In fact, Mexico has 12 weeks. And Greece has 40. I'd rather be a parent in the US than Greece or Mexico. Policies don't exist in a vacuum.

And Sweden has 480 days. Poland 1 year. Switzerland 20 weeks. Ireland 26 weeks. UK 52 weeks. Canada 50 weeks. Norway 12 months. Denmark 52 weeks. France 16 weeks for mothers and 4 weeks for fathers. I can go on. There's 120 such countries in the world.

BTW that leave is on top of 20-30 days of paid vacations each year and unlimited paid health leave in most of these countries.

Notice that most of these also have free healthcare and free or cheap university education. Which is also "impossible" apparently :)

Also notice that some of these countries have higher or similar GDP per capita to USA. Also ALL of the countries I mentioned have lower gender salary gap than USA. And most of them have higher women workforce participation.

Somehow the argument used against paid parental leave turns out to work in favor of it :)

If you choose to ignore almost all developed countries other than USA (that have 20 weeks or more of paid paternity leave ) and cherry-pick Mexico as your counterexample - you should at least be aware what you're doing. You are searching for excuses to keep your ideological delusions going.

This isn't complicated, it works everywhere it's been tried, it's a simple change, the costs are marginal compared to benefits, even countries with GDP per capita one tenth of USA can afford it.

You sound exactly like this: "8-hour work week can't be done, the argument that other countries do it means nothing - in USA it won't work. I prefer to work 12 hours a day 6 days a week in USA than to work 8 hours in Wenezuela after all".

In the US, households have 10% more money than the second closest competitor (Luxembourg), and 20% more money than next closest (Germany & Switzerland).

I think that's a much better comparison than GDP (which isn't necessarily connected with employment), and shows how these tradeoffs work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...

Realized capital gains, dividend income, income on rents. I'm not sure how the calculate disposable income. If I have 200M in stock that I could sell, is that considered disposable income? If I earn 2M in dividends that I reinvest, is that considered disposable?

Unemployment in Greece is nearly triple what it is in the US (14%).

Policies don't exist in a vacuum. Everything has trade offs. Until you accept that you'll never have a productive honest conversation.

[0] https://ideas.repec.org/p/wiw/wiwrsa/ersa06p257.html

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_unemploym...

All else being equal, providing a large benefit that's most likely to be exercised by one type of worker will discourage employers from hiring that type of worker.

This shouldn't be complicated or controversial. It's basic incentives.

Resources do not come out of thin air. Something has to happen for it to change:

1) Govt provide income to family engaged in child raising activity. -Need high level of tax base and political support to actually fund it.

2) Govt open free and quality child daycare. - Again need political support and competent administration to do it.

3) Force private employers to pay. - Only business survive are with high income and revenues. Not gonna work with conservative politics.

4) Go back to old joint family structures where grandparents stay in same home with couples and provide "free" child care. - Needless to say absolutely not gonna work. Its antithesis of progressive vision of society.

5) Keep giving examples of other countries. Useless until one look at whole societal structure and find why many other things work in USA but not in those countries.

Could you expand a bit on this? My impression was that it just became a cultural norm in places that could afford this, driven by the basic need to cultivate own "spaces".

This implies that Greece's unemployment is a result of their parental leave policies, which is, of course, not true at all.

Greece is used as an example particularly because of its bad economy; If a country that's doing as badly as Greece can do it, why can't the US?

If you want examples of "successful" economies doing it, there are plenty of those too.

It very much is part of the answer as it gives successful examples and as such proof how it's very much realistic to achieve, if effort was actually put into it.

Which is a much more constructive PoV than acting like even American problems are so exceptional that all of them need equally exceptional and unique solutions that no other country before could have figured out.

> Policies don't exist in a vacuum.

Indeed, that's why between Greece, Mexico and the US I would easily chose Greece, which has nearly half of the infant mortality rate of the US [0].

[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.DYN.MORT

Any tax financed benefits for everyone like this, pensions, maternal leave, unemployment, health care etc are really just an institution forcibly saving money for you, on your behalf. So that you don't have to be responsible for saving money yourself, and don't have to take the risk of over spending or mismanaging. And for that service you will pay the price of salaries for all the people working in these institutions.

What's even the upside if you're just trading universal tax to paying a for-profit corp monthly instead? Skipping the queue through wealth instead of need?

The upside like I said, is that you save all that unnecessary work in the bureaucracy around the parental leave systems. Just look at sweden for example, it's a huge mess around the parental leave, they have a centralized agency now to micro manage every single household in the country with exactly how many days here and there, they will stay home with their child. It's basically central planning for child care.

And there are tons of edge cases and contradictions and bugs in this, of course. It's even become somewhat of a virtual currency now these "days" that parents are given as a gift from the state. Every single family in the whole country is now basically a welfare case that has to be processed through this machinery, with all the applications, paperwork etc, regardless of how well they actually manage on their own. It's incredibly costly, inflexible and inefficient, compared to just giving people higher salaries and letting them manage their family time themselves.

Edit: and, surprise surprise, it's also abused and people game the system. Many parents for example use their parental leave at the same time, to make extended vacations abroad of several months.

Lucky for me I happen to be Swedish and can call you out on that absolute garbage FUD post that doesn't in the slightest reflect the general Swedish opinion of the parental leave system.

Du borde skämmas, dagisnivå.

some people don't have the liberty of that privilege. being poor is very expensive.

https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-lif...

> Just do what the US does.

thanks, but no thanks.

It's a tradeoff. It might be a better tradeoff for society as a whole but this idea that there aren't some cons to doing it that way is just false.

Personally, I think if your company was able to do without you for 7 months then they don't need you as an employee. My guess is that your salaries are much lower than someone would receive in the US.

They should be able to do without an employee for a few weeks not over half a year and be forced to continue paying this individual.

What this does is affect small businesses very badly while giving the upper hand to large corporations that can afford it.