By Bryce Covert, Illustration: Dakarai Akil, Photos: Shutterstock, The New York Times, July 21, 2022
The United States is one of six countries in the world without a national guarantee of paid parental leave. Twenty-three other countries have universal child or family allowances. We spend just 0.2 percent of our gross domestic product on child care for our youngest children, compared with an average of 0.7 percent among countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
In other words, paid leave, child care systems and child allowances are so common as to be banal in much of the rest of the developed world. But the United States has none of these things. That was supposed to change when House Democrats passed the Build Back Better reconciliation package, which originally included 12 weeks of paid family leave, heavily subsidized child care and universal pre-K, and a continuation of expanded child tax credit payments that went out in 2021 and acted as a kind of child allowance.
But negotiations over that ever-diminishing package came to a halt late last year when Senator Joe Manchin walked away. (Now there’s a phrase we’ve heard repeatedly during President Biden’s first two years in office.) Democrats have since scrambled to piece together a narrower deal that eschewed all of these things, but after Mr. Manchin recently balked at raising taxes on wealthy Americans, hopes for even that smaller deal have dimmed, if not gone totally dark. It’s not just Mr. Manchin who stands in the way. Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona has opposed raising taxes on the rich, while some House moderates have also started to question raising taxes before the midterms.
Comments (0)