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Without parental leave I might be dead

nytimes.com

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Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#411

Post by athenot »

burntoutfire wrote: post #326
cure wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your frame of reference may be a bit warped. What is an 'average' salary? The median personal income in 2019 was $35,805 (cf. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N ). I think you'd be hard pressed to live on that with a family of 3+ people. And what about the 50% of people who have a personal income less than the median? edit: that stat was for 2019, not 2020, my bad

That's $2983 per month. Biggest costs of life are housing, food and transportation. With one person staying at home, both the cost of transpo and food go down (because: one less person commuting to job, everything can be home cooked and the person staying at home have time to shop smartly and save a lot thanks to it). This lives housing costs. Here, it's all about location. In many areas (assuming renting), you can h…

> That's $2983 per month.

Gross. More like $2200 after tax.

Healthcare for a family of 4 averaged to $1777/month in 2020[1]. The higher up the income ladder, the more the employer pays that. On the low-end, the employer doesn't pick up much of that tab. So that's the largest expense… unless it's sacrificed in order to maintain a roof, food and transportation.

And we're assuming zero contributions towards retirement, here.

So... no, it is NOT easy to live on that amount of money anywhere where there are opportunities to grow one's job/career.

[1] In 2020, annual premiums for health coverage for a family of four averaged $21,342, but employers picked up 73% of that cost. - https://www.investopedia.com/how-much-does-health-insurance-...

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#412

Post by coryrc »

mjevans wrote: post #288
bradleyjg wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We haven’t even tried. For healthcare, the last time I heard about bending the cost curve was during the Obama administration. For education, I’ve never seen any politician suggests we try to reign in cost growth—-just proposals around who should eat the costs. For housing, governments at all levels have been pulling every policy lever they can find to increase costs. Falling costs are wildly considered a national em…

Free Money is popular with voters; be that in the form of cut / "no new taxes" or handouts. Want to fix that? A true multiparty system, IRV, and eliminating gerrymandering as possibilities. The last one would mostly be by eliminating geographic boundaries generally; instead representation would be decided by proportionally voting in representatives from the IRV list, which might be preferenced by area specific politi…

You're correct except IRV is hardly better than FPTP. Please endorse any ranked voting system except IRV.

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#413

Post by conductr »

kingsloi wrote: post #297
conductr wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. Suppose I was assuming that wasn’t a factor here since they said they would have quit if not for employer based insurance.

If I didn't have to pay for medical, I likely could've survived on savings and GoFundMe.

That’s unfortunate, as is the whole situation. My thought was it should protect your job/insurance and you’d have to still just pay your normal premiums. Potential loss of income depending on how your company handles that (my and my wife’s company has always opted to pay us). We paid the out of pocket maximum, something like $10K and that was it, realize that’s a substantial amount for some. I’d agree with the overall sentiment of the discussion, we should move towards a system that is predictable and humane and not so heavily tied to your employer at the moment. I work in healthcare industry for past 20 years (corp finance) and am continually perplexed by how silly things are.

If anyone else reading is ever in a similar situation talk to your HR department. I help HR departments negotiate things all the time. A common thing is taking an LOA and the company will pay your COBRA premiums. They don’t have to, it’s technically unpaid time, but if you have some savings and insurance is your barrier this is actually kind of common. But again, I’m in healthcare industry so YMMV.

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#414

Post by cmrdporcupine »

mountain_peak wrote: post #409
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #397

"If you live in Canada or, say, France, you are probably amused by this little thought experiment. And possibly drinking a beer from a small and dainty glass." Not really. Yes we have one year parental leave here in Canada, but the $$ value of that is not very high all things considered. It's not enough to live on on its own. Maximum in Ontario right now is $595 CAD a week for the highest income earners and lower tha…

Completely my experience as well (x3 kids)...can you enlighten me on what the author meant by, "drinking beer from a small and dainty glass"? If there's a social reference or analogy, I'm missing it.

I guess some American perception of sophisticated European Frenchmen? I dunno :-)

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#415

Post by jseban »

_bixt wrote: post #400
croo wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhh, it's 3 years where I live (though the welfare money for the last one and half year is very low and lots of mother go back to work before that) I would say 3 year is pretty good as kids starts to gain a lot from socializing after that age. Why would this be absurd? It's perfectly normal. Looking after a toddler is hard 7/24 work with little time to spare. Of course you can go to work and instead pay for a house c…

I believe in taking time away from work to raise kids. In fact, I am taking several years away from work now for that purpose. What I disagree with is who should pay for it. I'm paying for my living expenses and raising my child from my savings that I earned at my generous paying job. I think the government should pay for up to perhaps 3 months for raising kids (and it shouldn't be based on your salary, but tied to s…

Yeah this makes perfect sense. Paid parental leave is just a welfare system like any other, and has the same drawbacks as always. People act as if it's some invention to create free time out of thin air.

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#416

Post by danShumway »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #390
Ericson2314 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes exactly. The only way to close gender gaps is to force men to do less work outside the home, not women more. (Men doing more work inside the home and women less follows from that more easily than in the other direction.) Better childcare / pre-k can help too, but there musn't be a gap between when at least partial leave ends and childcare begins. Good thing we all work to much already, so reducing total "public s…

They attempted that in Sweden and it backfired massively. The more you try to force people into what they don't naturally gravitate towards (eg. women in STEM and engineering, men in nursing / teaching roles) the more the difference grows. I can vouch from personal experience that I did not enjoy my paternity leave at all and I'd much rather work. Also, the gender gap is not a thing. There are so many variables that…

There might be a middle ground here between forcing men to spend less time at work and offering them the opportunity to spend more time at home if they want to. Everyone is unique, but I know a number of fathers who would have liked to take more time off for their kids and would have chosen to if they had the opportunity, I suspect the ratio here may be higher than you expect.

> Also, the gender gap is not a thing. There are so many variables that go into salaries that any argument around the topic is just an attempt at making a political statement.

The gender gap was the explanation mbesto gave for why paid family leave for women might be opposed even by women. If the gender gap doesn't exist, and unbalanced paid time off between genders won't drive increased wage differences, then it seems like it might be fine to ignore mbesto's worry and just offer women that time off regardless of what paternal leave policies are.

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#417

Post by organsnyder »

kingsloi wrote: post #339
vadfa wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry for your loss, but this is textbook appeal to emotion.

I don't want sympathy or want to invoke empathy. I've heard enough "I'm sorry for you loss" to last me many, many lifetimes. I just want to share my 2c on how my/our situation was made worse, now my girl is gone, I feel like it would be a disservice to her if I sugar coated my experience. I would've loved to never have worked a single moment during that time. Also, I'm a British guy who used the NHS extensively befor…

Thank you for sharing your experience. Your testimony is both heartrending and necessary.

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#418

Post by freeflight »

lucaspm98 wrote: post #407
beaconstudios wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really strange to think that the American left (AOC, Bernie) are fighting for such radical concepts as social healthcare, free education and paid maternity leave. I'm from the UK, the most capitalist European country and we had all three until we regressed on university fees thanks to our wonderful Conservative party.

There's a reason for that. The majority of countries with these socialized services have suffered from the corruption, bureaucracy, and taxation innate with government control. This is with the notable exception of a few countries with vast natural resources providing an economic baseline, and likely more importantly a relatively small and homogenous population with similar needs and opinions.

> The majority of countries with these socialized services have suffered from the corruption, bureaucracy, and taxation innate with government control.

The majority of these countries rank better on these metrics than the US does.

> This is with the notable exception of a few countries with vast natural resources providing an economic baseline

I can only think of one notable exception on that front, that being Norway with it's oil resources.

> more importantly a relatively small and homogenous population with similar needs and opinions

How exactly do you define "homogenous population" and why do you think "needs and opinions" are inherent to certain types of "population", which you apparently seem to use as a synonym for race?

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#419

Post by jseban »

pertymcpert wrote: post #320
tomp wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're free to move to Europe, earn 3x less, and get 1-2 years parental leave (actually not just for mothers in some countries!)

Are you actually proposing that as a solution? Are you against paid parental leave?

I'm against it. Why give people less responsibility and less freedom, as they get smarter and more educated. And why revert to a more costly and inefficient public sector to achieve this. Seems like moving in the absolute wrong direction to me. Socialism and "free stuff" is something that I'm absolutely against in every way. And people have full control over having children. I see no point whatsoever in having paid parental leave, what's the reason why? "it's nice"?
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