No, it's more a matter of culture. Any wealthy industrialised country can easily afford this. The difference is in how much value they attach to family, child care and parenthood.
For all its talk about "family values", the US doesn't seem to care much about families; it's one of the few countries in the world without paid maternity leave (the others are Papua New Guinea, Lesotho and Swaziland), and it has the highest maternity death rate in the developed world.
And the US is not a poor country by any means; this is really a matter of culture and values.
The hidden subtext in this discussion is that the US does not do these kind of things because of their culture. The US is not a poor country. It is in fact one of the richest countries in the world. It's a political decision not to take care of their people. There are countries that really are poor that do a better job at this than the US.
I suspect many others here are. And I very clearly was. Exactly because the US is the most notorious country not providing these kind of things, despite being one of the richest countries in the world: that's a cultural issue.
Meanwhile, many countries much poorer than the US do a lot more. Maybe not quite as much as Scandinavian countries, but they do something.
Yes, in the sense that rich Western countries can afford things like that. And many do, whether they’re ”petrostates” or not. But what about the richest country of them all? Tell me that the US couldn’t afford it if they really wanted!
Any nation with a mandatory retirement age/state pension that normal people live long enough to revive for at least one year, necessarily has enough money to let typical parents look after their kids for at least six months per parent per child.
Necessarily has enough money to pay the social security amounts for that time (in exchange for pushing everyone’s full retirement age back by two years, not one [0])
The bigger problem is I think the average US SS beneficiary takes home around $1400/mo (and they would be Medicare-eligible, unlike most new parents). My mortgage alone is a substantial multiple of $1400/mo.
[0] The one year for one year trade ignores the growth at Treasury rates between the age-at-use and current retirement age. That could easily be 35 years which is a doubling at 2% interest rates, so we’d have to push back everyone’s social security retirement age back by 2 years to fund a max of $1400/mo for 1 year for each child. If we ever return to 4% Treasury rates, that would be 4 years delay for everyone to fund it. 8% is over 15 years’ delay (mathematically is slightly under 15, but so few people draw 15 years that the actual delay would likely be 16 or more years) and we’ve had 8% Treasuries during my adult lifetime.
I don’t see why you are counting future earnings rather than present earnings.
Thought experiment: imagine next year from Jan 1st to Dec 31st, literally every 25-year old stops working and simultaneously everyone who was due to retire in that year has their retirement delayed by one year.
The total size of the workforce remains constant.
If this became a permanent feature of society [0], GDP, average corporate income, and tax revenue, would all be constant.
Private pensions as well as states pensions would also pay out less in total, as there would be less years between retirement and death. How much would your pension pay, relative to parental leave, if someone equivalent to you were to reach pension age today? Because that’s the amount available for paternity in this thought experiment, not the number that your actual pension will be worth when you reach pension age.
[0] For a one-off year it would appear higher, but that’s an illusion caused by old people having more experience and therefore higher productivity and income; it obviously wouldn’t remain true once those 25-year-olds with one fewer years of experience each became 65.
I take your point on not accounting for interest growth. Well explained. Thank you.
My actual retirement is my defined contribution 401(k) account. The amount I put in now grows until I draw it down in retirement. There’s no one who will give me a year of their 401(k) drawdown, of course. What 401(k) money I and my wife don’t spend is part of our estate and inherited just like any other type of private savings.
Defined benefit plans (“private pensions”) are rare (and becoming more rare) for the current workforce.
Social Security is more than a rounding error in the retirement picture, but it’s by far the minority of income for most professional jobs. That’s literally the only “pension style money” that’s available to me and it’s about $1400/mo as far as I can tell. That's not going to take the typical 25-year old new parent very far I don't think. (It's slightly over the federal minimum wage for one full-time worker.)
$1400 is average. Assuming a decent professional salary and depending on when you retire, it could be closer to $2,000-$3,000.
But of course your basic point stands. Absent a separate defined-benefit pension (which still exist from older jobs in some cases), SS is fairly minimal by itself even if you own a house.
You are though, by definition, taking away an average benefit from those who would retire to give to parents, so I think average is the right reference figure when contemplating "what would the parental benefit be if funded from social security delays?"
