This 'progress' is behind the rest of the world, sure its a good innovation or whatever, but why is the USA miles behind the rest of the world in this regard?
Parents being around for their kids is important.
Because if something has even the hint of socialism, the discussion is considered over. It's why the U. S. doesn't have universal health care.
It is a complex issue and the socialism-word boogeyman isn't all there is to it--there is more than just the vocab.
From my anecdotal experience, I can say it isn't so much the socialism that tends to bother people, but the part where socialism is given to what are considered undeserving people. Those people might be immigrants that are perceived (incorrectly or correctly) of getting an unfair share of schooling and medical services. Those people might play off the older concept of the Welfare Queen. It varies from person to person that I speak to, but very few (zero?) people have told me they're against things like health care for all without also bringing up those parts as a con to why it either can't work, or shouldn't be implemented.
(then after all that, you still have regular politics to hurdle)
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 bet American Express has a program that looks an awful lot like universal coverage for their employees.
That means either, your value is low enough that you can be gone for that long without your company missing you OR that they have to pay somebody else to fill in for you with the knowledge that they'll be let go once you get back. Depending on what kind of work you do, this is no small task.
The types of companies who can afford to do this type of thing essentially boil down to subscription style, giant companies where the absence of any employee won't really effect anything from a business or customer standpoint...who also happen to be rolling in money.
If they're willing and able to provide that benefit...GREAT!
But different businesses provide significantly different cash flow models. Different businesses can't have their valuable employees AWOL for 52 weeks while paying them and somebody else to fill in for them at a higher rate.
You have to be in a money printing market position to even think about something like that.
I don't believe they do, so that makes it fairly irrelevant to the conversation about universal health care.
If someone's getting 55% pay for almost a year while they're not creating value for the company, that has to come out of someone else's paycheck, directly or indirectly.
> Parents being around for their kids is important.
I absolutely agree, but that doesn't imply in any way that it's right to foist the cost of choosing to have children on other people.
If one cares to argue whether something that arguably betters the collective (Amex's new policy would fit from my POV) should be subsidized collectively or individually, I'm open. If one would rather discuss the merits of attracting workers with benefits that some might not use, let's open that conversation. But if it's just going to amount to a simplistic, Ayn Randian "it's not fair!", then it's not really worth the time.
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.
So is ensuring that parents get to, you know, be parents.
>If you don't benefit from them somehow, you would have a valid complaint against subsidizing them
They did say they don't. They ride a motorcycle, and as such, don't need the full lane size.
>On the other hand, I distinctly don't benefit from random people diverting what could be my income to keep overpopulation going strong.
You would be wrong on all counts there, buddy.
>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.
And yet, the simple argument completely falls apart once you think about it. For example, you said they shouldn't be able to not subsidize wide roads. So why roads, and not childcare? Why roads and not police protection? Why roads and not healthcare?
Why not?
If you pay tax, some of that will go to paying school teachers, regardless of whether or not you have children of your own. Is that also wrong? Like it or not, all western societies include some form of wealth redistribution.
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.
(And immigration doesn't really change the result. Then you're just externalizing the cost of raising kids to another country; you're not getting rid of it, and you're still benefiting from that investment.)
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'm painfully aware, given that this number is broken out on my W2 stubs.
What I'm obviously doing here is arguing that "society"'s (meaning those in charge of tax code, who nominally take some amount of inspiration from the rest of society) policies are wrong.
Your argument is just "This is how we do things right now, so that's how it should be." At the risk of pulling a Molyneux, that is, in fact, not an argument.
Some people would be happy to forgo benefits like life insurance. Some will want the maximum 401-K matching while others don't contribute enough to take full advantage. People trade off vacation time and salary differently.
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.
No matter which way you turn it the sustainability of a retiree lifestyle hinges on a large part of society showing up at work on 9am. In 40 years, that's not going to be your peers, it's whatever children your generation produced. If you don't want to pay for benefits that ensure enough workers will be around then you are betting that we got rid of human workers in 40 years of time or investing your money into a hut in Alaska and some shotgun ammunition.
The real danger that most have yet to come to grips with is population stagnation/decline and the multitude of economic problems that come along with it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow...
(Edited for incorrect figures in first paragraph.)
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.
It's pretty shocking to see how quickly and how far total population would fall if global birth rates eventually decline to the level Europe is at today.
It seems like this is a problem being tackled in the most inefficient and damaging way possible. The focus needs to be more on helping people fund themselves and create their own financial security rather than forcing an unrelated third-party to foot the bill.
Here's my all American take on this: you made the choice to have kids. Don't expect companies to subsidize your child-rearing efforts, we owe you nothing.
It's really easy to say "hey you decided to have a kid, so that's on you". But you do need children to sustain society in the future. It does them a lot of good if their parents can spend more time with them during their infant stage.
Also that attitude is really detrimental to women. Are future mothers supposed to choose over one day raising a kid or their careers? Doesn't society lose out on a lot of potential if we just say "sorry, if you want a kid then you're going to find a new job" ?
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.
Corporations are free to offer top up benefit, and many do as a competitive incentive.
> 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?
"You're not wrong Walter. You're just an asshole."
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.
This is the whole idea behind lower tax brackets for married couples and similar things. Making sure our population is at least being maintained and preferably growing.
In addition, if you dislike the large amount of kids that grow up in orphanages/bad homes things like this should allow people to have more time to take care of their kids during their first several weeks of life as well as potentially encourage more people to keep their kids instead of putting them up for adoption.
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?
Interestingly, the current tax structure somewhat encourages single income families.
But taxes for married filing jointly are often higher than for two single filers. This is especially true for higher incomes.
As a really simple example, consider two people both with $100k in taxable income, after taking their standard deductions and personal exemptions, in 2016. As single filers they would pay $21036.75 each in taxes, for a total of $42073.50. If they were married filing jointly, they would pay $42985.50, which is more. That happens because while the first two bracket boundaries (10% to 15% and 15% to 25%) are twice as big for joint married filers as they are for single filers, after that the boundaries start to converge. At the very top, the 39.6% boundary starts at $415k for single filers and at ~$467k for married filers....
There are also nasty perverse incentives where if one member of a married couple has a high income the other one can't contribute to IRAs in ways they could if they were just filing as an individual filer.
Filing as married benefits couples where only one person is pulling down an income, thus providing a subsidy for one parent to be a full-time parent but not for marriages in general.
It seems pretty indisputable that children who are raised with more parental involvement are more successful in life. Those that are less successful don't just disappear, they become a financial drain on society, be it through social security, imprisonment, etc. etc.
So no matter how little you care for other people having kids, two things are true:
1) they're going to have them whether you like it or not (and really, society depends on this)
2) if they don't have support, they're going to cost you more than if they do.
There's really no way in which increased parental involvement doesn't make sense for society.
"You should have thought about that before you became poor!"
Civilization literally depends on having children. It's not optional.
It's amazing how bad the me-first, consumerist, anti-heritage, anti-community sentiments have gotten.
It doesn't depend on high-consuming Westerners having children tho'. The human race will survive regardless of whether Western civilization does.
Yes it does. Idiocracy is a far-future documentary, not a comedy. We absolutely need to encourage the highly intelligent to breed.
Right, because everyone else wasn't going to burn oil and coal? It takes an advanced society to produce energy responsibly.
Also if we never leave earth we will die, so yes you do need humans to continue getting more intelligent. People with below-average IQ's breeding are just contributing to the problem.
I do agree the OP could have said "different" rather than "behind"
After all, with something like this they often stem from a least theoretically similar policy goals, so it seems crazy not to evaluate implementation cost & benefits against peer systems.
Companies don't subsidize these types of plans (well, other than being forced to allow the leave). The government does via something (in Canada) called "Employment Insurance". It's a basic payroll tax. We pay taxes into a program specifically designed to provide benefits if you lose your job. That's been extended to pay for things like leaves for having children or caring for your dying parents, kid with cancer, etc, etc.
Considering that it's in all our best interests to have healthy, well adjusted children in our society, it's a trade-off well worth the "owing". I'd take a look at your crime rates compared to ours and think about your ideology a little. I'm no socialist, but it's silly to not take the very real advantages of living in a society. You wouldn't tell someone to pay for their own roads, or fire service, would you? And if you would, what happens to our society overall when everyone thinks like this? How does that move us forward? How does that move YOU forward?
And why do you say "we owe you nothing". You aren't a company, you're an individual.
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".
I disagree entirely that this "disadvantage" is enough for them to worry or care. If the disadvantage was real, you'd see more companies sacrificing profits to do it.
"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"."
That statement ignores an awful lot about reality.
Most professional workplaces offer some form of parental leave. My workplace offers 1 week for men (I don't know what they offer women, I assume it's much longer). It's not the 20 weeks that Amex just announced, but it's not nothing.
The disadvantage is real. I've tried to hire professionals in a place that didn't offer benefits before. They wouldn't come aboard -- not a single one (and yes, IMO, parental leave is a standard benefit). I had to draw from a pool of college kids who needed a break into the industry.
>That statement ignores an awful lot about reality.
I disagree. I think that's always been the American way. Government should be small and only interfere with specific legislation when very significant macro-level damage is likely. Other than that, the government's role is to preserve order (including both a criminal and a civil justice system) and promote freedom of conscience within the law, and free people will be free to act in their own best interests without burdensome constraints or regulation. That's how I define "freedom".
Whether you think every company should offer 20 weeks of parental leave (itself debatable from a business perspective, though obviously not a perk many employees would willfully decline) is different from whether you think they should be forced to do so.
So, to the higher ups, they were still able to hire. Did they eventually decide this was a disadvantage, and try to rectify it? Or did they not change?
>and free people will be free to act in their own best interests without burdensome constraints or regulation. That's how I define "freedom".
Having to pay rent and buy food are definitely huge burdensome constraints. Hence, most of this "If you don't like it, you don't have to work there!" is ignoring much of that, and reality. You said you had to hire college kids who didn't have any bargaining clout. But people out of college have kids too. Do you honestly think that this kind of benefit is something that should only be reserved for someone who is lucky enough to be in a good bargaining position?
>Whether you think every company should offer 20 weeks of parental leave (itself debatable from a business perspective, though obviously not a perk many employees would willfully decline) is different from whether you think they should be forced to do so.
Not to me. But then there are many things I don't believe should be dependent on where one works, or how good they are at bargaining.
I was the higher-up. I couldn't afford a full benefit package and decided to try the market and see who would work without them. The answer was "only people who didn't have the option". I hired two of those people instead.
I would've liked to hire someone with 20 weeks of parental leave and a full benefits package, but it was the second hire in a bootstrapped consulting company. I had to lay them off after about 14 months when two of our major clients ran out of money at about the same time (we mainly consulted with startups, obviously a bad market). I got hired by a client full-time about 2 months after that.
So yes, it was a real disadvantage, and yes, it would've been nice to rectify it. I just didn't have the cashflow for that.
>Having to pay rent and buy food are definitely huge burdensome constraints. Hence, most of this "If you don't like it, you don't have to work there!" is ignoring much of that, and reality.
Those are real-world survival constraints, not artificial government-imposed constraints. The government can't just wave a magic wand and make everything in the world free and automatic. That's been tried before and that blatant denialism results in stunning evil and poverty. The organic market that allows real-world risk and reward to be passed through with minimal artificial influence is the only system that functions reasonably well.
The people of the country do not owe you a ticket to free rent. The government's role is to not make sure that everyone is rewarded or even that everyone survives. Your prosperity is now and always will be your responsibility. The difference is that in a socialist system, that prosperity is almost impossible to attain. In our system, opportunity is everywhere for the people who want to stop whining and go out and take advantage of it.
>Do you honestly think that this kind of benefit is something that should only be reserved for someone who is lucky enough to be in a good bargaining position?
I honestly think that this kind of benefit is not something that should be forced, and it's not something that's owed, just as a job isn't owed. You have to earn these things. You have to convince someone that they need to give them to you in exchange for something else you're going to give them. I really don't understand the rules of the world you're envisioning here. Everyone should just get whatever they want because they want it? That's simply not how reality works, and it's not how it's ever going to work, even in the most ideal conditions. There must be a functioning risk-reward system or the whole thing falls apart with stunning rapidity.
>Not to me. But then there are many things I don't believe should be dependent on where one works, or how good they are at bargaining.
Personally, I think it's quite frightening that you believe that you should have the authority to force everyone in the country to do what you think should be done. That's not freedom, it's dictatorship. We only use force and compulsory means when an action threatens our social structure's fundamental operations. Everything else must be allowed to prosper or decline on its own merit, and we must allow people to do things we don't personally agree with, or the system doesn't work.
The scary part is that when most people have the perspective you're sharing, when the respect for competition and the ability of each individual as a sovereign and independent actor to make his own choices and prosper or fail by them is gone, that's when freedom is crushed. It takes a society that truly respects these principles to secure the kind of government we've enjoyed in the US for the last 200+ years, and I fear more and more that as a society, we're losing that. And once we lose it culturally, it's just a few short years until the politics follows.
That's true, but if the issue is important enough to lots of people, those people will elect representatives to enact the policy they want made.
> As we can see by many companies in the United States willfully offering such perks without legal mandate
If it were many companies, then this wouldn't be news.
Yes, but it's more complicated than that. The federal government isn't legally allowed to mandate these types of things under the Constitution, except insofar as they can claim it relates to "regulating interstate commerce" (which they do for almost everything these days). Most employment law is state-level, where there is not necessarily a constitutional prohibition on this type of action (each state has its own constitution, YMMV) and where there's a reasonable possibility of jurisdictional competition to keep things healthy.
For example, there is no federal minimum wage (the term "Federal Minimum Wage" refers to the lowest amount of money that the government pays its employees, not a legally-required minimum wage nationwide). Each state has its own minimum wage.
>If it were many companies, then this wouldn't be news.
It's news mostly because AMEX paid its PR people to put this out. It's good press and may cause talented job seekers to look at their openings. There are a lot of news reports about routine things every day, because much of the news is bought by PR firms.
Secondarily, it's news because it comports with the political agenda of the news editors and gives them an opportunity to say things like "America is behind other developed nations in this area", when that's anything but an objective conclusion (because whether this policy is "ahead" or "behind" is a subjective evaluation).
That's true, but if a state has a minimum wage it can only effectively be higher than the federal minimum wage.
From https://www.dol.gov/whd/minwage/q-a.htm:
> Where an employee is subject to both the state and federal minimum wage laws, the employee is entitled to the higher minimum wage rate.
The rule is from the Fair Labor Standards Act.
That makes it a bad example of what I was talking about, but it's now a good example of how the foundational principles of the Union have been selectively permeated for political convenience. That's sad, IMO, and not something we should seek to replicate in further employment legislation.
What barrier? It's a selectively permeable membrane at best: wealth can flow from public to private, but never the other way.
"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else." - Winston Churchill
I say: you made the choice to have a company. Don't expect child-rearers to subsidize your corporate veil, we owe you nothing.
That may be true, but not everybody is special and selected enough to keep the species going. All of humanity supports those that have children.
Amex should be proud to help species continuers.