RUTHFULLY YOURS

Donald Trump is no one’s idea of a traditional Republican, but his speech Tuesday showed the rank-and-file a better way to help workers at the bottom. Democrats pound the need to raise the minimum wage, which is a tricky political issue for the GOP. “Fight for $15” fits well on a protest sign, and it’s easy to paint opponents of a higher minimum wage as heartless, even though their economic reasoning is sound.

Speaking in a Philadelphia suburb, Mr. Trump proposed a new benefit: allowing families to deduct child-care expenses on their income taxes. For a single-parent household with no income-tax liability—the families that Democrats target with their minimum-wage message—this wouldn’t do much good. So Mr. Trump offered an alternative: an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) to offset child-care expenses.

The EITC, signed into law by President Gerald Ford in 1975, has for decades been championed by Republican and Democratic presidents alike. The word “credit” is a misnomer; the policy is better described as a wage supplement for low-income employees, topping up their income on a sliding scale.

To be eligible for the EITC a person must hold a job and earn income. The size of the annual payment depends not on tax liability, but on how much the employee earns and how many children he or she has. Payments phase out gradually as income rises, to avoid the counterproductive “cliff” effect that characterizes other social-welfare programs.

Economists have found much to like about the policy: A 2008 study, supported in part by my organization and published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, found that when the credit has been expanded in the past, employment of single mothers rose. So did their wages. Mr. Trump would build on this success by further expanding the credit to help cover eligible child-care expenses. The maximum supplement under his plan would be one-half the amount of the employee’s payroll taxes (i.e. FICA and Medicare). For married couples, the maximum would be calculated from the lower-earning spouse. CONTINUE AT SITE

Hillary Clinton’s comment that half of Donald Trump’s supporters are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic”—a heck of a lot of phobia for anyone to lug around all day—puts back in play what will be seen as one of the 2016 campaign’s defining forces: the revolt of the politically incorrect.

They may not live at the level of Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables,” but it was only a matter of time before les déplorables—our own writhing mass of unheard Americans—rebelled against the intellectual elites’ ancien régime of political correctness.
It remains to be seen what effect Hillary’s five phobias will have on the race, which tightened even before these remarks and Pneumonia-gate. The two events produced one of Mrs. Clinton’s worst weeks in opposite ways.

As with the irrepressible email server, Mrs. Clinton’s handling of her infirmity—“I feel great,” the pneumonia-infected candidate said while hugging a little girl—deepened the hole of distrust she lives in. At the same time, her dismissal, at Barbra Streisand’s LGBT fundraiser, of uncounted millions of Americans as deplorables had the ring of genuine belief.

Perhaps sensing that public knowledge of what she really thinks could be a political liability, Mrs. Clinton went on to describe “people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them . . . and they’re just desperate for change.”

She is of course describing the people in Charles Murray’s recent and compelling book on cultural disintegration among the working class, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.” This is indeed the bedrock of the broader Trump base.

One of the most amusing spectacles of this election season has been the whipsawing of the loyalists. Repeatedly, spinners for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have been sent out to hammer this or that talking point, only to be left holding the bag when the candidate goes another way.

So far, Trump has been narrowly ahead in this important competition. But after Sunday, Clinton may have taken the lead.

For weeks, the official position of the chattering classes was that any inquiry into Clinton’s health was “sexist.”

As Democratic senator Amy Klobuchar told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell on September 2, “I have seen her personally. You’ve seen her personally, Andrea. She is in shape. She is strong. She just has a ton of energy. And I find this actually quite sexist when these guys are saying this. I think that that is not an issue at all and the American voters know that.”

Glamour magazine ran an item headlined, “Yes, It’s Sexist to Speculate about Hillary Clinton’s Health.”

Last week, Clinton herself was asked if discussion of her health was sexist. She replied with a long, ironic “hmmmmmm” that typified her gift for political subtlety and nuance.

The same day, the headline for Chris Cillizza’s Washington Post column captured the prevailing attitude: “Can We Just Stop Talking about Hillary Clinton’s Health Now?”

Five days later, after Clinton’s near-collapse at Ground Zero, another Cillizza column carried this headline: “Hillary Clinton’s Health Just Became a Real Issue in the Presidential Campaign.”

According to the Clinton campaign, Hillary is currently ill with pneumonia. That much we finally learned on Sunday, hours after she suddenly left the 9/11 memorial ceremony she was attending at Ground Zero. She had to be escorted away to her daughter Chelsea’s Manhattan apartment to recover from what her campaign spokesperson first described as an “overheated” condition. At the time of the incident, the temperature outside was approximately 80 degrees, with relatively low humidity.

The press traveling with Hillary was first kept in the dark. Had not a video captured her nearly stumbling and being held up to prevent her from falling as she was helped into a van, Hillary’s campaign might not have admitted that anything was wrong at all. Only towards the end of the day did her doctor disclose that she had been diagnosed with pneumonia last Friday.

Health is normally a private matter. If Bill or Chelsea Clinton had taken ill, for example, it would be none of our business what was wrong. But Hillary Clinton is running to become the next president and commander-in-chief of the United States. Physical and mental fitness for performance of the duties of the highest and most demanding job in the land is a legitimate public concern. When one runs for the presidency of the United States, the public has a right to know, before they vote, whether the candidates asking for their votes are likely to be capable of performing under intense stress for at least the next four years.

Doubts about Hillary Clinton’s health were already making the rounds on the Internet and cable TV before this latest episode. Such doubts have been fueled by her prolonged coughing fits, stumbles, fainting spells, a concussion and self-proclaimed memory lapses regarding briefings on the handling of classified information while she was Secretary of State. The Clinton campaign and her supporters have tried to label those who have raised legitimate questions regarding Hillary’s health as conspiracists. Clinton aides had gone so far as to belittle a reporter for saying that Hillary looked “low energy” and sounded “absolutely exhausted” at her press conference last Friday and even issued a veiled threat that the reporter’s job was in jeopardy. The reporter had the temerity to tweet: “I half expect her to slump over and collapse any second now.” Nick Merrill, Clinton’s traveling press secretary, tweeted the reporter the message: “delete your account.”