Speaking in Aston, Pa., Sept. 13, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump rolled out his child-care policy as his daughter Ivanka stood by his side. (The Washington Post) 
 
 Donald Trump released Tuesday a paid maternity leave plan — the first from a Republican presidential nominee. The measure, a pillar of the real estate mogul’s child-care proposal, bears close resemblance to an idea floated by Bill Clinton in 1999. 
 
 Trump’s plan would guarantee six weeks of paid maternity leave to women; currently, federal policy provides only 12 weeks of unpaid time off. He would fund the change by tweaking the unemployment insurance employers must provide under federal law, according to the campaign. 
 
 The country’s Federal-State Unemployment Insurance supplies benefits to workers who lose their job through no fault of their own. What that means varies by state, but the state-run program generally covers workers who are laid off. Trump’s proposal would open the aid to new mothers, who often miss wages as life’s expenses surge. Employers would not absorb the burden, Trump aides said, because reductions in the existing program would offset the cost. 
 
 Advocates for working families in the late 1990s called a version of this concept baby unemployment insurance, or “Baby UI.” The first iteration emerged in Vermont, where policymakers saw the legislation as a way to boost working mothers, the breadwinners in a growing number of American households. It never passed, but Vermont legislators sought the federal Labor Department's approval in hopes the model would spread nationwide. 
 
 At the time, Clinton told former Labor Secretary Alexis Herman to draft regulations allowing states to grant unemployment insurance benefits to new parents. The Labor Department’s resulting Baby UI plan, released in 2000, allowed states to fund both maternity and paternity leave for 12 weeks. By 2003, however, the movement chilled. The Bush administration rescinded the policy, insisting it would hurt employers, stifle business and put women at risk of employment discrimination. 
 
 Trump’s spin on Baby UI would be cheaper than the design Clinton backed. Mothers would be eligible for the new safety-net if their workplace lacked the benefit. Fathers, however, would not qualify. The program would cover half the time Democrats fought for 17 years ago — six weeks instead of 12. Trump said he would eliminate fraud within the program to keep the cost down, the Post's Robert Costa reported, though the Trump campaign did not specify how that would work. 
 
 On Tuesday, Trump aides addressed the long-held conservative concerns about using unemployment insurance to fund maternity leave. In a campaign memo shared with The Post, they said women who intend to have children would not become “less desirable” to employers. The program reductions would pay for the change without raising taxes, staffers said, so hiring a potential mother would not add to a business’s costs. 
 
 Economist Heidi Hartmann, president of the nonpartisan Institute for Women’s Policy Research, said the plan would still single out women by extending guaranteed paid leave to only one gender. But she welcomes the conversation, which she said was previously silent on the right. 
 
 “It’s great that a Republican candidate for president is indicating support for paid maternity leave,” Hartman said. “It’s also interesting that Trump is proposing half of Bill Clinton’s idea from the year 2000.” 
 
 Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a right-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C., said Trump’s plan isn’t free — it’s a government program expansion, dressed up to look fiscally conservative. 
 
 “Someone’s going to pay that cost,” he said. “Arguably it’s the employer. The reality is the costs are always passed on to the employee in one way or another. Ultimately, you'll have men or women who don't have children paying for women who do.” 
 
 That could mean lost vacation time, Tanner said, or lower wages. 
 
 Hillary Clinton has proposed 12 weeks of paid family leave funded through tax increases on the wealthy. Trump first mentioned the plight of working families last month in a Detroit speech on the economy, pledging to make childcare tax-free. Both his eldest daughter, 34-year-old Ivanka Trump, and campaign manager, veteran Republican strategist Kellyanne Conway, have urged him to roll out policy ideas that support working mothers. 
 
 Advocates generally applaud Trump’s focus on working family issues — with caveats. 
 
 “It's great to see candidates addressing the need for paid leave, given that the U.S. is at the very bottom of the world's nations when it comes to affordable time to care,” Ellen Bravo, executive director of Family Values @ Work, said in a statement. “But we need to remember that it's not just pregnant women who welcome new children. Fathers and adoptive parents need time as well.” 
 
 More on Wonkblog: 
 
 Inside Donald Trump's strategy to win over women 
 
 
 
 Ivanka Trump's clothing designer does not offer paid maternity leave 
 
 
 
 What Donald Trump doesn't understand about calling women beautiful ||||| Trump Campaign Sketches Out Family Care Plans; Questions Linger Over Funding 
 
 Enlarge this image toggle caption John Moore/Getty Images John Moore/Getty Images 
 
 Donald Trump is once again taking the fight to Democrats and Hillary Clinton. 
 
 During a week in which the Republican presidential nominee has been attacking Clinton for disparaging half of his supporters as "deplorables," Trump plans to roll out a new proposal that treads deep into the core issues that Clinton and other Democrats regularly campaign on: making child care more accessible and affordable. 
 
 In a speech Tuesday evening in suburban Philadelphia, Trump is expected, according to campaign aides, to go into more detail on a proposal he originally laid out last month in a wide-ranging economic speech — allowing parents to deduct the average cost of child care from their taxes. 
 
 How the plan works 
 
 Trump's expanded plan would allow parents to deduct the average cost of child care from their taxes. The campaign says this is focused on "working and middle-class families," though its income caps — $250,000 for individuals and $500,000 for couples — far exceed most people's definition of working class. 
 
 After his economic speech last month, Trump was criticized for a plan that didn't do anything for those who don't earn enough to pay federal income taxes. They wouldn't be able to take advantage of the deductions, and because child care costs what it costs, it has an outsize impact on the poor. 
 
 To address this, Trump's campaign unveiled child care rebates — up to $1,200, staffers say — to provide benefits to people who currently don't earn enough to pay federal income taxes. 
 
 The Trump campaign says that stay-at-home parents would also be eligible for the same tax deductions working parents currently receive. 
 
 As CNBC found in its analysis when Trump's plan was unveiled last month, Trump's plan "would create a substantial tax break for working parents, but further widen the deficit." That's because: 
 
 "On average, households with a woman working outside her home and taking care of a child under 15 paid an average $127 a week on child care, according to a Census Bureau analysis of 2010 data. That works out to about $6,600 a year. With some 24 million households in that category, the child-care tax break would cost the government $158 billion a year. "For families paying for child care, the current tax break offers little relief. Only 3.5 million tax returns claimed the existing child-care tax credit for the 2010 tax year, according to IRS data, saving those households $1.9 billion. (Nearly 10 million returns claimed a separate tax credit for all parents, whether or not the family had child-care expenses, for another $14 billion in tax savings.) "So total out-of-pocket child-care costs amounted to about $142 billion, which a Trump administration would either have to make up with higher taxes or add to the budget deficit." 
 
 Along with all this, the campaign is now promising to "guarantee" six weeks of paid maternity leave. (Paternity leave is not mentioned.) 
 
 Clinton's proposal would be open to fathers as well. She also wants to institute a hard cap on families' child care costs, at 10 percent of their overall income. 
 
 Tax-free savings accounts 
 
 Trump would also create a Dependent Care Savings Account, which would allow "tax-deductible contributions and tax-free appreciation year-to-year," according to a campaign-provided fact sheet. What's more, the government would match half of the first $1,000 deposited per year. 
 
 That could come at a whopping cost. There are some 124 million households in the U.S., about 43 percent of which include children. That's more than 50 million households. If all of those families put in $1,000 per year, it would cost the government $25 billion annually. Even if half of all families contributed to it, that's still a big price tag, and the Trump campaign outlines no way to pay for it. Not to mention that that kind of benefit doesn't help the families who can't afford to put that much in per year. 
 
 Trump campaign policy adviser Stephen Miller told NPR's Sarah McCammon that a Trump administration would focus on fraud to finance the family leave portion. Miller's estimate was $5.3 billion in unemployment insurance fraud, which the campaign believes it can recoup half of. Republicans wary of increasing government spending frequently suggest funding new proposals by saying they will eliminate fraud. 
 
 "We estimate we can easily recover $2.5 [billion] for paid leave," Miller said. 
 
 That still would leave a sizable gap in how to pay for the overall plan. Miller added, "The rest is paid for through comprehensive tax and economic reform." And the campaign believes it would be "deficit-neutral." But if that's based on "growth," that can always be a murky calculation. 
 
 Trump has already overhauled his tax plan once during this election campaign. One outside analysis of his initial tax plan estimated a 10-year cost to taxpayers of $9.5 trillion. An economic adviser to Trump estimated in August his updated plan would cost $3 trillion over a decade. 
 
 The Trump campaign says Trump's daughter Ivanka was deeply involved in coming up with this proposal. It echoes a notable line from her speech at the Republican National Convention in July, when she told Republicans that Trump would "focus on making quality child care affordable and accessible for all." 
 
 Democrats have long pushed for guaranteed paid family leave, but many Republicans in Congress have been resistant because of the cost to employers. ||||| Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump proposed new subsidies for child care in Philadelphia on Tuesday evening, hoping to reach out to women and suburban swing voters. Photo: Getty Images 
 
 ASTON, Pa.—Donald Trump proposed new federal subsidies for child care, including tax deductions, rebates for lower-income households and tax-preferred savings accounts, as well as a promise of paid maternity leave for workers who don’t have it. 
 
 The proposal, unveiled at a speech outside Philadelphia on Tuesday evening, is the latest move by the Republican presidential nominee to build up a policy agenda that has been short on detail. The child-care proposal could help Mr. Trump appeal to blocs of voters who have resisted him,...
– Donald Trump says he has gone where no GOP presidential nominee has gone before with promises of paid maternity leave and federal subsidies for child care. Accompanied by his daughter, Ivanka, Trump unveiled his plan in a speech outside Philadelphia on Tuesday evening, the Wall Street Journal reports. His campaign says the estimated $2.5 billion cost of providing six weeks of paid maternity leave through unemployment benefits will be covered by reducing waste elsewhere in the program. He promised to make child care tax-deductible for couples making less than $500,000, and give "spending rebates" of up to $1,200 to lower-income families. A roundup of coverage: NPR takes a close look at the plan—which also includes special savings accounts for caring for children and elderly relatives—and at how the Trump campaign says it will pay for it. The funding plan involves "comprehensive tax and economic reform," according to a campaign spokesman. The Washington Post notes that Trump's paid maternity leave looks a lot like the "Baby UI" plan that Bill Clinton supported in 1999, which the Bush administration rolled back in 2003. Fiscal conservatives aren't happy about what they see as an expansion of government spending, though the New York Times reports that social conservatives are pleased that Trump's plan includes tax credits for stay-at-home moms. "My opponent has no child care plan," Trump said. Politico, however, notes that Hillary Clinton's plan includes 12 weeks of paid maternity leave, to be paid for by raising taxes on the rich.