Romania, bang average country (GDP per capita almost equal to world average), not even classified as a high income economy and with a GDP per capita 1/6th of the US one is currently offering up to 18 months of maternity leave at 80% pay. There is a paternity leave, I forgot how long, I think it's at least a few weeks if not months.

If there's a will, there's a way.

Oh, our external debt is about 40% and our tax rates are largely comparable to Western ones. So far the only signs of collapse seem to be coming from Communist era buildings :-p

And our collapsing public healthcare system. :P

As my dad who still lives there told me, unless you know someone in the system or pay the doctors bribes or go to their private offices(because of course) they won't lift a finger to help you and just leave you sink in the healthcare bottomless pit of endless misery, bureaucracy and waiting lists where you keep being bounced around like a hot potato that nobody gives a damn about. If you actually want to be taken care of the right way, you have to pay up or know someone in the system.

And once you end up in the underfunded public hospitals, you then have to pay the nurses to take care of you and not leave you in your own sh!t, buy medicine, toilet paper and food out of pocket as what you get there is lacking or sub-standard. Basically, if you're poor, you're f*cked.

But yeah, at least on paper, some Romanian laws still got some things right, even compared to richer countries. Too bad that major corruption is eating all that away.

That's on corruption, as you said. I doubt we don't have money for at least decent healthcare. I'm not talking Western standards, just:

- clean hospitals

- punctual appointments

- basic services covered

Well we would have money for proper healthcare but due to corruption we don't have money as a lot of it goes into the pockets of politically influencial despots.

Everything being bought with public funds ends up being bought through middle men at 10x the price.

You only get born once. I think its right of the child, moreso than that of parents, to be looked after at birth. It does not happen that often that we should be talking about affordability.

On the other hand, can we afford mutinationals paying no taxes?

Neighboring Sweden has an even better system without oil money

Yes. It's more of a matter of culture and priorities than excessive expenses.

It's a matter of money more than it's a matter of "culture".

No, it's more a matter of culture. Any wealthy industrialised country can easily afford this. The difference is in how much value they attach to family, child care and parenthood.

For all its talk about "family values", the US doesn't seem to care much about families; it's one of the few countries in the world without paid maternity leave (the others are Papua New Guinea, Lesotho and Swaziland), and it has the highest maternity death rate in the developed world.

And the US is not a poor country by any means; this is really a matter of culture and values.

>It's not a matter of money, it's a matter of culture. Any wealthy country can afford this.

???

The hidden subtext in this discussion is that the US does not do these kind of things because of their culture. The US is not a poor country. It is in fact one of the richest countries in the world. It's a political decision not to take care of their people. There are countries that really are poor that do a better job at this than the US.

But I'm not talking about the US.

I suspect many others here are. And I very clearly was. Exactly because the US is the most notorious country not providing these kind of things, despite being one of the richest countries in the world: that's a cultural issue.

Meanwhile, many countries much poorer than the US do a lot more. Maybe not quite as much as Scandinavian countries, but they do something.

Counterexample: Sweden is arguably less "rich" than both Norway and the US and has a more generous system than both.

Yes, in the sense that rich Western countries can afford things like that. And many do, whether they’re ”petrostates” or not. But what about the richest country of them all? Tell me that the US couldn’t afford it if they really wanted!

Nowhere did I talk about the US. I'm Southern European.

Any nation with a mandatory retirement age/state pension that normal people live long enough to revive for at least one year, necessarily has enough money to let typical parents look after their kids for at least six months per parent per child.

Necessarily has enough money to pay the social security amounts for that time (in exchange for pushing everyone’s full retirement age back by two years, not one [0])

The bigger problem is I think the average US SS beneficiary takes home around $1400/mo (and they would be Medicare-eligible, unlike most new parents). My mortgage alone is a substantial multiple of $1400/mo.

[0] The one year for one year trade ignores the growth at Treasury rates between the age-at-use and current retirement age. That could easily be 35 years which is a doubling at 2% interest rates, so we’d have to push back everyone’s social security retirement age back by 2 years to fund a max of $1400/mo for 1 year for each child. If we ever return to 4% Treasury rates, that would be 4 years delay for everyone to fund it. 8% is over 15 years’ delay (mathematically is slightly under 15, but so few people draw 15 years that the actual delay would likely be 16 or more years) and we’ve had 8% Treasuries during my adult lifetime.

I don’t see why you are counting future earnings rather than present earnings.

Thought experiment: imagine next year from Jan 1st to Dec 31st, literally every 25-year old stops working and simultaneously everyone who was due to retire in that year has their retirement delayed by one year.

The total size of the workforce remains constant.

If this became a permanent feature of society [0], GDP, average corporate income, and tax revenue, would all be constant.

Private pensions as well as states pensions would also pay out less in total, as there would be less years between retirement and death. How much would your pension pay, relative to parental leave, if someone equivalent to you were to reach pension age today? Because that’s the amount available for paternity in this thought experiment, not the number that your actual pension will be worth when you reach pension age.

[0] For a one-off year it would appear higher, but that’s an illusion caused by old people having more experience and therefore higher productivity and income; it obviously wouldn’t remain true once those 25-year-olds with one fewer years of experience each became 65.

I take your point on not accounting for interest growth. Well explained. Thank you.

My actual retirement is my defined contribution 401(k) account. The amount I put in now grows until I draw it down in retirement. There’s no one who will give me a year of their 401(k) drawdown, of course. What 401(k) money I and my wife don’t spend is part of our estate and inherited just like any other type of private savings.

Defined benefit plans (“private pensions”) are rare (and becoming more rare) for the current workforce.

Social Security is more than a rounding error in the retirement picture, but it’s by far the minority of income for most professional jobs. That’s literally the only “pension style money” that’s available to me and it’s about $1400/mo as far as I can tell. That's not going to take the typical 25-year old new parent very far I don't think. (It's slightly over the federal minimum wage for one full-time worker.)

Edit to add some stats/refs:

[0] - 4% of private sectors workers have only defined-benefit plan (down from 60% in the 1980s) 14% of private sector employees have access to both - https://money.cnn.com/retirement/guide/pensions_basics.money...

[1] - https://www.bls.gov/ncs/ebs/factsheet/defined-benefit-frozen....

$1400 is average. Assuming a decent professional salary and depending on when you retire, it could be closer to $2,000-$3,000.

But of course your basic point stands. Absent a separate defined-benefit pension (which still exist from older jobs in some cases), SS is fairly minimal by itself even if you own a house.

Thanks for the data on the top of range.

You are though, by definition, taking away an average benefit from those who would retire to give to parents, so I think average is the right reference figure when contemplating "what would the parental benefit be if funded from social security delays?"

> I take your point on not accounting for interest growth. Well explained. Thank you.

Thanks for the compliment, I’m glad to see I’m improving :)

It’s only a matter of money if everyone is not forced to allow it. As long as it is equally enforced it is not that big of a damper on things.

Being a petrostate has nothing to do with it. Any healthy economy can afford this, if they care about parenthood.

Apparently yes: https://www.businessinsider.com/countries-with-best-parental...

> How lovely. Is this affordable anywhere other than a petrostate?

Of course. Like so many other things, it's a matter of priorities.

These aren't expensive policies, yes its cost is more than 0, but what country would honestly be bankrupted by this?

Yes. Sweden and Germany do it.

Actually Norwegian parental leave is not that generous by the standards of similar countries. There is one year total of leave shared between mother and father (or other mother).

Germany has a much more restrictive system though. 65% and a cap that pretty much anyone with a college degree will hit. So in reality you look at 30-50% for most people. Still nice, especially given the job guarantee, but very restrictive in who can take it if you have bills to pay.

In my experience the Elterngeld usually replaces one income in a double income family. Of course one will "loose" money if the cap hits, but hey its 1800 EUR per month for up to 14 months just for being a parent. I think it is awesome even if it is just 30% of your regular salary.

The problem just is that it's often infeasible to replace the higher income. And since women in their early 30s are (unfortunately) often paid worse on average than men (due to many factors), women stay out longer and lose out even more.

On the other hand, in Norway you can get 100% up to a quite large maximum. As opposed to 80% capped at 1000SEK per day in Sweden.

Edit: Living in Norway is more expensive though. So a family of low income might not have been able to sustain themselves if the compensation was lower.