However, two recent paid leave proposals — the New Parents Act from Senators Marco Rubio and Mitt Romney[2] and the CRADLE Act from Senators Joni Ernst and Mike Lee — fall short of this standard in important ways:
- Unlike the paid leave programs of several pioneering states (and the federal Family and Medical Leave Act, which provides for unpaid leave), both bills would provide paid leave only to parents caring for newborn or newly adopted children, leaving out workers who need to care for their own serious health issues or those of a family member.
- Instead of pooling risks and resources across the entire workforce, as the rest of Social Security and the state paid family and medical leave programs do, these bills would ask individual parents to bear the cost of their parental leave benefits by cutting the Social Security retirement benefits they would receive decades later. This would weaken Social Security’s near-universal social insurance protection by treating the program’s guaranteed benefits like a private account from which individuals could draw. Essentially, both bills ask parents to choose between their current caregiving needs and their future retirement security.
via CBPP.
Related Reading:
Stop asking parents to sacrifice Social Security benefits for paid family leave.
“There should be no trade-off between paid family leave and Social Security benefits,” says former Senator Tom Harkin, chairman of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare’s advisory board.
“The Cradle Act proposes the same kind of ‘I need it now’ trap that induces younger adults to withdraw money from their retirement plans when changing jobs. Later, they discover they have nothing left for old age.”
