Matt Yglesias

Providing Paid Family Leave Through Social Security

I’ve done a couple of posts recently on the United States’ anomalous lack of a national system of paid parental leave. And as it happens, today CAP senior economist Heather Boushey has released a paper about creating a national system of paid family and medical leave, a slightly broader concept than parental leave. Of course you could try to do this by simply mandating that employers offer paid leave to their employees. But a proposal along those lines would generate substantial opposition and almost certainly get watered down with various kinds of exemptions for small employers and would likely do little for part timers, contract employees, the self-employed, etc. Boushey’s idea is to mandate the “leave” (as with the current Family and Medical Leave Act) but to finance the “paid” part through the Social Security system which already makes structurally similar payments via its disability provisions.

Watch her discuss the idea:

This is good stuff. Right now the health and energy debates are sucking up the oxygen on the Hill, but it’s necessary for folks to start talking about and building support for and understanding of further social policy innovations. The hope, after all, is to keep progressive policy flowing in 2010, 2011, and beyond.

Paid Parental Leave

Reader T.H. said this chart of paid parental leave in different countries is inaccurate, and sends this more up-to-date chart, based on Sakiko Tanaka’s 2005 article “Parental leave and child health across OECD countries” ([p F7-F28] Economic Journal Volume 115 Issue 501):

The baseline point, however, remains the same. It’s standard for countries to offer a certain amount of mandatory paid parental leave as a recognition of the special role parents play in our society (in effect, this measure lowers everyone’s wages slightly and then provides a benefit only to parents, thus enacting a small transfer of resources from non-parents to parents). In the United States, everything must surrender beneath the all-powerful God of flexible labor markets, and “pro-family” conservatives seem fine with that.