American Express will give all parents 20 weeks of paid leave

A government mandate requiring companies to provide paid leave forces (i.e. opposite of choice) everyone else to pay for it.

It's not hidden at all. I am quite privileged as are all of the people in first world economies of which we speak. You (yes, you) are among the top 1% wealthiest of the worlds population.

I have no idea why the children of my comment assume a very, very false dichotomy of working through your child's childhood or becoming destitute. Now, more than ever, there is a huge swath of available and acceptable behavior between those two extremes.

For the sake of argument, consider a person who is extremely short-sighted by nature, who sees an opportunity to apply for a shitty low-paying job right after getting pregnant in order to get paid maternity leave? Where do we draw the line for what businesses need to support this and what businesses can't feasibly do it?

It seems this kind of mandatory paid maternity is incompatible with our current capitalist / socialist infrastructure.

My coworkers and managers would probably start wondering wth my values are if I didn't take at least 4 months with each kid. I'd look like some kind of stone age man to then I hope).

I guess once such prolonged leave gains just a little bit of traction, management are likely to be concerned that they'll be seen as being behind the times if they oppose it? Just conjecture and idle musings with nothing to back it up whatsoever.

a) I've found that I need to quit work cold turkey-style, just be OUT. Working part-time while caring for the toddler just means everyone at work assume I am at work, leading to 100% work load and only X% time to do it in. (Where X is significantly less than 100!)

Previous time around, we tried to both work part-time for a few weeks during transitioning from my wife being at home to me caring for the little one - worst mistake we ever made; totally ran both of us into the ground as we in practice wound up trying to catch up on work after the little critter had fallen asleep, trying to meet deadlines. Not good.

b) As for being at home full-time, I've found that it works very well, provided (drumroll, important part) I get enough time to interact with adults during the day. True, the little princess is as cute as they get, all smiles (and, if she's not - time for some food and sleep!) and mostly a joy to be around - but what soon gets to me is not talking to someone with a vocabulary larger than 'Da-da!' and 'Tee-hee!'.

So - every day, we go out, visit the library, shop for groceries, just chatting up random people we meet - to keep me sane. I've found that works a charm for me.

Also, we try to keep to somewhat of a schedule, though obviously allowance needs to be made for her sleep schedule - which is still somewhat of a work in progress.

We get up at about the same time every morning, eat at regular-ish intervals, I try to do some chores like cleaning, laundry &c while she's asleep, so that most of the day-to-day chores are done with by the time the older kids + missus come home in the afternoon.

That basically means we can spend a couple of hours going over the 7-year-old's homework, play a little, read, whatever until kids' bedtime - rather than having to cram in all chores inbetween or -shudder- wait until after the kids have gone to sleep, giving us a couple of hours before adult bedtime to do adult stuff for relaxing, rather than playing catch-up on keeping the house tidy-ish and clean-ish.

Tl;dr: I definitely cannot claim that my recipe will work for anyone, but for me, working in the industry I do, being at home full-time works a charm as long as I get some interaction with grownups during the day, have a schedule of sorts - and the wits to depart from it when need be.

The people who disagreed did so not because they necessarily disagree with universal health care, but because they thought it was unfair that they had to spend their hard earned money to subsidise people who they view as freeloaders.

I don't have the details on hand, but Robert Putnam (Political science, Harvard) did a study about Americas breakdown in civil engagement that speaks to this point quite a bit.

Here's an article that talks about it: http://archive.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/...

But, yeah, I'll cop to vastly over-simplifying.

I don't believe they do, so that makes it fairly irrelevant to the conversation about universal health care.

Yes. What part of this is unreasonable?

> Why should I subsidize roads with 16 foot lanes

16 foot lanes aren't a voluntary activity, they're infrastructure that everyone benefits from. If you don't benefit from them somehow, you would have a valid complaint against subsidizing them. For example, farmers don't have to pay the gas tax on farm-use-only gas because they don't put wear on the roads.

On the other hand, I distinctly don't benefit from random people diverting what could be my income to keep overpopulation going strong.

> simplistic

Simple arguments are better than complex ones. You're right, my argument is simple; it's morally wrong to force people to pay for things they don't want, and it's especially wrong to force people to pay for things where the benefit is obviously less than the cost.

Possibly, but in a less odious way. Public school has at least two benefits over paying people to have children; 1) it probably doesn't incentivize people to have kids, but it does (probably) benefit the kids that already exist and 2) it might actually have a positive net value to the people being forced to pay for public school but aren't using it. In particular, public schools serve as a form of division of labor, where the adult/child ratio is much lower, freeing up a huge number of parents to remain in the workforce instead of staying home and watching the kids all day. This, I would argue, is most low-quality lower-division public schools' primary function; it's not about the kids learning, it's about freeing the parents' schedules for 8-9 hours a day.

You can be for the government paying people on maternity/paternity leave while also being against mandating the business should be the ones to pay for it.

That's a silly argument. Just because an action (possibly) has a positive externality, like having children, doesn't mean we need to subsidize it. You also get quickly diminishing returns; dumping $10M into a kid won't get you a 100x better result than dumping $100K into a kid.

Every single form of industry that isn't already subsidized by the government, by virtue of its continued existence, has a higher value to society than what they earn in income. Should we subsidize all those CEOs to make up the difference?

> each person contributes a lot more to the economy over their lifetime than the cost of raising them.

This is true and irrelevant. Again, spending more money on children doesn't mean their economic output will be correspondingly higher. At some point (which I imagine we've already passed) you're just burning money. That is, of course, if your goal is economic optimization (which your post seems to suggest). If your goal is e.g. more effective socialization/indoctrination or accelerated education, then you could reasonably argue for increased spending to push us farther down the diminishing economic returns curve.

Ah, of course. Instead it should come at the expense of people who chose not to (or were unable to) spend time with a child at all.

"<Positively connoted activity> should not be a privilege of people who have money" is a very nice-sounding statement, but it ignores the fact that there's a reason only people who have money do certain things; because it's very expensive.

> Overall resources in our society aren't that scarce

Evidently resources in our society are scarce enough that parents can't stay home with their child 24/7 without someone else paying for it. (Either that or the parents in question are able but unwilling to decrease their expenses in exchange for time with their children.)

I don't think that this is correct with the usual pensions in the USA and the UK.

There are other countries with different pension funding where this applies though.

I'd be curious to know if there are any good books on the subject. It seems like this is something that we're going to have to figure out in our lifetimes.

But it seems fundamentally unfair to impose on the business's ability to function (or other people's ability to get hired/promoted) because you want to have a kid.

So if you want to incentivize parents, do it through social benefits, rather than unreasonable demands and distortions of the labor market.

> you do need children to sustain society in the future.

Do we really? A lot of the worries, especially among progressive circles, is how automation is reducing the need of manual labor and how the people in this world already are replaceable by machines.

Also, the ones that are more focus on protecting the environment always get to pull some kind of neo-malthusian argument. So, one could argue that we should not be establishing policies that encourage people to have more kids.

> Are future mothers supposed to choose over one day raising a kid or their careers?

Why do you assume that the mother is the one that will stop working? Why not the father? Or, to make it more "equal", why can't both parents switch to part-time jobs and participate in the child rearing part, equally?

Think about all the time you spend thinking about work in off work hours. You no longer really have the time. All those hobby projects that make you a better worker? What time do you have for that?

He might only appear right if you take a look at the world in a very narrow and short-term way. Ie, he can only think of children as children, rather than the adults who will sustain society once he is old and (even more) feeble-minded.

I'm confused by that statement. From my experience, married couples pay more in taxes (in the US) than they would if each were single (and making the same amount).

Or am I misunderstanding, and you meant that there _should_ be lower taxes for married couples?

It doesn't depend on high-consuming Westerners having children tho'. The human race will survive regardless of whether Western civilization does.

The thing is that in America, there is still a barrier between the private and public sectors. While we obviously like perks like this, we don't believe that it's the government's place to mandate it. As we can see by many companies in the United States willfully offering such perks without legal mandate, companies are willing to make these accommodations on their own if they feel it will benefit their position in the market by allowing them to attract better talent.

Companies that can't afford this will be at a market disadvantage, but they won't have to be afraid to hire the workers they need when they're growing because the law would force them to pay out half of the employee's salary for up to a year without being able to derive any productive benefit from that outlay.

The most American thing about America is "it's a free country". That means that unless there is a vast social cost with allowing a certain behavior, it should be legal and people should be allowed to prosper or fail on the basis of their own choices rather than governmental policy that states "we know what's best for you".