by going right to the root and raising the minimum wage. Her plan is to initially raise the federal minimum wage to $12 an hour and to give the states the option to raise it higher. This would be the highest federal minimum wage we’ve ever had, even adjusting for inflation.

Let’s do the math.

For that single parent who makes $20,000 a year, with the increase of the minimum wage to $12 an hour, they would then earn almost $30,000 a year. Even without changing anything else, the percentage of their income spent on child care after this wage increase drops to 46 percent.

Comparing the two, Clinton’s federal minimum wage increase would give this single parent an extra $10,000 a year. Trump’s tax exemption would only give them $1500.

For working class families and single parents, the choice is clear this November.