Damn, those are some serious ticking time bombs those fascists left! I’m not sure about Portugal, but the last Spanish fascist government I know of was 1975, and the last one in Greece was in the 40’s I think. I don’t even have enough fingers and toes to count how many years that is, but it’s a passel of them. 
It’s sad that the socialist governments that came after them couldn’t do anything about all that entrenched fascism and such, but hell, they were only in power a short time so what can you do??
i’d feel better about paid parental leave if it covered all reasons that FMLA covers, not just parental leave. Not all of us will become parents, but just about all of us will experience some medical disability or need extensive medical care or need to take care of a family member at some point. and not all of us have the ability to build up leave, even if we stayed at the same jobs long enough to do so in a meaningful way. For example, I am not allowed to roll over a single day of sick or vacation time even to the next year. And I get a whopping 4 days a year of sick leave anyway. Even if I could roll over the sick leave, it would take me 10 years to build up enough for an 8- week leave, assuming I never once needed to use sick time for anything else during that time. That’s unrealistic.
Sure, I could take up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave, but if my husband or I were sick and one needed to take off work for an extended period to care for the other, that means neither salary is coming in until LTD kicks in, plus presumably whatever medical bills went with that. That’s a financial hardship for all but the most wealthy.
Gee, do you not think that has something to do with half the Continent still being behind the Iron Curtain 20 years ago?
Claims that America cannot afford maternity leave are comical. Romania and Albania, of all places, literally bywords for grinding poverty 20 years ago when they were behind the Iron Curtain, have at least 126 days of maternity leave at 85% of pay, yet anybody is expected to take seriously claims that America cannot afford the same? Please.
On the affordability issue, I’m almost certain that if someone proposed a novel public institution that loaned books and other media to the public for FREE, without anyone making a profit, that such a plan would be criticized. "Just because it works in Europe - that land that is as different from us as chalk and cheese - doesn’t mean it can work here! “But the owners of book stores will get mad!” “I’m not convinced that people actually need to read books - convince me there is a problem to be solved!” “What about blind people who can’t read?” And, of course, “There’s no money to pay for it!”
I’m all for questioning ideas and good debate, but sometimes it feels like the discussion in the public square is now reflecting Dave Chappelle’s Playa Haters Ball sketch.
Its far more correct to say that America does not choose to afford maternity leave. We don’t choose to afford a lot of things we could afford. Granted, we can’t afford everything, but we really should look at what we are choosing to afford - for instance we are choosing to afford to not tax 99% or something large like that of inheritances. We are choosing to afford energy subsidies to large billion dollar corporations. We choose to afford expensive wars. We don’t choose to afford a guarantee of six weeks of parental leave. We don’t choose to afford universal health care. We are slowly choosing not to afford decent public schools and roads.
I understand the jealousy concerns, but I’ll add to the other anecdotes. My company has pretty generous (by US standards) leave policies, but we’re generally pretty excited when babby forms. And there was definitely some “dude, GO HOME” when a new dad came in two days after.
I can see a difference between a benefit that is funded directly by a tax on my paycheck, vs the company paying for it and probably still indirectly affecting my paycheck.
I’m glad your company is civilized, but unfortunately not all companies are. Small employers aren’t even covered by the FMLA, nor are people who have only been on the job a short time or most part-time employees. And even those people whose leave would be covered by the FMLA are sometimes discouraged from taking what they are entitled to, even if they can afford to do so financially. One of my co-workers, a lawyer, at his prior firm, had his wife give birth to premature twins, who were in the NICU for a while. When he went to his boss and said he would like to go to the hospital to be with his wife and two premature infants in the NICU, the response was “I don’t think that would be a good idea.”
This is an employer and employee (not to mention a situation) that clearly should have been covered by FMLA, and a well-informed employee who knew his rights at that. Imagine how things are for more vulnerable, less well-informed employees?
How on earth do you go from “the parasitic elites created by those regimes” to “entrenched fascism?” Seriously, I have to think you’re just picking a fight for the sake of picking a fight here, because I don’t see how your response actually relates to the post you quoted.
I was writing about jealous coworkers. Are you?
I also resent the insinuation that women are somehow exploiting this by “choosing” to get pregnant. Having a child is not a simplistic binary choice; a woman might insist she never wanted kids, got pregnant by accident and changed her mind and kept the child. How many working professional women just give up their baby for adoption?
If a person truly chooses to be child free then they are willing to make those sacrifices ( working extra to cover shifts, contributing something that they don’t necessarily directly benefit from, the myriad of other complaints child free people are having). As some people said, taking maternity/paternity leave is not a day at the beach.
I feel people complaining about it are like an able bodied person complaining a government agency paid for some paraplegic guy’s electric wheelchair. Does the reason the guy can’t walk arbitrarily make him less deserving of it? Does the able bodied person arbitrarily deserve free money just so both are ‘fair’?
I was truly on the fence about this (though in truth I haven’t given it much thought other than a 10-second “hmmm” after the SOTU), so I was quite happy to see this thread. As half of a DINK couple who pay some of the highest property taxes in our state (not incidentally, funding some of the state’s best public schools), I was actually hoping to see some convincing arguments against such a policy.
I didn’t. And now I’m in favor of it. It will never get through Congress, naturally, and it certainly won’t be enacted in my (currently Republican-dominated but typically purple) state any time soon.
[QUOTE=Lemmytheseal2]
Greece, Spain, and Portugal were run by right-wing dictatorships for decades after WW2
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The ‘right-wing dictatorships’ he’s talking about here were Fascist governments, of course, and so it seems reasonable to me, especially in a tongue in cheek reply to posit he’s talking about those elites being entrenched fascists. Seems reasonable to me.
And I wasn’t picking a fight…I was mocking his post since it’s so silly.
No, I just don’t think parenthood is the only situation when people need and deserve time off, preferably with pay. I absolutely think my co-worker should not have gotten pushback from management to spend time with his wife and critically ill newborns.
Programs like this are transfers, in this case the childless are exploited to benefit children and their parents. Supporters can argue whether the underlying pupose is (1) because parents need the leave, (b) to reward parents for having children, or (3) to benefit the children, but it is confused to imagine it might not be a transfer.
Any economic system will be full of transfers. The childless already pay taxes for schools. The mortgage deduction in effect transfers money from renters to homeowners. Repealing the estate tax transfers wealth from ordinary taxpayers to large family fortunes. Meat inspection transfers value from vegetarians to carnivores! Et cetera.
If government programs were inadmissible if they had negative value for anyone, we’d have no government programs at all.
And of course, the already-low tax rates are too high; it would be “unfair” not to lower them further. 
First, Albania is not part of the EU. Second, the GDPPC for the US is higher than France*, UK, and Germany. Third, if Romania and Albania have mandated parental leave maybe it’s not a good idea after all. How do we know it’s not making their economic problems worse?
My problem with your argument is that you’re not making any judgement based on the cost. You like the ends and so you hand-wave away the expense by comparing us to Europe. I’m not against parental leave but I want to understand the cost before I support a government mandate. The cost will also shape the kind of legislature we enact.
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- It’s close with France and depending on the year and calculations they are roughly equal.
Ideally, we would base our parental leave program like the ones in, oh, I dunno, every other 1st world Western country?!
There’s no mystery about how it works or what kind of impact it will have. There are a hundred million people living in countries with paid parental leave and vacations and sick days. We do not need to study it any more than we need a study to see if water is wet. These days off help parents and employees and have minimal affect on the employer. The US should join the 20th century and start providing these to all employees by law
Also, straight income comparisons aren’t really informative. When the company for which I worked moved me back from the US to Spain, my income went down but my disposable amount went up, and I was paying half as much rent for three times as much space.
I resent the insinuation that childfree people should be forced to take up the slack for parents without just compensation. If parents want our help, they are obligated to help us in return when we need or want time off. And yes, having a child is a choice, one that some people make too lightly, but that does not free them of their responsibilities.
No, your post was silly, or at least demonstrates a critical failure of reading comprehension. All of these dictatorships lasted formally into the 1970s, and (let’s try again) the parasitic upper-class twits that ruled said regimes are still around, dodging taxes and enriching themselves at the expense of the masses. The supposedly “socialist” governments that followed never really were willing to challenge this elite power structure, and in any case these countries were eventually integrated into the neoliberal capitalist EU, where they have proven to be more vulnerable than, say, Germany or the Nordic countries.