Included in President Trump’s announcement of his tax plan earlier this week is a promise to provide “tax relief for families with child and dependent care expenses”. Without more details about his plan, however, it’s near-impossible to judge, but we make an attempt nonetheless.

Various news outlets and advocates have speculated that Trump’s initial interest in reforming Dependent Care Flexible Spending Accounts (DCFSA) has since shifted to address a more widely utilized tax credit, referred to as the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (see here, here, and here).

There are three central questions to ask when facing reforms billed as improving access to effective, high-quality child care and education: (1) Does the policy allow all parents the option to stay home with their infants, newly adopted children, or new foster children? (2) Does the policy relieve the cost burden of early child care and education for low- and middle-income families? (3) Does the policy improve quality by investing in the early care and education workforce?

Given the wording of the president’s plan outline, it would appear his efforts will focus on (2) affordability—by either reforming or expanding the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC)—while remaining silent on (1) parental leave policies and (3) improving child care quality. Right off the bat, his hint at child care reform misses key components, and we will show you below that improving affordability through current tax programs misses the target.

Relying on the tax system to improve access to affordable, high quality child care has a number of limitations. As a whole, using the tax system to expand access to affordable child care is especially misguided for three key reasons. First, many families do not have the cash on hand each month to pay out-of-pocket and wait for the end of the year’s tax return. Second, not all current tax credits benefiting household with children are refundable, meaning they are useless if a family owes no taxes. Finally, existing tax programs for child care are not well targeted. In a zero sum world of child care subsidies, many families who arguably don’t need assistance are getting a large share of it.

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Besides the labor secretary, President Trump will name countless federal officials responsible for advocating for working people. One of the most important agencies to which Trump will nominate officials is the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which protects the rights of private sector employees to join together, with or without a union, to improve their wages and working conditions.

On April 25, POLITICO reported that the Trump administration is considering Minneapolis attorney Doug Seaton to fill a vacancy on the NLRB. Seaton is a well-known union-avoidance consultant, otherwise known as a “persuader” or, more accurately, a union buster.

When workers seek to organize and bargain collectively, employers often hire so-called “persuaders” to orchestrate and roll out time-tested, anti-union campaigns. Union-avoidance consultants do exactly what their job titles describe: they help employers keep their businesses union-free, by either defeating union organizing campaigns or assisting with decertification efforts to unseat an existing union.

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In 2015, 4,836 workers died on the job. That’s nearly five thousand husbands, wives, fathers, and mothers who walked out their door in the morning and never came back home.

April 28 is Workers’ Memorial Day—an international day of remembrance for workers killed, disabled, or sickened by their work. And as highlighted by the AFL-CIO’s 2017 Death on the Job Report, it is also an opportunity to highlight the preventable nature of most workplace deaths and injuries, and a day of action to fight for improvements in workplace safety.

One important way we can honor the memories of our fallen loved ones is by learning from what happened, and enacting laws and regulations to make workers safer in the future. In fact, many workplace safety laws and regulations are passed in memory of workers who died on the job.

Take, for example, the Miner Act of 2006—a mine safety law enacted after the deaths of 21 miners within the first few months of that year. The Senate report explaining the necessity of the enhanced mining safety provisions states that, “these tragedies serve as a somber reminder that even that which has been done well can always be done better.” Or California’s 2016 Workplace Violence Prevention in Health Care regulation, promulgated to protect health care workers against workplace violence after the deaths of a psychiatric technician and a registered nurse who were killed during patient assaults. Documentation supporting the regulation states that, “the deaths of theses health care workers demonstrate the need for better security measures, procedures, and practices.”

The foundational step in enacting new worker safety rules is recording and reporting workplace incidents, because if we don’t know about the problems, we cannot solve them. For example, many people may be surprised that in 2016, the private-sector jobs with the highest rates of injuries included not only tractor-trailer truck drivers and warehouse laborers, but also nursing assistants. And the top five public-sector occupations with the highest rates of injury included sheriff’s patrol officers and firefighters, but also janitors, cleaners, and teacher assistants.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is responsible for tracking workplace injuries and illnesses, and issuing new rules and regulations to keep workers safe going forward. But OSHA cannot read minds: it requires employers to record and report injury and illness rates in their workplaces. Yet, many employers evade their statutory recording and reporting duties, sweeping deaths and injuries under the rug to avoid liability. That is one reason why OSHA enacted a recordkeeping rule last year, enhancing its enforcement powers to issue citations and fines to employers who fail to maintain these critical injury and illness records.

Yet, one of the first things President Trump and congressional Republicans did this year was overturn OSHA’s recordkeeping rule, and establish that OSHA can never promulgate a similar rule again unless Congress specifically authorizes it to do so.

So now workers may not only die at work, they could die in vain. Or lose a limb, lose their eyesight, or develop lung cancer from exposure to toxins. And instead of honoring their tragedies by recording and reporting them to learn what we can do better, much if it could all quietly brushed under the rug. Without any evidence of the problems of the past, we can have no solutions for the future.

What will happen next year if, because OSHA’s enforcement powers have been stripped down, workplace tragedies go unreported? Sadly, it’s something we all should think about during this Workers’ Memorial Day. And who knows, one day the person who wakes up, goes to work, and never comes home could be someone you love. Wouldn’t you want their death to mean something? Check the vote count for overturning OSHA’s rule to see if your congressperson or Senator agrees.

Alexander Acosta will not be the secretary of labor that working people need, and for that reason, senators should oppose his confirmation. As Senator Elizabeth Warren said, the test is not whether Acosta is better than Andrew Puzder, a truly abysmal, insulting choice to lead the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL). The test must be whether he will be a strong advocate for working Americans, someone who will use the power of his department to improve their lives. The evidence from Acosta’s confirmation hearings and his past service in the government shows that he will not. The best we might hope for is that he will not politicize the agency and will be a caretaker until an administration that believes in the Labor Department’s mission is elected. That is not enough.

It isn’t even clear that Acosta will be a good caretaker of the agency whose mission is to foster and promote the welfare of the nation’s job seekers, wage earners, and retirees. At Acosta’s confirmation hearing, Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH) asked whether Acosta would defend the DOL against the draconian 21 percent budget cut called for in President Trump’s preliminary budget. Acosta refused to say he would, despite professing concern about reducing the already tiny number of OSHA compliance officers in New Hampshire. Even Scott Pruitt, who spent years in state government attacking and suing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) before his appointment as EPA administrator, cared enough about his mission to publicly oppose the EPA budget sent to Congress by Trump’s Office of Management and Budget. DOL’s Wage and Hour Division has fewer than 1000 inspectors for 7.3 million workplaces, and wage theft is a nationwide epidemic costing workers tens of billions of dollars a year. Yet Acosta would not commit to work to preserve the meager resources devoted to protecting workers from abuse.

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Today, President Trump is set to unveil a proposal that serves as his opening bid for the upcoming debate over tax “reform.” Unsurprisingly, the president is proposing straightforward tax cuts for the rich, which will need to be temporary because they will increase the federal budget deficit. It’s being reported that the centerpiece of the proposal is a cut to the rate faced by both corporations and “pass-throughs” to 15 percent, accompanied by the claim that the tax cuts will pay for themselves (“pass-throughs” are businesses that pay no direct taxes but whose owners pay individual taxes on the dividends and other income they receive from the business). There are three important things to note about these proposed changes.

First, they would clearly be a windfall to already-rich households. The incidence of corporate tax cuts falls disproportionately on owners of businesses and other capital, and this type of income is incredibly concentrated at the top, with the top 1 percent alone claiming 53 percent of it in 2013.

Second, these tax cuts will not trickle down. There is simply no payoff to low- and middle-income families from cutting the corporate tax rate. We’ll touch on this more in an upcoming paper, but briefly, corporate tax cuts are terribly inefficient fiscal stimulus relative to nearly any other tax cut or spending increase. And the textbook channel through which they boost long-run growth—boosting savings—will not materialize. The U.S. and global economies are glutted with savings, so boosting incentives to save helps nothing.

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Undeterred by their failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Republicans look set to move on to the next item in Paul Ryan’s “Better Way” agenda—tax reform. This post helps set the stage for the upcoming tax reform debate and explains why “tax reform” will in the end likely just become a deficit-financed tax cut for the rich and corporations that expires in 10 years—a decade of free money for groups that don’t really need it and a problem for policymakers to deal with in the future.

Understanding why this deficit-financed, 10-year tax cut is the most likely outcome requires some understanding of the “budget reconciliation” process (apologies). Budget reconciliation allows the Republicans to avoid the Senate’s 60-vote threshold for a filibuster, and hence will almost surely be needed to pass any tax cut. To begin the reconciliation process, Congress first passes a budget resolution with topline spending numbers that includes reconciliation instructions. These instruct the relevant committees to make changes to mandatory spending or revenues in order to achieve some budgetary target—for instance, decreasing revenues or the deficit by so-many billion over a specified time period.

Here, Republicans in Congress face a choice. They originally planned to use the fiscal year 2017 budget to repeal the ACA, and so wrote reconciliation instructions that were basically deficit neutral over the 10-year budget window. They could do this because, although repealing the ACA would mean large tax cuts for the top 1 percent, these could be paid-for with cuts to Medicaid and subsidies that helped people afford insurance in the ACA marketplace exchanges. If Republicans wanted revenue-neutral tax reform—perhaps following through on the popular mantra of “broaden the base, lower the rates”—they could simply repurpose those instructions. But this is unlikely to work for them.Read more

President Donald Trump recently told the Wall Street Journal that his administration won’t label China a currency manipulator in a semi-annual U.S. Treasury report that is due this week. Crucially, he has also forwarded no alternative mechanism to deal with the misaligned U.S.-China exchange rate. This essentially means that Trump has turned his back on working Americans who have lost millions of manufacturing jobs since China entered the WTO in 2001, and have experienced growing competition with imports from China and other low wage countries that reduced the wages of all non-college graduates by $180 billion per year in 2011 alone.

In a campaign speech in Monessen, PA last June Trump outlined a 7-step program that he “would pursue right away to bring back our jobs.” In step five, he promised to “instruct my Treasury secretary to label China a currency manipulator,” a commitment he repeated many times last year.

There has been some debate over whether or not the Chinese is currently actively manipulating its currency. What there is no debate over is whether or not the U.S.-China exchange rate is severely misaligned, and that this misalignment costs jobs in U.S. manufacturing. While China has been a net seller of foreign exchange reserves over the past two years (meaning that it has not engaged in direct manipulation over this time), it maintains well in excess of $3 trillion in total reserves, which have a depressing effect on the value of its currency.

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The H-2A visa program allows farmers anticipating shortages of U.S. seasonal workers to be certified by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) to recruit and employ foreign workers with temporary, nonimmigrant visas. DOL certified 165,700 jobs to be filled by H-2A workers in fiscal 2016, up 14 percent from 145,900 in fiscal 2015.1 The H-2A program in 2016 is two-and-a-half times larger than it was a decade ago in 2006, when 64,100 jobs were certified.Read more