Quote Originally Posted by foxtrot View Post
Quick math off the top of my head:

1% of everyone's salary capped at 12 weeks. Assuming 45 working years, and avg 2 children per family, that's 45% of your annual salary committed towards paying benefits of 24 weeks (46% of year). Seems equal on it's face, but the child bearing age will have the lowest wage (and thus, lowest benefit) while the last 20 years of work will have the highest wage by far (probably a factor of 2x), and ofc few people could actually take 12 weeks off of work for a variety of reasons. It seems to me that quite a bit more will be deducted than will be paid. Unless of course, benefits are paid to a lot of non-contributors to make the avg child per income far higher than 2, which seems likely.

I don't necessarily have an issue with this, but I think it should sorta be pay-to-play, in many regards. This should be built like an HSA account, that rolls over and can be invested. And you can draw down unused portions after age 65. Reward people for being invested in their future, and make it equal between child and non-child families. Have 8 kids before 25? Yeah, you're probably not getting 12 weeks of for each of them. Have on kid at 30? F it, take 16 or 20 if you can swing it through your account if you want. Or only take what you need and build it for retirement. (Could also open it up to medical costs after an arbitrary age, like 45)

Problem with handout benefits is its a "commons" problem... people use it to the maximum, even if unnecessary to do so.
Bolded is the only reason they want this. On it's face it's an issue that every conservative that has ever uttered anything about the importance of family should be behind 100% if they actually believed what they were preaching. In reality, it's a way to create yet another pool of free money that can just be invested and used on an unlimited amount of other projects with no strings attached and with zero oversight. Individual plans as suggested by foxtrot would provide the most long term benefit to people as a whole, but probably wouldn't work that well in reality for the same reasons as in the bold section. Even if everyone was allowed some sort of very broad use HSA from the very first day of their working life until they were old, the vast majority of young workers wouldn't contribute, and even those that did may not have earned enough money to be useful by the time they had their first kid.