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Is there any indication it actually requires continued growth to break even? Given average salary where I am and roughly average tax rate, a typical household
by nucleardog 5y ago
Is there any indication it actually requires continued growth to break even?
Given average salary where I am and roughly average tax rate, a typical household with two working adults is going to pay somewhere in the neighbourhood of $2m in tax over their working life. Paying 3% of that back to them is not going to break the bank.
There are other programs vying for their tax dollars, but I can't see any inherent reason why it requires population growth to fund the benefits unless as you look at a timeline longer than a single tax year.
As well, kind of an odd program to make that argument on. Parental leave is one of the few programs where you can pretty definitely guarantee the population growth since it's paying out for population growth that has already happened.
- endisneigh 5y agoI see what you're saying, but parental leave is a direct cost, but there are subsidiary costs, such as the lost productivity as well as the lifetime resources to raise the newly born child that require more people to subsidize. If a child were something that required no ongoing resources to provide for, then yeah I'd agree with you. That being said I didn't really properly articulate that, so the way I described it I'd have to concede that perhaps it's not a Ponzi scheme.
- kristjansson 5y agoThe benefit side of that equation is the perpetuation of human society, so it’s worth some investment. Humans and economies aren’t cost minimizers, they’re utility maximizers.