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Comment by chaostheory | Hacker News Reader

> And I don't want to even get in to how fucked up it is to have to save up years of vacation days to take some time off when you have a baby

This is the trade off we pay for lower taxes. (Yes certain states like NY and CA have higher tax rates, but they make up for it with more state benefits.)

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When you actually count the full tax load on American employees (federal, state, and local income taxes; property taxes; sales taxes; medical insurance; disability insurance; and retirement savings), we really aren't a low-tax country. In fact, we do not actually compare favorably to most of Europe when you consider the all-in price of life.

What we really pay for is $1T+/year on our military for bombing brown people and maintaining oil supplies.

It depends on the state. States with less benefits have a lot less taxes and vice versa.

Maternity and paid sick leave policies have very little to do with tax rates.

See the CA state budget here: http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/2014-15/Enacted/agencies.html

The big-ticket items are the things affecting tax rates, like 11B on corrections, or almost 50B on K-12 education, and another 50B on health care services.

CA's PFL program is part of EDD, which spends $14 Billion: http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/2014-15/Enacted/StateAgencyBudgets...

Not all of it comes from California.

As Domenic pointed out, maternity leave is related to EDD since you can claim disability for it.

http://www.edd.ca.gov/disability/FAQ_DI_Pregnancy.htm

CA sick leave through FMLA, when there's a claim on disability, also draws from EDD. Your employer only starts kicking in your sick leave pay AFTER the state's coverage of your salary maxes out.

EDD spends $14 billion per year. It has a lot to do with high CA tax rates. There's even more related taxes involved if you happen to live in SF itself.

I believe what the OP was saying here was that in countries like the UK or Canada with subsidized/government-provided health care, the costs for that health care is covered by higher taxes/VAT.

> This is the trade off we pay for lower taxes.

Why would mandating that companies provide meaningful maternity or paternity leave require higher taxes? This topic doesn't have much to do with fiscal policy.

If a company is required to provide paid leave, then that means they are required to pay a person money and aren't getting anything in return for that money. In other words, you're paying a person not to work. It essentially acts the same way as a tax.

This already happens all the time for salaried employees, they often receive vacation time that doesn't reduce their yearly salary and this works perfectly fine for those roles. This isn't a tax scenario, this is more of a compensation adjustment for workers.

Vacation is still an option for employers, not a requirement. If the government required vacation time and a company did not previously offer vacation time, it's net-effect would still be an additional tax.

I'm not making a moral argument here -- actually find it rather immoral for a company not to offer adequate time off. I'm just saying the net-effect of a government forcing a company to pay more money than it normally would is a tax.

Then that's a horrible, shitty fucking trade.

Well spoken, thank you.

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