The industry standard for severance is 1-2 weeks pay per year at the company, paying out roughly 7 months is a big deal (and yes, an acknowledgment of how rough they know the job hunt will be).
Going forward, I wonder if severance packages should be a point of competitive recruiting advantage
There is also no industry standard for severance, it's not federally mandated and not a guaranteed benefit.
The goal, at least here, is to expect individuals to mostly take care of themselves rather than depending in the state or some other authority to do it for them.
Universal healthcare, guaranteed indefinite severance, universal childcare, etc are completely antithetical to our system. Maybe the majority is ready and willing to throw that old system out, but if so we need to do it by focusing on the fundamentals rather than getting distracted with higher level implementation details.
I don't see how that follows. How is your system that different from e.g. the UK, which manages to have all of those things (severance is not indefinite and is unemployment).
And if that's the case, I'd disagree. But would any of those problems be somehow explained by the differences between the British and American systems? Especially when countries with very different systems (like all of continental Western Europe), and the US, have then too.
Toy original point, the US was based on individual freedoms and rights that simply didn't exist in the monarchical UK system. For much of the US's history the, albeit politically idealized, expectation was that you come here and make your own way. We didn't have a feudal system and didn't depend on a monarch to run many details of our daily life. We have seen more and more of that creep into the American system over the last century or so though, and yes we are coincidentally also running into many of the same issues seen in more socialist European countries today.
Neither were the British by the time the American revolution started.
I don't see much difference in the personal opportunities and rights between post-independence US and industrial Britain. Apart from, you know, the US having slaves with no rights nor opportunities.
The British don't have a right freedom of speech, for example. They gave been arresting and charging people for social media posts.
We're getting way off on a tangent here though. The original point you were commenting on was that welfare programs, including those the US already has, don't fit in the model the US was original founded on and operated under for a majority of the time the country has existed.
What socialist type programs can you point to in the US, say before the New Deal?
Its because, inequality is not the problem.
The problem is the ability to move between income levels. That coefficient used to the highest in the US. Rich people could and did go poor. Poor people could be rich.
That index was always the highest by far in the US, but now its decreasing. That's the real issue.
Requiring companies to do all of these extra things just gives larger companies more and more advantages, since they have an economy of scale to provide go government-type services.
I don't want my company to be in charge of my whole life. Let them pay taxes to a government that can provide those things equally for everyone.
I mean this as a genuine question, in case that isn't clear. To me the latter is just socializing the cost across multiple companies, but I'm happy to be wrong here.