"If you have limited funds, you can’t do everything that you might want to do. So pick something and try to do it well." This is a nearly universal problem in governments at all levels. In Kansas City we had about 400 different programs/services and were routinely panned in citizen satisfaction surveys. I argued that we should pick a couple of hundred and do them well, but optics and symbolism are powerful forces. Emanuel Cleaver, when he was mayor, came close to describing the dilemma when he said "all that fat belongs to someone."
You could say something similar about Amtrak. It's nearly useless as a national rail service, yet it sits there soaking up the limited funds available for passenger rail and spreading it thinly across the whole country, and blocking the emergence of better service in areas where there's the strongest case for it. All those near-useless Amtrak lines belong to someone, and they'll fight for them.
The thing that annoys me with this map is that it breaks down the EU to its member states, but doesn't do the same with the US. To the best of my knowledge, there's no EU paid family leave policy. It's just that paid family leave is popular and member states have done it on their own. Similarly, there are already some US states that have paid family leave. If paid family leave is indeed popular in the US, when people realize they'll have to pay for it, I'm pretty sure that this is a battle that can be won on a state by state basis.
1. This agreement entitles men and women workers to an individual right to parental leave on the grounds of the birth or adoption of a child to take care of that child until a given age up to eight years to be defined by Member States and/or social partners.
2. The leave shall be granted for at least a period of four months and, to promote equal opportunities and equal treatment between men and women, should, in principle, be provided on a non-transferable basis. To encourage a more equal take-up of leave by both parents, at least one of the four months shall be provided on a non-transferable basis. The modalities of application of the non-transferable period shall be set down at national level through legislation and/or collective agreements taking into account existing leave arrangements in the Member States.
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But, as with so many EU directives, it probably has some long phase-in time and special exemptions. Both my kids were born in the EU after this law was enacted and we did not get four months of leave.
I totally agree that a fair comparison is either to break out the EU and US by (member) state or to show the EU-wide policy on the map. Comparisons like these are irritating because they—in my opinion deliberately—try to make the EU look better than the US by their choice of how to plot the metric they are using to make their point. You can always make them look scarier/better by filling in the entire geographical area one color.
The Netherlands (where I used to live) has a long tradition of women taking care of kids and working part-time 'to keep busy' and still has the second-highest full-time employment gap by gender. There is plenty of resistance to these policies within the member states and plenty of antipathy for Big Bad Brussels, even in countries that the Anglosphere perceives as super progressive leftists. And there is plenty of support in countries that the Anglosphere perceives as right-wing, often more so because they are poor (and they are often wedged against 'traditional values').
Paid leave is just not a hill anyone is willing to die on. Poland and Hungary have right-wing governments that love to grandstand against the overbearing EU on social issues (and fake immigration issues), but conveniently forget that their economies are absolutely dependent on EU agriculture subsidies. And policies are implemented by the EU parliament, which is elected separately from the national government. Those elections notoriously include expats who vote at high rates and tend to be educated and liberal—which is why they left in the first place. It is not at all unusual for MPs to run against their own MEPs, as if the latter weren't elected by their own citizens.
In the end, these policies get enacted and then become popular (not unlike Obamacare) even in member states with conservative governments (not unlike Obamacare). Eventually they join the amorphous blob of "socialist policies" that right-wing nationalist parties paradoxically rail against (not unlike Obamacare).
The EU isn't a federal state and is nowhere near becoming one. Are Chinese provinces or Mexican states treated differently on the map than American states?
I have never lived in Mexico or China, so I don't know about them, and I haven't lived for enough years in the US either, so maybe you should discount my opinion about the US. In the EU, though, we are all governed by the same Parliament while simultaneously pretending that this isn't happening, which makes things confusing. EU laws (if we're talking about laws and not recommendations, which are also issued by the European Parliament) are binding and pre-empt member state laws.
Strictly-speaking the European Commission can only pass legally binding acts in the areas in which the existing treaties permit them to do so, e.g., virtually anything relating to customs. (And virtually nothing to do with immigration.)
I think that the US functions similarly. We simultaneously pretend that every law passed by Congress and every decision made by SCOTUS directly impact every facet of our daily lives, while totally ignoring glaring contradictions like legal weed at the state level.
Isn't it how the Tenth Amendment works in the US? And then you have to use the Commerce Clause, the power of taxation, and threats to expand the Supreme Court to have things like the New Deal?
You are correct about immigration and each country having its own rules for naturalization, but also Frontex exists, and the EU-Turkey deal exists, and you also have Dublin II/III etc.
I just reflexively point out that the EU does not have much of anything to say about immigration after years of explaining that to Europeans who have never gone through their own immigration systems : )
e.g., technically asylum is not immigration and Frontex is enforcement. But never ceases to amaze me how many people do not know that each member state controls who and how many immigrants they let in and that residence is state-based.
I know these things even though my personal experience is only with the US immigration system, but then I'm the type of European who is a paying subscriber to Slow Boring, so... :P
Except in the US it's more well established that federal law is supreme and states can't nullify it. It's why whatever the Supreme Court thinks about whether Roe should be overturned, it's unlikely to rule that Texas gets to make effectively that decision for itself by procedural shenanigans; only the federal Supreme Court itself can decide that.
Whereas in the EU, my understanding is they're still more in the place where the pre-Civil War US was. Member states like Poland and even Germany don't fully concede that their own constitutions are subordinate to the EU Treaty.
Not to pick nits, but sovereign nations are no more subordinate to the EU than the US is to NAFTA (or whatever it is called now). The member states have all signed treaties that allow the implementation of laws that unify Europe for the pursuit of the free movement of people, services and goods and some stuff about human rights. But the incentives to keep those treaties in place are huge, especially for countries also in the Eurozone.
I think it is always good to keep in mind that Norway is not part of the EU, but found membership sufficiently beneficial that they associated themselves via the European Economic Zone. Thus, they have ceded sovereignty without the benefits of membership. Israel is an associated member country.
There are constant rumblings from Euroskeptic parties about subordination and sovereignty, just like there are huge State of Jefferson signs along I-5 and Texas pretends like it will secede from the union any day now.
For this sort of map, there’s no reason a mapmaker should feel bound to care whether something is a federal state or not. What you really want is a map that shows where family leave is available, and how much, and no one cares whether it is a state or federal law or international accord that does it. I saw a map yesterday that shaded nations based on whether they would have more freshwater withdrawals than rainfall and other freshwater sources by 2030, which was extremely misleading because it made places like the United States, Canada, China, India, be single colors, rather than having different colors in different regions. Pretending that it’s an immutable law of mapmaking that you must care whether something is a federal state or a unitary state or a union of sovereign states can end up making a map worse.
Perhaps it should - but one might also say that perhaps NAFTA should, and perhaps the EU should have a higher one than it does, but this map doesn't show those things. If we care about who has access to these things, then it's more relevant to show any local jurisdiction that has them than it is to hide those under some higher level entity that should *also* have them.
This is fine as an ideological stance, but it takes the map very far away from being a useful tool to evaluate whether an individual within the bounds chosen by the mapmaker can expect to have parental leave.
Are Chinese provinces allowed to have different policies wrt leave? Honest question.
Sometimes I think it is fair to compare American states to EU member states because sometimes the EU interacts with member states almost identically to the interactions of the federal government with states. Like, you wouldn't break Eurozone interest rates out by member state any more than you would break out the fed rate by American states. Conversely, it makes sense to plot property tax rates by (member) state.
Yes, they are. I would have to go dig in to see which if any do, but I would expect Beijing, Shanghai, and perhaps Jiangsu and Guangdong to be a bit better on this and similar issues than the rest of the country.
Agree. Maybe Congress can't agree on the specifics of a national family/parental leave program, but could it agree on something make it easier for States that want to pass their own leave program to do so? A major objection at the State level is fear of a race to the bottom, losing businesses to States the don't have leave, so maybe something like tax credits for companies in States that have a qualifying leave program....
I think that the argument is that paid family leave is popular, so I guess that would mean that people will move from lower tax/no paid family leave states to higher tax/yes paid family leave states anyway.
Moreover, there's no such mechanism in the EU, to the best of my knowledge, and somehow not everyone has moved to Ireland. People actually prefer paying higher taxes, if that means better services! Now, if your argument is that Americans for cultural reasons will always take lower taxes over better services, then I don't think that it's a good idea for the federal government to intervene by making the tax code weird.
Yes adding more kludginess to the federal tax code is not good, but if it's what's needed to overcome that race-to-the-bottom objection which rightly or wrongly carries a lot of weight in state legislatures maybe it's worth it. Clumsy workarounds like that are just about the only way things get done in Congress.
More globally, I do think it worth thinking about whether there's a more generally applicable and less kludgy way for Congress to facilitate State level social welfare programs, so the States that want it can have it and those that don't, don't have to. Maybe give each state an unrestricted grant equal to its per capita share of some percentage of federal tax revenue, or something like that.
Why would parental leave be considered a race for the bottom? More to the point, plenty of states seem very willing to tax their citizens more - a bit of an extreme case, but people living in NYC making under 50k a year will likely be paying 10% more in income taxes than someone in Texas or Florida.
Because if the law is structured in a way that makes employers pick up some or all of the cost, as most of these laws are, it increases the cost of doing business in the state. If it was funded entirely some other way, then it wouldn't, except to the extent small employers would complain about the difficulty of covering for employees out on leave.
I think this is a misconception. Most employers in these locations are already having to pay a wage differential because of high living costs. Most are willing to bear it because they gain from being in the location, usually by access to a better labor pool. A cost they would incur that would also continue to improve their labor pool would probably be accepted.
Having said all that, I really hope it doesn't get structured this way. We've attached health insurance, retirement planning and a bunch of other things to where you work and most of those end up having some pretty negative consequences. Why not simply roll paid leave into a broader unemployment insurance scheme that paid you more money/longer if you were unemployed because of having children.
Unfortunately I can't edit my other comment now that I realized that I want to add something, so let me make a second comment.
With the caveat that each EU member state has its own paid family leave program, so the specifics vary a lot, here's the mechanism I'm personally familiar with. The employee pays a bit more in payroll taxes, and receives paid family leave benefits from the state in return. Here in the US, my contract includes paid family leave, and my understanding is that the cost for this is on the employer. If the US state I live in moved to a system like the EU one I describe, my employer would actually be paying less not more.
There’s an unwinnable conflict on the Left- to spend decades building a consensus for generally higher taxes for everyone that is needed for European style social democracy, they would have to fight the cost disease that appears endemic to the US. To do that they would have to fight with their own constituents.
In the spirit of Both Sides Do It, I want to make sure to also cast blame on the moderates, for not supporting a better designed program. Pay for it by killing the carried interest or step up tax loopholes.
The stepped up basis isn't a loophole, it's clearly the intentional purpose of that part of the code. It's not like people found some weird interaction between rules or took something designed for a tiny niche and made it universal.
It's weird that this is the first time I've seen someone point this out. Regardless of whether you like, hate or are indifferent to the stepped-up basis provision, it is very clearly not a "loophole" in the sense that some accountant out there found a daring tax-avoidance strategy that rich people ran with. It's built into the Code so that people can do exactly what people are doing with it.
But like Brian T points out, it's called a "loophole" all over the place. Unless I'm being too narrow in my definition of "loophole"
"Moderates don’t pretend to be anything but what they are."
They do though? Twitter is having a field day posting ads where Sinema talks about repealing the Trump tax cuts and prescription drug pricing reform in her ads, and then proceeds to oppose these.
You never see a moderate campaign on "tax cuts for rich people is more important the dental coverage in Medicare or universal pre-K" -- hell, not even Republicans do this. Political junkies that comment on Substack might know the exact details of the sausage making process, but that's hardly representative.
FWIW both of my children were born in the Netherlands, an EU member state with paid maternity leave; they enacted paternity leave recently as well. And the way leave of any kind worked at my job was that the government paid my employer for (a large percentage of) my salary, i.e., it acted as an insurance company. Technically I was a government employee, but IIRC it was the same for my partner's maternity leave. There were reporting requirements and you had to prove that you actually had a kid and/or were sick.
My partner worked in a very bro-forward environment, but HR was quick to point her at resources outlining her rights, one of which was a private room to pump milk (and time to do it). So they re-appropriated a small break-room just for her. After that, many of the lower-level employees started making use of the room; apparently HR was not so quick to tell them about their rights.
The norm up until recently was that women stayed home to raise kids and only took part-time jobs 'to keep busy'. That is still largely true—the Netherlands has the second-highest gender gap for full-time employment in the EU—so enacting leave met with some resistance from the traditionalists and the 'women belong at home' folks. (Americans like to think of Europeans as Bernie-esque progressives, but my experience is exactly the opposite.) It was not exactly a popularist move but, as if often the case, national parties can always gesticulate towards Brussels to deflect blame.
My general observation was that, once enacted, parental leave became more popular and started expanding. I am not sure how much of that was driven by the EU laws that put floors on parental leave, but everyone I talked to from professors to janitors saw it as a good thing. By the time I left, it was entirely routine that a few colleagues were always out on parental leave and others on medical leave and, frankly, it was no big deal because of the universality—when there is a constant fraction of people out on leave, there is no slack to pick up, just tasks to reallocate. So I'm sad to see the American implementation shot through with holes by various interest groups that will likely keep it from reaching that universality threshold.
My experience in France and the Netherlands is that the left/right axes are just different. The current caretaker government in the Netherlands is headed by a center-right party and it was recently re-elected (despite a huge scandal where they were screwing over foreigners). They ran on boilerplate conservative policies like privatization and lower taxes (relatively speaking) and they very much speak the same language as American Republicans (their fliers are often hilariously almost one-to-one translations of Fox News talking points). But they are also pro-EU, pro-immigration, for universal healthcare, pro-choice, pro LGBT rights, etc. It's not that the center-right party is to the left of American conservatives, it is really just a different bouquet of interests and incentives.
The closer analog to the GOP on social policy is the basket of far-right anti-immigrant parties; they are federalist (anti-EU), very anti-immigrant and suspicious of the electoral process. They rail against 'big government' and run campaigns on 'traditional values' and nationalism.
Point taken, but Rutte is more similar to your garden variety Democrat (e.g., Obama) than to most Republicans on most issues. Though it certainly does speak to the coalition model that Rutte does not have to cozy up to the real left/right-wing nutjobs because they tend to win between 0 and 1 seats.
I would echo Sam's comment about the UK & Canada having FPTP and also paid parental leave. In general I have repeatedly expressed my view that believing different voting systems or parliamentary organization leads to a different culture is on the same intellectual level as astrology, I think we've chatted about this a few times now.
The US is just a more culturally conservative country, borne out by decades of academic polling of people's views (unless you believe parliamentary structure affects the political & emotional views of the country's citizens as well). This is the more likely explanation. Politics is downstream of culture imo, not voting methodology.
I'd also note that in Europe most parties generally refuse to enter into a coalition with far-right parties, whereas I don't think that would be the case here. The most likely multiparty system would split the Republicans into Cheney/Romney/country club types, and MAGA/Trump/Greene types. I very much believe they'd join a coalition together
One could look north, rather than across the pond, and see how paid maternal / paternal leave works in Canada (quite well, actually). It also occurs to me that Canadian women do not face any hospital bills for childbirth while millions of US women may feel compelled to race back to work to pay those bills.
The US can fix childcare, education, and family leave without a VAT, pretty handily. It'd just require us to genuinely redline the damned defense budget for the first time in decades and remove the various loopholes that allow capital to never, ever be taxed.
Do that and we've got a cool 1.5 trillion a year to play with for schools, childcare, family leave.
As for healthcare... expanding the Medicare payroll tax is, of course, a broad-based flat tax, but if we're doing it in lieu of employee insurance contributions the math works out in most people's favor. Moreover, it's reasonable to expect we'd be able to bring costs down in real terms over a decade or two.
Sure, a cradle-to-grave welfare state would require a VAT, but that's not what most folks, even progressives, actually want.
If you want something but only want it if someone else pays for it, I question how bad you want it. Like do you want paid leave or do you want to soak the rich? Those are 2 different policy goals. You can want one and not the other. If you want to tax the rich fine have a bill that taxes the rich. If you want to cut defense spending cut defense spending. You can get a majority of Americans for all 3 of those polices but it might not be the same majority. By making the pay for completely un related you made a straightforward policy debate needless complicated.
If we, say, wanted to only keep to our NATO obligations to spend at least 2%, that would save us "only" ~$300-350B. That's not nothing, but given the huge deficits we routinely run anyway, I don't think it's the reason we don't have all the nice things that Europe does.
Cutting the defense budget and increasing taxes on the rich are all good things to do -- I support them -- and they could probably pay for lots of things progressives want to do.
But, philosophically speaking, isn't there something disturbing in the idea that people should not have to be asked to pay for things they want, at least a little? Or, to be blunter, that they will angrily reject the idea of paying a dime for all these great things?
If you're a 30 year old adult making some money, but not a lot, and your parents make a ton more than you do, is it to be expected that they buy a nice house and car for you, and pay for your entertainment?
(NB: I still want to cut the defense budget and raise taxes on the rich, just not fund a large-scale welfare state on the money. Use it to really attack climate change, pay down the debt, what have you.)
"The US can fix childcare, education, and family leave without a VAT, pretty handily. It'd just require us to genuinely redline the damned defense budget for the first time in decades and remove the various loopholes that allow capital to never, ever be taxed."
This is factually incorrect. The looming entitlement crisis would still bankrupt us even if we eliminated the military entirely.
Moreover, capital gain are taxed. The lower capital gains rates are to partially compensate for the fact that much of those capital gains are actually just inflation, IE not real gains.
If you want a European style welfare state, then you are going to end up with European tax rates. Which means much higher tax rates on the middle class.
Finally while it is true that we spend a lot more on total healthcare costs than other countries (and I certainly believe we need massive healthcare reform). Those other countries control their costs by having a healthcare budget and rationing care.
In addition, the US is footing much of the world healthcare R&D bill. Unfair sure. But came in handy when COVID hit.
That map is deceptive. My state has paid leave but the map shows that it doesn't. Same for a bunch of other states.
The map ignores the fact that the U.S. is a federal system where things like paid leave are normally decided at the state level. The EU is essentially a federal system, but the EU states are colored in separately, not en masse.
The map gives a distorted impression. It is more of an advocacy tool than a reporting tool.
""If you have limited funds, you can’t do everything that you might want to do. So pick something and try to do it well.""
What if we tried to pay for all the promises we already made regarding SS, Medicare/Medicaid? Maybe get the unfunded liabilities down from $100 trillion to say $10 or $20 trillion?
All that being said, I was reasonably happy with the California SDI when we lived there. Everybody pays for it as a portion of their payroll taxes. Then you can use it for pregnancy, or disability.
But as you mention, a real welfare state requires EVERYONE to pay more in taxes. You won't get there even if you took every last dollar from the rich
“The sense that this is both true and outrageous has driven a lot of the outrage about the possibility that paid leave will be dropped from Build Back Better legislation or shrunk down to a very tiny program.”
Somehow I cannot bestir myself to outrage about this lack of yet another federal welfare program.
I'm in favor of more support for parents because kids are REALLY expensive. That being said, none of the countries with MUCH more generous support for parents have turned around the birth rates.
are you really saying higher birth rates In Saudi Arabia or Africa are because of paid leave? Because very few rich economies have substantially higher birth rates than the USA. I don’t know if any large rich country with a TFR above 2.2. Replacement level.
"Higher birth rates in the past were a function of child and marternal mortality and agrarianism."
I think birth rates were affected by those things, it sounds as though you believe they were effected by those things.
"We don't need 80% of the population to be involved in farming anymore."
Or in energy production, for that matter. (I haven't bought a new jar of whale oil in, I dunno, ever?) But what about other economic sectors? Child care, for instance? How do you identify the need?
"With all that surplus labor, we raised education standards to devote more resources to innovation, as well as create a large labor pool for an industrial base to service the innovation sector, and a vast service sector to augment the high living standards all of that innovation and industry enabled."
Again, your argument has the sound of a belief that "we" effected those changes. If that's true, then "we" effected plague of cost disease. But of course we did not.
One specific concern is that the availability of maternity leave will actually increase births among eligible working women. In this paper we use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to examine the impact of maternity leave on fertility. We explore two possible routes through which maternity leave may influence fertility. We first estimate the impact of desired fertility on the probability of being in a job offering maternity leave. We then estimate the impact of maternity leave and desired fertility on the probability of a birth. We find no evidence that women sort by fertility desires into firms on the basis of their maternity leave policy. We do find that the probability of a birth increases as a result of maternity leave, and that the fertility effect of maternity leave increases with birth parity.
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This does not explicitly answer your question Ken, in that it looks (from the abstract) like "two otherwise equal firms, the one with maternity leave will increase probability of birth" BUT.... it could be that that's true, but only firms for white collar professionals offer these, and their birth rates are already lower than the country as a whole, so this fails to make up the gap.
That said, if that's the reason the rate isn't higher, then I question whether your comparison is correct. If only law firms had maternity leave, and law firms had lower birth rates than the country as a whole, but law firms _with maternity leave_ generated higher-than-other-law-firm rates, then from the standpoint question of "does maternity leave tend to increase birth rates" the answer is yes, and if that's the policy goal, then this policy does it.
"If only law firms had maternity leave, and law firms had lower birth rates than the country as a whole, but law firms _with maternity leave_ generated higher-than-other-law-firm rates, then from the standpoint question of "does maternity leave tend to increase birth rates" the answer is yes..."
Not necessarily. Women who desired relatively large families would naturally be attracted to the firms that offered the best maternity leave benefits. I see that as a massive confounding factor. It could be not that "maternity leave tend[s] to increase birth rates," but that maternity leave tends to attract the fecund.
Focus on the Child Tax Credit. Paid leave is something that firms could be subsidized for providing like the government pick up a portion of the cost of the benefit or for insuring the cost of the benefit. The main reason we want paid leave is so workers don't come to work sick.
It’s entirely possible that I lost the plot long ago, but I don’t understand where the screams of horror came from when paid leave failed to make the BBB cut. Who’s pushing for this?
"If you have limited funds, you can’t do everything that you might want to do. So pick something and try to do it well." This is a nearly universal problem in governments at all levels. In Kansas City we had about 400 different programs/services and were routinely panned in citizen satisfaction surveys. I argued that we should pick a couple of hundred and do them well, but optics and symbolism are powerful forces. Emanuel Cleaver, when he was mayor, came close to describing the dilemma when he said "all that fat belongs to someone."
You could say something similar about Amtrak. It's nearly useless as a national rail service, yet it sits there soaking up the limited funds available for passenger rail and spreading it thinly across the whole country, and blocking the emergence of better service in areas where there's the strongest case for it. All those near-useless Amtrak lines belong to someone, and they'll fight for them.
Exactly! Excellent point!
The thing that annoys me with this map is that it breaks down the EU to its member states, but doesn't do the same with the US. To the best of my knowledge, there's no EU paid family leave policy. It's just that paid family leave is popular and member states have done it on their own. Similarly, there are already some US states that have paid family leave. If paid family leave is indeed popular in the US, when people realize they'll have to pay for it, I'm pretty sure that this is a battle that can be won on a state by state basis.
“If paid family leave is indeed popular in the US, when people realize they'll have to pay for it”
Progressives are not especially honest about the paying for it part.
The EU puts a floor on parental leave: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?qid=1414661428912&uri=CELEX:32010L0018
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Clause 2: Parental leave
1. This agreement entitles men and women workers to an individual right to parental leave on the grounds of the birth or adoption of a child to take care of that child until a given age up to eight years to be defined by Member States and/or social partners.
2. The leave shall be granted for at least a period of four months and, to promote equal opportunities and equal treatment between men and women, should, in principle, be provided on a non-transferable basis. To encourage a more equal take-up of leave by both parents, at least one of the four months shall be provided on a non-transferable basis. The modalities of application of the non-transferable period shall be set down at national level through legislation and/or collective agreements taking into account existing leave arrangements in the Member States.
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But, as with so many EU directives, it probably has some long phase-in time and special exemptions. Both my kids were born in the EU after this law was enacted and we did not get four months of leave.
I totally agree that a fair comparison is either to break out the EU and US by (member) state or to show the EU-wide policy on the map. Comparisons like these are irritating because they—in my opinion deliberately—try to make the EU look better than the US by their choice of how to plot the metric they are using to make their point. You can always make them look scarier/better by filling in the entire geographical area one color.
The Netherlands (where I used to live) has a long tradition of women taking care of kids and working part-time 'to keep busy' and still has the second-highest full-time employment gap by gender. There is plenty of resistance to these policies within the member states and plenty of antipathy for Big Bad Brussels, even in countries that the Anglosphere perceives as super progressive leftists. And there is plenty of support in countries that the Anglosphere perceives as right-wing, often more so because they are poor (and they are often wedged against 'traditional values').
Paid leave is just not a hill anyone is willing to die on. Poland and Hungary have right-wing governments that love to grandstand against the overbearing EU on social issues (and fake immigration issues), but conveniently forget that their economies are absolutely dependent on EU agriculture subsidies. And policies are implemented by the EU parliament, which is elected separately from the national government. Those elections notoriously include expats who vote at high rates and tend to be educated and liberal—which is why they left in the first place. It is not at all unusual for MPs to run against their own MEPs, as if the latter weren't elected by their own citizens.
In the end, these policies get enacted and then become popular (not unlike Obamacare) even in member states with conservative governments (not unlike Obamacare). Eventually they join the amorphous blob of "socialist policies" that right-wing nationalist parties paradoxically rail against (not unlike Obamacare).
The EU isn't a federal state and is nowhere near becoming one. Are Chinese provinces or Mexican states treated differently on the map than American states?
I have never lived in Mexico or China, so I don't know about them, and I haven't lived for enough years in the US either, so maybe you should discount my opinion about the US. In the EU, though, we are all governed by the same Parliament while simultaneously pretending that this isn't happening, which makes things confusing. EU laws (if we're talking about laws and not recommendations, which are also issued by the European Parliament) are binding and pre-empt member state laws.
Strictly-speaking the European Commission can only pass legally binding acts in the areas in which the existing treaties permit them to do so, e.g., virtually anything relating to customs. (And virtually nothing to do with immigration.)
I think that the US functions similarly. We simultaneously pretend that every law passed by Congress and every decision made by SCOTUS directly impact every facet of our daily lives, while totally ignoring glaring contradictions like legal weed at the state level.
Isn't it how the Tenth Amendment works in the US? And then you have to use the Commerce Clause, the power of taxation, and threats to expand the Supreme Court to have things like the New Deal?
You are correct about immigration and each country having its own rules for naturalization, but also Frontex exists, and the EU-Turkey deal exists, and you also have Dublin II/III etc.
Yeah, we're just further down the path of centralization than the EU, so the 10th seems sort of like a dead letter.
And it was never more than a lawyerly redundancy to begin with, stating the obvious that if Congress isn't authorized to act in a area, it can't.
I just reflexively point out that the EU does not have much of anything to say about immigration after years of explaining that to Europeans who have never gone through their own immigration systems : )
e.g., technically asylum is not immigration and Frontex is enforcement. But never ceases to amaze me how many people do not know that each member state controls who and how many immigrants they let in and that residence is state-based.
I know these things even though my personal experience is only with the US immigration system, but then I'm the type of European who is a paying subscriber to Slow Boring, so... :P
Except in the US it's more well established that federal law is supreme and states can't nullify it. It's why whatever the Supreme Court thinks about whether Roe should be overturned, it's unlikely to rule that Texas gets to make effectively that decision for itself by procedural shenanigans; only the federal Supreme Court itself can decide that.
Whereas in the EU, my understanding is they're still more in the place where the pre-Civil War US was. Member states like Poland and even Germany don't fully concede that their own constitutions are subordinate to the EU Treaty.
Not to pick nits, but sovereign nations are no more subordinate to the EU than the US is to NAFTA (or whatever it is called now). The member states have all signed treaties that allow the implementation of laws that unify Europe for the pursuit of the free movement of people, services and goods and some stuff about human rights. But the incentives to keep those treaties in place are huge, especially for countries also in the Eurozone.
I think it is always good to keep in mind that Norway is not part of the EU, but found membership sufficiently beneficial that they associated themselves via the European Economic Zone. Thus, they have ceded sovereignty without the benefits of membership. Israel is an associated member country.
There are constant rumblings from Euroskeptic parties about subordination and sovereignty, just like there are huge State of Jefferson signs along I-5 and Texas pretends like it will secede from the union any day now.
For this sort of map, there’s no reason a mapmaker should feel bound to care whether something is a federal state or not. What you really want is a map that shows where family leave is available, and how much, and no one cares whether it is a state or federal law or international accord that does it. I saw a map yesterday that shaded nations based on whether they would have more freshwater withdrawals than rainfall and other freshwater sources by 2030, which was extremely misleading because it made places like the United States, Canada, China, India, be single colors, rather than having different colors in different regions. Pretending that it’s an immutable law of mapmaking that you must care whether something is a federal state or a unitary state or a union of sovereign states can end up making a map worse.
I think there's a rather different rationale for describing physical phenomena vs. legal codes.
The whole point is that the US, as a nation-state, has no requirements in this regard and it should.
Perhaps it should - but one might also say that perhaps NAFTA should, and perhaps the EU should have a higher one than it does, but this map doesn't show those things. If we care about who has access to these things, then it's more relevant to show any local jurisdiction that has them than it is to hide those under some higher level entity that should *also* have them.
I disagree. I think it perfectly reasonable to say "national units are the basis for a good apples-to-apples comparison" and be done with it.
Treating NAFTA or the TPP as a unit in this context is just nonsensical, and I would argue the EU mostly is as well.
This is fine as an ideological stance, but it takes the map very far away from being a useful tool to evaluate whether an individual within the bounds chosen by the mapmaker can expect to have parental leave.
Are Chinese provinces allowed to have different policies wrt leave? Honest question.
Sometimes I think it is fair to compare American states to EU member states because sometimes the EU interacts with member states almost identically to the interactions of the federal government with states. Like, you wouldn't break Eurozone interest rates out by member state any more than you would break out the fed rate by American states. Conversely, it makes sense to plot property tax rates by (member) state.
Brief digging complete:
"This varies from extending leave from the national
entitlement of 98 days to 128 days (in Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu,
Zhejiang, Hubei, Chongqing, and Tianjin) to extending leave for
up to one year (in Tibet). The most common extension is to 158
days (in Hebei, Shanxi, Inner Mongolia, Liaoning, Jilin, Anhui,
Jiangxi, Shandong, Hunan, Sichuan, Guizhou, Yunnan, Qinghai,
Ningxia, Shaanxi, and Xinjiang).
• In Shanghai, there are two additional provisions. Female
employees who are 28 weeks pregnant or more should receive an
hour’s break per day (paid at 80 per cent of their earnings) and
should not work nightshifts. Women who need to be exempted
from work to protect their foetus can, upon presentation of a
medical certificate, take a ‘foetus protection leave."
So, mostly wrong about who is "forward-looking" on the matter, but there is considerable variation.
Yes, they are. I would have to go dig in to see which if any do, but I would expect Beijing, Shanghai, and perhaps Jiangsu and Guangdong to be a bit better on this and similar issues than the rest of the country.
Agree. Maybe Congress can't agree on the specifics of a national family/parental leave program, but could it agree on something make it easier for States that want to pass their own leave program to do so? A major objection at the State level is fear of a race to the bottom, losing businesses to States the don't have leave, so maybe something like tax credits for companies in States that have a qualifying leave program....
I think that the argument is that paid family leave is popular, so I guess that would mean that people will move from lower tax/no paid family leave states to higher tax/yes paid family leave states anyway.
Moreover, there's no such mechanism in the EU, to the best of my knowledge, and somehow not everyone has moved to Ireland. People actually prefer paying higher taxes, if that means better services! Now, if your argument is that Americans for cultural reasons will always take lower taxes over better services, then I don't think that it's a good idea for the federal government to intervene by making the tax code weird.
Yes adding more kludginess to the federal tax code is not good, but if it's what's needed to overcome that race-to-the-bottom objection which rightly or wrongly carries a lot of weight in state legislatures maybe it's worth it. Clumsy workarounds like that are just about the only way things get done in Congress.
More globally, I do think it worth thinking about whether there's a more generally applicable and less kludgy way for Congress to facilitate State level social welfare programs, so the States that want it can have it and those that don't, don't have to. Maybe give each state an unrestricted grant equal to its per capita share of some percentage of federal tax revenue, or something like that.
Why would parental leave be considered a race for the bottom? More to the point, plenty of states seem very willing to tax their citizens more - a bit of an extreme case, but people living in NYC making under 50k a year will likely be paying 10% more in income taxes than someone in Texas or Florida.
Because if the law is structured in a way that makes employers pick up some or all of the cost, as most of these laws are, it increases the cost of doing business in the state. If it was funded entirely some other way, then it wouldn't, except to the extent small employers would complain about the difficulty of covering for employees out on leave.
I think this is a misconception. Most employers in these locations are already having to pay a wage differential because of high living costs. Most are willing to bear it because they gain from being in the location, usually by access to a better labor pool. A cost they would incur that would also continue to improve their labor pool would probably be accepted.
Having said all that, I really hope it doesn't get structured this way. We've attached health insurance, retirement planning and a bunch of other things to where you work and most of those end up having some pretty negative consequences. Why not simply roll paid leave into a broader unemployment insurance scheme that paid you more money/longer if you were unemployed because of having children.
Unfortunately I can't edit my other comment now that I realized that I want to add something, so let me make a second comment.
With the caveat that each EU member state has its own paid family leave program, so the specifics vary a lot, here's the mechanism I'm personally familiar with. The employee pays a bit more in payroll taxes, and receives paid family leave benefits from the state in return. Here in the US, my contract includes paid family leave, and my understanding is that the cost for this is on the employer. If the US state I live in moved to a system like the EU one I describe, my employer would actually be paying less not more.
In other words, it fails the "does what it says on the can" test. Great breakdown. Thanks!
There’s an unwinnable conflict on the Left- to spend decades building a consensus for generally higher taxes for everyone that is needed for European style social democracy, they would have to fight the cost disease that appears endemic to the US. To do that they would have to fight with their own constituents.
This paid leave plan feels like something a person trying to parody neoliberalism would come up with.
I sympathize a lot with progressive frustration over how this bill has developed, but man, this doesn't seem to have been the right hill to die on.
In the spirit of Both Sides Do It, I want to make sure to also cast blame on the moderates, for not supporting a better designed program. Pay for it by killing the carried interest or step up tax loopholes.
The stepped up basis isn't a loophole, it's clearly the intentional purpose of that part of the code. It's not like people found some weird interaction between rules or took something designed for a tiny niche and made it universal.
It's weird that this is the first time I've seen someone point this out. Regardless of whether you like, hate or are indifferent to the stepped-up basis provision, it is very clearly not a "loophole" in the sense that some accountant out there found a daring tax-avoidance strategy that rich people ran with. It's built into the Code so that people can do exactly what people are doing with it.
But like Brian T points out, it's called a "loophole" all over the place. Unless I'm being too narrow in my definition of "loophole"
People just call it a "loophole" because they don't like it. But that's not what a loophole means!
Fair enough. That was just the term I found when googling it.
"Pay for it by killing the carried interest or step up tax loopholes."
Would this even raise enough money?
"Moderates don’t pretend to be anything but what they are."
They do though? Twitter is having a field day posting ads where Sinema talks about repealing the Trump tax cuts and prescription drug pricing reform in her ads, and then proceeds to oppose these.
You never see a moderate campaign on "tax cuts for rich people is more important the dental coverage in Medicare or universal pre-K" -- hell, not even Republicans do this. Political junkies that comment on Substack might know the exact details of the sausage making process, but that's hardly representative.
As a noted family Man I should be spokesperson for these programs
Honestly, this seems worse than nothing, because at least with nothing, there's a better chance of doing something sane in the future.
The Chad-knower community appreciates the Chad reference.
Need an update on goings-on in Chad, the gap has been too long IMO.
What's the zoning situation like in N'Djamena?
FWIW both of my children were born in the Netherlands, an EU member state with paid maternity leave; they enacted paternity leave recently as well. And the way leave of any kind worked at my job was that the government paid my employer for (a large percentage of) my salary, i.e., it acted as an insurance company. Technically I was a government employee, but IIRC it was the same for my partner's maternity leave. There were reporting requirements and you had to prove that you actually had a kid and/or were sick.
My partner worked in a very bro-forward environment, but HR was quick to point her at resources outlining her rights, one of which was a private room to pump milk (and time to do it). So they re-appropriated a small break-room just for her. After that, many of the lower-level employees started making use of the room; apparently HR was not so quick to tell them about their rights.
The norm up until recently was that women stayed home to raise kids and only took part-time jobs 'to keep busy'. That is still largely true—the Netherlands has the second-highest gender gap for full-time employment in the EU—so enacting leave met with some resistance from the traditionalists and the 'women belong at home' folks. (Americans like to think of Europeans as Bernie-esque progressives, but my experience is exactly the opposite.) It was not exactly a popularist move but, as if often the case, national parties can always gesticulate towards Brussels to deflect blame.
My general observation was that, once enacted, parental leave became more popular and started expanding. I am not sure how much of that was driven by the EU laws that put floors on parental leave, but everyone I talked to from professors to janitors saw it as a good thing. By the time I left, it was entirely routine that a few colleagues were always out on parental leave and others on medical leave and, frankly, it was no big deal because of the universality—when there is a constant fraction of people out on leave, there is no slack to pick up, just tasks to reallocate. So I'm sad to see the American implementation shot through with holes by various interest groups that will likely keep it from reaching that universality threshold.
My experience in France and the Netherlands is that the left/right axes are just different. The current caretaker government in the Netherlands is headed by a center-right party and it was recently re-elected (despite a huge scandal where they were screwing over foreigners). They ran on boilerplate conservative policies like privatization and lower taxes (relatively speaking) and they very much speak the same language as American Republicans (their fliers are often hilariously almost one-to-one translations of Fox News talking points). But they are also pro-EU, pro-immigration, for universal healthcare, pro-choice, pro LGBT rights, etc. It's not that the center-right party is to the left of American conservatives, it is really just a different bouquet of interests and incentives.
The closer analog to the GOP on social policy is the basket of far-right anti-immigrant parties; they are federalist (anti-EU), very anti-immigrant and suspicious of the electoral process. They rail against 'big government' and run campaigns on 'traditional values' and nationalism.
Except that Romney opposes abortion, assisted suicide and legal weed.
Point taken, but Rutte is more similar to your garden variety Democrat (e.g., Obama) than to most Republicans on most issues. Though it certainly does speak to the coalition model that Rutte does not have to cozy up to the real left/right-wing nutjobs because they tend to win between 0 and 1 seats.
I would echo Sam's comment about the UK & Canada having FPTP and also paid parental leave. In general I have repeatedly expressed my view that believing different voting systems or parliamentary organization leads to a different culture is on the same intellectual level as astrology, I think we've chatted about this a few times now.
The US is just a more culturally conservative country, borne out by decades of academic polling of people's views (unless you believe parliamentary structure affects the political & emotional views of the country's citizens as well). This is the more likely explanation. Politics is downstream of culture imo, not voting methodology.
I'd also note that in Europe most parties generally refuse to enter into a coalition with far-right parties, whereas I don't think that would be the case here. The most likely multiparty system would split the Republicans into Cheney/Romney/country club types, and MAGA/Trump/Greene types. I very much believe they'd join a coalition together
UK and Canada have FPTP, with coalition governments being rare, but still have paid leave.
One could look north, rather than across the pond, and see how paid maternal / paternal leave works in Canada (quite well, actually). It also occurs to me that Canadian women do not face any hospital bills for childbirth while millions of US women may feel compelled to race back to work to pay those bills.
It's fun how often we can find solutions by just looking to our Northern neighbor :)
Maybe we need a What Would Canada Do hashtag... #WWCD
Ha!
You can if you make someone else pay!
The US can fix childcare, education, and family leave without a VAT, pretty handily. It'd just require us to genuinely redline the damned defense budget for the first time in decades and remove the various loopholes that allow capital to never, ever be taxed.
Do that and we've got a cool 1.5 trillion a year to play with for schools, childcare, family leave.
As for healthcare... expanding the Medicare payroll tax is, of course, a broad-based flat tax, but if we're doing it in lieu of employee insurance contributions the math works out in most people's favor. Moreover, it's reasonable to expect we'd be able to bring costs down in real terms over a decade or two.
Sure, a cradle-to-grave welfare state would require a VAT, but that's not what most folks, even progressives, actually want.
If you want something but only want it if someone else pays for it, I question how bad you want it. Like do you want paid leave or do you want to soak the rich? Those are 2 different policy goals. You can want one and not the other. If you want to tax the rich fine have a bill that taxes the rich. If you want to cut defense spending cut defense spending. You can get a majority of Americans for all 3 of those polices but it might not be the same majority. By making the pay for completely un related you made a straightforward policy debate needless complicated.
Just one thing to keep in mind, the defense budget is huge but it's "only" 3.7% of GDP: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266892/military-expenditure-as-percentage-of-gdp-in-highest-spending-countries/
If we, say, wanted to only keep to our NATO obligations to spend at least 2%, that would save us "only" ~$300-350B. That's not nothing, but given the huge deficits we routinely run anyway, I don't think it's the reason we don't have all the nice things that Europe does.
Cutting the defense budget and increasing taxes on the rich are all good things to do -- I support them -- and they could probably pay for lots of things progressives want to do.
But, philosophically speaking, isn't there something disturbing in the idea that people should not have to be asked to pay for things they want, at least a little? Or, to be blunter, that they will angrily reject the idea of paying a dime for all these great things?
If you're a 30 year old adult making some money, but not a lot, and your parents make a ton more than you do, is it to be expected that they buy a nice house and car for you, and pay for your entertainment?
(NB: I still want to cut the defense budget and raise taxes on the rich, just not fund a large-scale welfare state on the money. Use it to really attack climate change, pay down the debt, what have you.)
"The US can fix childcare, education, and family leave without a VAT, pretty handily. It'd just require us to genuinely redline the damned defense budget for the first time in decades and remove the various loopholes that allow capital to never, ever be taxed."
This is factually incorrect. The looming entitlement crisis would still bankrupt us even if we eliminated the military entirely.
Moreover, capital gain are taxed. The lower capital gains rates are to partially compensate for the fact that much of those capital gains are actually just inflation, IE not real gains.
If you want a European style welfare state, then you are going to end up with European tax rates. Which means much higher tax rates on the middle class.
Finally while it is true that we spend a lot more on total healthcare costs than other countries (and I certainly believe we need massive healthcare reform). Those other countries control their costs by having a healthcare budget and rationing care.
In addition, the US is footing much of the world healthcare R&D bill. Unfair sure. But came in handy when COVID hit.
We have rich people but they know how to run from the tax man.
That map is deceptive. My state has paid leave but the map shows that it doesn't. Same for a bunch of other states.
The map ignores the fact that the U.S. is a federal system where things like paid leave are normally decided at the state level. The EU is essentially a federal system, but the EU states are colored in separately, not en masse.
The map gives a distorted impression. It is more of an advocacy tool than a reporting tool.
""If you have limited funds, you can’t do everything that you might want to do. So pick something and try to do it well.""
What if we tried to pay for all the promises we already made regarding SS, Medicare/Medicaid? Maybe get the unfunded liabilities down from $100 trillion to say $10 or $20 trillion?
All that being said, I was reasonably happy with the California SDI when we lived there. Everybody pays for it as a portion of their payroll taxes. Then you can use it for pregnancy, or disability.
But as you mention, a real welfare state requires EVERYONE to pay more in taxes. You won't get there even if you took every last dollar from the rich
“The sense that this is both true and outrageous has driven a lot of the outrage about the possibility that paid leave will be dropped from Build Back Better legislation or shrunk down to a very tiny program.”
Somehow I cannot bestir myself to outrage about this lack of yet another federal welfare program.
How low would the birth rate have to fall before you’d change your mind?
I'm in favor of more support for parents because kids are REALLY expensive. That being said, none of the countries with MUCH more generous support for parents have turned around the birth rates.
"...kids are REALLY expensive."
In what sense? You have to provide them with food and shelter?
Oh, and two other things:
1. Higher birth rates in the past coexisted with a near total lack of paid parental leave.
2. Outrage is meant to be a strong emotion. Outrage over this is impossible for normies.
Yeh I think the higher birth rates probably had something to do with the lack of birth control.
are you really saying higher birth rates In Saudi Arabia or Africa are because of paid leave? Because very few rich economies have substantially higher birth rates than the USA. I don’t know if any large rich country with a TFR above 2.2. Replacement level.
Ug apologies for typos “i don’t know (of) any.
Probably. Did it have anything to do with paid leave?
"Higher birth rates in the past were a function of child and marternal mortality and agrarianism."
I think birth rates were affected by those things, it sounds as though you believe they were effected by those things.
"We don't need 80% of the population to be involved in farming anymore."
Or in energy production, for that matter. (I haven't bought a new jar of whale oil in, I dunno, ever?) But what about other economic sectors? Child care, for instance? How do you identify the need?
"With all that surplus labor, we raised education standards to devote more resources to innovation, as well as create a large labor pool for an industrial base to service the innovation sector, and a vast service sector to augment the high living standards all of that innovation and industry enabled."
Again, your argument has the sound of a belief that "we" effected those changes. If that's true, then "we" effected plague of cost disease. But of course we did not.
A low birth rate kinda sort of solves global warming. So to
Some it isn’t a problem till you get to like .7 children born per woman and you just accept immigration for the economy issues.
How does the birth rate for families working at business firms with paid leave differ from the rate for the country as a whole?
From 2001:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1061601
==QUOTE==
One specific concern is that the availability of maternity leave will actually increase births among eligible working women. In this paper we use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to examine the impact of maternity leave on fertility. We explore two possible routes through which maternity leave may influence fertility. We first estimate the impact of desired fertility on the probability of being in a job offering maternity leave. We then estimate the impact of maternity leave and desired fertility on the probability of a birth. We find no evidence that women sort by fertility desires into firms on the basis of their maternity leave policy. We do find that the probability of a birth increases as a result of maternity leave, and that the fertility effect of maternity leave increases with birth parity.
===========
This does not explicitly answer your question Ken, in that it looks (from the abstract) like "two otherwise equal firms, the one with maternity leave will increase probability of birth" BUT.... it could be that that's true, but only firms for white collar professionals offer these, and their birth rates are already lower than the country as a whole, so this fails to make up the gap.
That said, if that's the reason the rate isn't higher, then I question whether your comparison is correct. If only law firms had maternity leave, and law firms had lower birth rates than the country as a whole, but law firms _with maternity leave_ generated higher-than-other-law-firm rates, then from the standpoint question of "does maternity leave tend to increase birth rates" the answer is yes, and if that's the policy goal, then this policy does it.
"If only law firms had maternity leave, and law firms had lower birth rates than the country as a whole, but law firms _with maternity leave_ generated higher-than-other-law-firm rates, then from the standpoint question of "does maternity leave tend to increase birth rates" the answer is yes..."
Not necessarily. Women who desired relatively large families would naturally be attracted to the firms that offered the best maternity leave benefits. I see that as a massive confounding factor. It could be not that "maternity leave tend[s] to increase birth rates," but that maternity leave tends to attract the fecund.
The part I quoted specifically addresses that:
"We find no evidence that women sort by fertility desires into firms on the basis of their maternity leave policy."
I can’t read the paper.
You tell me.
I bet you a dollar it’s lower.
You didn’t really address my question. But that’s fine.
"...even if it is not SO generous as to raise their birthrate above that of low earners."
In other words, you assume your preferred policy would engender your preferred result?
Focus on the Child Tax Credit. Paid leave is something that firms could be subsidized for providing like the government pick up a portion of the cost of the benefit or for insuring the cost of the benefit. The main reason we want paid leave is so workers don't come to work sick.
Thanks for this piece. Very helpful.
It’s entirely possible that I lost the plot long ago, but I don’t understand where the screams of horror came from when paid leave failed to make the BBB cut. Who’s pushing for this?