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The problem with parental leave is the same problem with universal health care or any entitlement that isn’t utilized by the entire population at the same rate

The problem with parental leave is the same problem with universal health care or any entitlement that isn’t utilized by the entire population at the same rate constantly. Things like roads (and even then there are many locales with crappy roads) are easy to justify. Things like parental leave and universal health care are hard because the percentage of those utilizing will be low and the disproportionate benefit will inherently fall with a small percentage. It’s inherently a Ponzi scheme. Not to say that we shouldn’t participate, but it is what it is. Add in the mindset of maximizing wealth and it makes even less sense because those who need is will be increasingly less fortunate and those who don’t can fund it themselves anyway.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
> percentage of those utilizing will be low and the disproportionate benefit will inherently fall with a small percentage. The percentage of society deriving a benefit from a healthy workforce is very high. On the order of 100%.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  Indirectly sure. Directly, it’s low. It has to be low for the math to work.
  - dralley 5y ago
    Not every societal benefit has to be quantified and accounted for to justify its existence. Pretty much everyone has experience with misguided middle managers trying to run organizations entirely from the context-free numbers their spreadsheets, why is this any different.
    - endisneigh 5y ago
      If you’re trying to justify it to voters it does have to be.
onionisafruit 5y ago
I don’t think I will agree with you, but I’m curious to see how paid parental leave is like a Ponzi scheme.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  The addition of more people to tax is necessary in order to fund the precious generation. Most insurance/probabilistic entitlements have the same property. It’s the only way the math can work.
  - onionisafruit 5y ago
    I get you now. You mean the bigger system of mandating benefits to be paid for by future taxes, not specifically paid parental leave. I still don't agree it's a Ponzi scheme because it's not soliciting investments with promises of big payoffs unless you count paying taxes as investing. I would agree that is shares an important property with a Ponzi scheme. It will fail when it can no longer increase the amount that gets paid in.
    - endisneigh 5y ago
      I call it a Ponzi scheme because there’s a discrete payoff - having a child and receiving paid time off. Taxes in general aren’t a Ponzi scheme because many of the things paid for by taxes are continuous - less people, less tax collection needed. Tax collection for roads being an example. Parental leave and the amount of taxes necessary is more contingent on the future population than the present.
      - Hamuko 5y ago
        >I call it a Ponzi scheme because there’s a discrete payoff - having a child and receiving paid time off. By this definition, my job is a Ponzi scheme.
nix23 5y ago
Not sure why it works (parental leave and universal health care) in the rest of the world but ~cannot not work in the US. Maybe the US is so focused on being "pure capitalist" that you forgot the peoples who are part of the system?
- endisneigh 5y ago
  It works in other countries by having higher tax rates, lower incomes, smaller populations and less wealth inequality.
  - nix23 5y ago
    >higher tax rates That's the secret sauce, and a smaller military >lower incomes That makes no sense, maybe don't sell your medicine for 10x more...but NO that would not be compatible with a pure capitalism >and smaller populations That's a NON argument
    - jseban 5y ago
      Lower incomes is a direct requirement of higher taxes.
      - nix23 5y ago
        Higher incomes is a direct requirement for higher living costs ;)
letmeinhere 5y ago
That's...not what a Ponzi scheme is. Also, lol at entire population using roads at exactly the same rate, I've been subsidizing rural and exurban lifestyles my whole urban lifetime.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  How is it not a Ponzi scheme? You need more people to fund the previous beneficiaries. You think the math works if the population never increases? Consider how you’d fund it if the population decreased and immigration did not exist.
  - letmeinhere 5y ago
    So in your mind Charles Ponzi innovated the principle of factoring in the likelihood of growth into economic planning? And any investment that is premised on that growth is thus a Ponzi scheme? I guess we can use words however we want, sure. Also, again, lol that roads pass this criteria. No expectation of growth and expanding tax bases there...
    - endisneigh 5y ago
      Requiring growth is not a Ponzi scheme, requiring additional investors for the initial ones to be paid is. Do you have an actual rebuttal?
      - charcircuit 5y ago
        Where do you think the additional inventors come from (especial if everyone is forced to invest)?
      - letmeinhere 5y ago
        It's hard to rebut your arguments when you don't really explain them, instead relying on scarewords that don't fit at all. Who are the "additional investors"? The children? In what way would parental leave had been a horrible misstep if they do not show up? Seems like a wash. Or are the additional investors individuals and families who won't ever need paid leave, don't care about their neighbors, and don't care about the next generation of residents? If so, Ponzi schemes are when market participants indirectly spend money on things that they don't 100% agree to? So, like, every interaction in life outside of the household that one individual might fully dominate?
TimPC 5y ago
Roads aren’t as easy to justify as you think. Different people use them at different rates and in order to account for this there is a concept called a “toll road” which is a road that has usage fees. I’d argue if you can support public roads despite them being used at different rates by the population then these benefits shouldn’t be shot down by the same objection.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  Roads are already funded by usage except for highways which is funded federally, which is my point to begin with.
Mvandenbergh 5y ago
The majority of the population over time will use parental leave if it is available. Most people do have at least one child in their lifetime so this is a terrible example of an entitlement which is unequally distributed. Health care is even worse, especially if you are guaranteeing access prospectively. Even people who are not currently using healthcare resources (hopefully most people) know that there is a very good change that they will have to and realistically as you age the chance that you need substantial medical care approaches 100% pretty rapidly. It is not a Ponzi scheme for a number of reasons. First, Ponzi schemes use money from new members to pay for older members. This might be a model for retirement spending (it isn't, see my next point) but it has the timeline reversed for parental leave. Parental leave is effectively funded by the fraction of the population not currently using it for the benefit of the fraction that currently is. It effectively serves a few different distributional roles: a) It moves resources from your own pre-child and post-parental leave career to the period when the child is born. Many people who can easily fund a year of not working from their total career earnings cannot do so in their peak child-bearing years and there aren't any efficient ways of using saving or borrowing to shift that money either. For these people, parental leave uses the risk pooling and payment guarantee capabilities of the state to effectively borrow cheaply against their lifetime earnings. b) It distributes resources from higher to lower earners, depending on how the obligation is structured there is usually a progressive taxation element which ensures a certain minimum is available. Second point, retirement schemes are also not Ponzi schemes. A Ponzi scheme requires an ever-increasing number of new entrants to maintain payouts. Pay-as-you-go retirement schemes require maintaining a balance between payers and payees which can be disrupted by changes to demographics but that does not mean that they are inherently fraudulent, just that in the presence of demographic trends which lead to a change in that ratio, they either need to reduce payouts, or increase payments in, or borrow to bridge temporary gaps. The difference is that in a Ponzi scheme, the changes required to maintain this are exponential and rapidly become impossible. There is no stable state to a Ponzi scheme.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  > The majority of the population over time will use parental leave if it is available. I agree with this. However: > b) It distributes resources from higher to lower earners, depending on how the obligation is structured there is usually a progressive taxation element which ensures a certain minimum is available. This is irrelevant to whether or not parental leave is a ponzi scheme. > a) It moves resources from your own pre-child and post-parental leave career to the period when the child is born. Many people who can easily fund a year of not working from their total career earnings cannot do so in their peak child-bearing years and there aren't any efficient ways of using saving or borrowing to shift that money either. For these people, parental leave uses the risk pooling and payment guarantee capabilities of the state to effectively borrow cheaply against their lifetime earnings. Parental leave’s true cost is more than just the income lost. It’s the labor required to raise the new children. If we say parents cannot just stay at home (in which case parental leave is unnecessary) then the people required to sustain the new children will be exponential in growth.
bbarn 5y ago
Except that, normalizing long time off for both maternity and paternity has much broader societal benefit, even if people don't think they need to. This author's case is extreme, but any child benefits from more developmental time in the earliest stages.
yokoprime 5y ago
Have you looked up what Ponzi scheme means? I agree parental leave is a forceful redistribution of wealth, but it's not a Ponzi scheme. First and foremost parents are not investors in the tax system, also how are recent "investors" paying previous investors if parental leave is a Ponzi scheme?
sjg007 5y ago
Nonsense.

lotsofpulp 5y ago

> percentage of those utilizing will be low and the disproportionate benefit will inherently fall with a small percentage. The percentage of society deriving a benefit from a healthy workforce is very high. On the order of 100%.

endisneigh 5y ago
Indirectly sure. Directly, it’s low. It has to be low for the math to work.
- dralley 5y ago
  Not every societal benefit has to be quantified and accounted for to justify its existence. Pretty much everyone has experience with misguided middle managers trying to run organizations entirely from the context-free numbers their spreadsheets, why is this any different.
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    If you’re trying to justify it to voters it does have to be.

onionisafruit 5y ago

I don’t think I will agree with you, but I’m curious to see how paid parental leave is like a Ponzi scheme.

endisneigh 5y ago
The addition of more people to tax is necessary in order to fund the precious generation. Most insurance/probabilistic entitlements have the same property. It’s the only way the math can work.
- onionisafruit 5y ago
  I get you now. You mean the bigger system of mandating benefits to be paid for by future taxes, not specifically paid parental leave. I still don't agree it's a Ponzi scheme because it's not soliciting investments with promises of big payoffs unless you count paying taxes as investing. I would agree that is shares an important property with a Ponzi scheme. It will fail when it can no longer increase the amount that gets paid in.
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    I call it a Ponzi scheme because there’s a discrete payoff - having a child and receiving paid time off. Taxes in general aren’t a Ponzi scheme because many of the things paid for by taxes are continuous - less people, less tax collection needed. Tax collection for roads being an example. Parental leave and the amount of taxes necessary is more contingent on the future population than the present.
    - Hamuko 5y ago
      >I call it a Ponzi scheme because there’s a discrete payoff - having a child and receiving paid time off. By this definition, my job is a Ponzi scheme.

nix23 5y ago

Not sure why it works (parental leave and universal health care) in the rest of the world but ~cannot not work in the US. Maybe the US is so focused on being "pure capitalist" that you forgot the peoples who are part of the system?

endisneigh 5y ago
It works in other countries by having higher tax rates, lower incomes, smaller populations and less wealth inequality.
- nix23 5y ago
  >higher tax rates That's the secret sauce, and a smaller military >lower incomes That makes no sense, maybe don't sell your medicine for 10x more...but NO that would not be compatible with a pure capitalism >and smaller populations That's a NON argument
  - jseban 5y ago
    Lower incomes is a direct requirement of higher taxes.
    - nix23 5y ago
      Higher incomes is a direct requirement for higher living costs ;)

letmeinhere 5y ago

That's...not what a Ponzi scheme is. Also, lol at entire population using roads at exactly the same rate, I've been subsidizing rural and exurban lifestyles my whole urban lifetime.

endisneigh 5y ago
How is it not a Ponzi scheme? You need more people to fund the previous beneficiaries. You think the math works if the population never increases? Consider how you’d fund it if the population decreased and immigration did not exist.
- letmeinhere 5y ago
  So in your mind Charles Ponzi innovated the principle of factoring in the likelihood of growth into economic planning? And any investment that is premised on that growth is thus a Ponzi scheme? I guess we can use words however we want, sure. Also, again, lol that roads pass this criteria. No expectation of growth and expanding tax bases there...
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    Requiring growth is not a Ponzi scheme, requiring additional investors for the initial ones to be paid is. Do you have an actual rebuttal?
    - charcircuit 5y ago
      Where do you think the additional inventors come from (especial if everyone is forced to invest)?
    - letmeinhere 5y ago
      It's hard to rebut your arguments when you don't really explain them, instead relying on scarewords that don't fit at all. Who are the "additional investors"? The children? In what way would parental leave had been a horrible misstep if they do not show up? Seems like a wash. Or are the additional investors individuals and families who won't ever need paid leave, don't care about their neighbors, and don't care about the next generation of residents? If so, Ponzi schemes are when market participants indirectly spend money on things that they don't 100% agree to? So, like, every interaction in life outside of the household that one individual might fully dominate?

TimPC 5y ago

Roads aren’t as easy to justify as you think. Different people use them at different rates and in order to account for this there is a concept called a “toll road” which is a road that has usage fees. I’d argue if you can support public roads despite them being used at different rates by the population then these benefits shouldn’t be shot down by the same objection.

endisneigh 5y ago
Roads are already funded by usage except for highways which is funded federally, which is my point to begin with.

Mvandenbergh 5y ago

The majority of the population over time will use parental leave if it is available. Most people do have at least one child in their lifetime so this is a terrible example of an entitlement which is unequally distributed. Health care is even worse, especially if you are guaranteeing access prospectively. Even people who are not currently using healthcare resources (hopefully most people) know that there is a very good change that they will have to and realistically as you age the chance that you need substantial medical care approaches 100% pretty rapidly. It is not a Ponzi scheme for a number of reasons. First, Ponzi schemes use money from new members to pay for older members. This might be a model for retirement spending (it isn't, see my next point) but it has the timeline reversed for parental leave. Parental leave is effectively funded by the fraction of the population not currently using it for the benefit of the fraction that currently is. It effectively serves a few different distributional roles: a) It moves resources from your own pre-child and post-parental leave career to the period when the child is born. Many people who can easily fund a year of not working from their total career earnings cannot do so in their peak child-bearing years and there aren't any efficient ways of using saving or borrowing to shift that money either. For these people, parental leave uses the risk pooling and payment guarantee capabilities of the state to effectively borrow cheaply against their lifetime earnings. b) It distributes resources from higher to lower earners, depending on how the obligation is structured there is usually a progressive taxation element which ensures a certain minimum is available. Second point, retirement schemes are also not Ponzi schemes. A Ponzi scheme requires an ever-increasing number of new entrants to maintain payouts. Pay-as-you-go retirement schemes require maintaining a balance between payers and payees which can be disrupted by changes to demographics but that does not mean that they are inherently fraudulent, just that in the presence of demographic trends which lead to a change in that ratio, they either need to reduce payouts, or increase payments in, or borrow to bridge temporary gaps. The difference is that in a Ponzi scheme, the changes required to maintain this are exponential and rapidly become impossible. There is no stable state to a Ponzi scheme.

endisneigh 5y ago
> The majority of the population over time will use parental leave if it is available. I agree with this. However: > b) It distributes resources from higher to lower earners, depending on how the obligation is structured there is usually a progressive taxation element which ensures a certain minimum is available. This is irrelevant to whether or not parental leave is a ponzi scheme. > a) It moves resources from your own pre-child and post-parental leave career to the period when the child is born. Many people who can easily fund a year of not working from their total career earnings cannot do so in their peak child-bearing years and there aren't any efficient ways of using saving or borrowing to shift that money either. For these people, parental leave uses the risk pooling and payment guarantee capabilities of the state to effectively borrow cheaply against their lifetime earnings. Parental leave’s true cost is more than just the income lost. It’s the labor required to raise the new children. If we say parents cannot just stay at home (in which case parental leave is unnecessary) then the people required to sustain the new children will be exponential in growth.

bbarn 5y ago

Except that, normalizing long time off for both maternity and paternity has much broader societal benefit, even if people don't think they need to. This author's case is extreme, but any child benefits from more developmental time in the earliest stages.

yokoprime 5y ago

Have you looked up what Ponzi scheme means? I agree parental leave is a forceful redistribution of wealth, but it's not a Ponzi scheme. First and foremost parents are not investors in the tax system, also how are recent "investors" paying previous investors if parental leave is a Ponzi scheme?

sjg007 5y ago

Nonsense.