Trump Called for Paid Family Leave. Here’s Why Few Democrats Clapped.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/05/upshot/paid-leave-trump.html

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President Trump called for paid family leave in the State of the Union on Tuesday, the first Republican president to do so. But the bill he supported does not offer what has generally been considered paid family leave.

It is a bipartisan bill, introduced in December by Senator Kyrsten Sinema, Democrat of Arizona, and Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana. And it would enable new parents to collect a portion of their future child tax credits early and receive a smaller credit for the next 10 to 15 years.

Here’s why it’s different from most paid family leave proposals. It does not provide a new source of funding to pay parents during leave; instead, they borrow from their future selves. It covers only leaves for babies or newly adopted children under 6; it does not cover care for sick family members or to take care of personal medical problems. And it does not guarantee that a person’s job is protected when taking the leave.

Supporters of the bill describe it as a partial solution and a place to start, and say it doesn’t preclude Congress from pursuing more comprehensive paid leave. It has some important advantages, they say: Its sponsors are bipartisan, which is rare on this issue. It doesn’t raise taxes or create a mandate for businesses, two top priorities for Republicans. It also gives parents the freedom to use the money as they see fit, whether as wage replacement while on leave or to pay for infant or adoption expenses.

“Not only is it a good solution, but it’s possible in the political world we live in today,” Senator Sinema said at an American Enterprise Institute and Brookings event in September.

Since first campaigning for president, Mr. Trump has expressed support for some kind of paid parental leave, and it has been a policy goal of his daughter Ivanka Trump. Until Monday, the White House had said it was keeping every plan under consideration. This is the first time it endorsed one.

Traditionally, Republicans haven’t supported paid leave — voicing concern about spending on new government programs and burdening businesses. So why is a Republican administration doing so?

Politically, analysts say, it appeals to a group of voters they need: suburban women, especially those who voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 but have considered Democrats since then.

“Everyone’s talking about suburban female voters because they’re deciding elections,” said Olivia Perez-Cubas, a spokeswoman for the Winning for Women Action Fund, a political group dedicated to electing Republican women. “They’re a coveted demographic in elections, and policies like paid family leave are important to them.”

Paid leave, in general, is an easy sell with voters. Families need it — 72 percent of mothers and 93 percent of fathers with children at home are in the labor force — and a large majority of voters support it. But Americans, like their elected representatives, disagree on the details, particularly how to pay for it.

In the State of the Union, Mr. Trump called paid parental leave for federal workers, a Democratic initiative he signed into law in December, “a model for the rest of the country.” But it has almost nothing in common with any of the paid leave bills in Congress, including the one he endorsed. The leave for federal workers, which will start in October, is financed by the government, and workers pay nothing (this is similar to companies that voluntarily give employees paid leave).

There is one model of government-run paid leave that has already been successfully adopted in the United States. In eight states and the District of Columbia, paid leave has been financed by a small payroll tax increase, paid by employees and employers. This is also the model that Democrats have proposed for all Americans, in a bill called the Family Act.

The child tax credit is worth up to $2,000 per child. If the Trump-backed bill passed, the average worker with a new child could receive $5,000, and then collect $500 less in child tax credits each year for 10 years. Workers earning less than $11,000 a year, who don’t qualify for the full child tax credit, could also get up to $5,000, and pay it back over 15 years.

Under the Democrat-backed Family Act, average workers would pay an additional $120 in annual payroll taxes, according to analysis by Vicki Shabo, a senior fellow on paid leave policy and strategy at New America, a left-leaning policy group. If they took leave, they would receive $9,920 for 12 weeks. Those with income of less than $11,000 a year would receive two-thirds of their pay, roughly $1,840, and their payroll taxes would increase around $22 a year, according to the analysis.

So far, the Family Act has minimal Republican support, and the deal breaker is the tax increase. “A payroll tax increase is not going to be passed into law anytime soon,” Ivanka Trump said on Face the Nation on CBS in December.

Republicans have instead focused on ways to let people borrow from their future federal benefits. One idea, tapping Social Security early, has been unpopular, because it would mean receiving less money in retirement.

The bill that Mr. Trump endorsed is different, its supporters say, because parents would just be shifting the timing of money that was already designated for helping them raise children, in the form of the child tax credit.

But opponents say that it would just delay parents’ financial stressors, because they would collect smaller tax credits for the first decade of their children’s lives, when they still had significant expenses like child care, clothes and food.

“Republicans have really painted themselves into a corner on taxes,” said Kathleen Romig, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning research group. “They know voters want it, constituents need it, but they don’t have anywhere to go for funding except for anything that already exists.”

The Trump administration, in supporting the bill, wants to show support for working families, particularly women. Opponents of the bill fear it would end momentum for paid family leave — without actually achieving it.