At a health center in Louisville, Ky., Clinton also plans to announce two other initiatives aimed at improving the quality of child care, according to her campaign. | AP Photos Clinton releases plan to cap child care costs

Hillary Clinton declared on the campaign trail in Kentucky on Tuesday that a “bigger government backstop” is needed amid rising child care costs and proposed that working parents should not be required to spend more than a tenth of their paychecks on child care.

In addition to proposing to cap families’ child care expenses, Clinton also pledged to bolster child care workers’ wages through an initiative that directs funding into state programs that focus on improving compensation in the field and that would also expand home-visiting services to pregnant women and families with young children.


She rolled out the new proposals during stops at a childcare center in Lexington and at a health center in Louisville, where she was campaigning ahead of Kentucky’s May 17 Democratic primary. But she didn’t say how she would fund the efforts, and her campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment.

“I don’t think any family should have to pay more than 10 percent of their income for child care,” Clinton said. “That ought to be just a rule and you ought to get help if you’re getting close to that or going above that.”

Clinton, a longtime advocate of early childhood programs, said it’s well established that sharp rises in college tuition have made higher education extremely expensive, “but, for many families, child care costs are even more.”

She said she wants to reinforce the early childhood educator workforce to make it a more desirable career and to make employers better able to retain high-quality workers. The Clinton campaign said the efforts would include creating what it calls the RAISE initiative (Respect And Increased Salaries for Early Childhood Educators), to provide funds to states that increase pay levels for child care workers to equal compensation for kindergarten teachers.

Clinton also supports doubling the financial investment in home visiting efforts, like the government’s Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting program, which is similar to the Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters program that she supported as first lady of Arkansas.

Toby Eckert contributed to this report.