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.
[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.