Yesterday afternoon at a campaign stop in Kentucky, Hillary Clinton rolled out two new policy initiatives aimed at improving child care across America—an industry that needs all the help it can get. Clinton’s plan is two-pronged: first, to broaden a home-visiting program called MIEHC that reaches low-income at-risk children, and secondly, to increase pay for child care workers, who earn an average of only $22,310 a year. So far, so great, right?

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As Jonathan Cohn—who has done extensive reporting on early childhood development—has explained, home-visiting programs created through MIEHC drastically decrease the number of children who require longer-term specialist care by sending trained clinicians direct to families’ doors for one-on-one therapy and assistance. The program has successfully decreased the number of calls to child welfare centers—which Cohn calls “strong evidence of long-lasting effects.” And providing more generous salaries for child care workers is just good common sense—more money means more highly qualified job candidates, which means happier, healthier children.

But Clinton slipped in a mention of an even further-reaching plan in her announcement, calling for legislation that ensures no family spends more than 10 percent of its income on child care. Details are scarce on how exactly Hillary would provide funding for the endeavor (in his reporting, Cohn indicated that it would be “a combination of subsidized child care and tax credits”) and her aides promised only that more details would be released later. But the implications for such a swell of funding could be massive: The annual cost of child care is higher than a year’s tuition at the average four-year public college in most states. But where saving for college tuition is a habit that can be developed and honed over an 18-year period, pregnancy allows only 40 weeks for child care planning and saving—without even the safety net of legally guaranteed parental leave to mitigate the time between birth and a mother’s return to work.

Subsidizing such a huge chunk of the cost of child care would be revolutionary for pretty much every family in the U.S.—imagine a world in which women can make decisions about work and family based on what they think is best rather than the cost of day care! But here’s why Clinton’s plan to keep child care costs under 10 percent of net income, perhaps more than the other two initiatives, would change the lives of lower-income families in unimaginable ways: the average family making less than $1,500 a month, according to the Center for American Progress, earns approximately $938. And families in that bracket who have a child under five spend about 50 percent of their weekly earnings on childcare.

Yes, half of their earnings go toward this single, entirely necessary expense, leaving an average of $479 for housing, food, and other basic necessities. The math just doesn't add up, and substandard nutrition and care can have life-long impacts on a child's development. Holding these families responsible for only 10 percent of child care costs means their post-child care income would swell to approximately $845 per month, providing a firm boost in the standard of living. That's the sort of difference that can give a new generation access to a better future that wouldn't have been possible before. This is one proposal that everyone should want to hear about more.