Donald Trump on Monday unveiled a new economic proposal to make child care tax deductible, a response to Hillary Clinton’s plans for universal pre-kindergarten and a cap on the cost of child care.

His campaign says the proposal will help low-income families and middle class Americans afford the increasing costs of raising young children, making it easier for parents to work. But the vast majority of poor families will not benefit from Trump’s plan.

In his speech Monday, Trump offered few details about the deduction and his campaign did not respond to a request for more information. His website says he would “exclude child care expenses from taxation.” In other words, Trump wants to create a new tax deduction for child care expenses.

On surface, this sounds like a good idea. Since the cost of daycare can be a huge cost for many families, the plan has the potential to help many Americans. But Trump is proposing a tax deduction, not a tax credit—and that’s a problem. A deduction subtracts from a person’s taxable income while a credit reduces the amount of taxes a person owes. These tax expenditures, as they are known, are the same as spending but they happen through the tax code. Congress has grown very fond of spending through the tax code; in the last fiscal year, tax expenditures totaled around $1 trillion.

To benefit from the vast majority of tax expenditures, people must have taxable income. Americans cannot apply a deduction to their taxes if they pay no taxes. And that’s the problem with Trump’s plan: Millions of low-income Americans—the families most likely to be unable to afford child care—don’t pay any income taxes. They won’t see any benefit from Trump’s new proposal. Furthermore, high-income people benefit the most from tax deductions, since they pay the highest marginal tax rates.

This is the nature of tax expenditures: They benefit the rich and leave behind the poor. The Congressional Budget Office found that more than 50 percent of tax expenditures accrued to the top 20 percent of earners.

So if Trump’s plan doesn’t help the poor, does it mostly help the rich? Maybe not. According to the Associated Press, the deduction will include an income limit so that families above a certain income threshold cannot claim the deduction. That’s a good way to prevent the benefits of the deduction from accruing to high-income Americans. But it still doesn’t help poor families afford child care.

Trump could have structured his plan as a refundable tax credit—meaning that families with no income could also benefit from the credit. This would have cost a lot more money. But it would have at least been a legitimate proposal to enable low-income families to afford child care.

If Trump is looking to help Americans afford the costs of child care, this plan does almost nothing to help. But if Trump simply wants any plan as a response to Clinton’s family proposals—regardless of whether it actually achieves its purported goals—then this does just that.

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