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> 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.

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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.

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