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Florida Senator Marco Rubio and Ivanka Trump may have a new parental leave policy idea that they would like you to consider, reportedly based on this proposal from The Independent Women’s Forum: A new parent is given a 12-week leave, earning 45 percent of their normal wages (the equivalent of Social Security disability). For this deal, the parent forgoes six weeks of Social Security benefits when they’re eligible.


You may recall that during the election, the president’s eldest daughter positioned herself as a champion of the Working Mom. Between ducking questions about her father’s treatment of women and questions about her own company’s leave program, Ivanka was said to take parental leave very seriously. In fact, she had a hand in crafting her father’s first parental leave policy, which proposed extending six weeks of paid leave to new birth and adoptive mothers.

It was rightfully skewered: Leave policies necessarily need to include men, not just because some couples only include men, but also because a father taking baby leave has been associated with better outcomes for baby, mom, the dad’s relationship with baby, and the companies mom and dad work for. (That plan is no longer available online, but I wrote about some of its inadequacies at the time.)




This proposal is theoretically open to men and women, but it underlines a different problem that’s only growing bigger by the day: It would exacerbate America’s retirement crisis.

Everything You Need to Know About Social Security If you pay taxes and you plan on retiring in your golden years, you should probably know a thing or Read more

America’s Retirement Crisis

You’ve no doubt come across an article or 10 lamenting the state of the American worker and his or her bank account. We don’t have enough money to cover the cost of a minor emergency. We’re overwhelmed with medical bills, student loan repayments and credit card debt. Companies no longer provide pensions to their workers, and as the gig economy and contract work comprise ever more of our workforce, our retirement accounts dwindle (if we open them at all).


Many people—about 40 percent of workers have zero savings put away for retirement—will rely completely or almost completely on Social Security in their old age. This plan would doubly punish those workers.

Under the Independent Women’s Forum plan, if you have a kid, you’re pushing your (full) Social Security benefits back from age 67 to age 67 and six weeks, and on and on if you choose to have more kids. It also fails to take into account that Social Security is not just used to pay for retirement benefits: It pays for disability and survivor benefits as well. Would those be tapped? (Virginia Rep. Tom Garrett has proposed a similar measure, except you’d be able to pay off student loan debt with your Social Security funds if you agree to raise your retirement age.)


Social Security is not some slush fund open to any politician’s pet projects. We pay into it with the expectation that we will receive a monthly stipend in our old age. And the Social Security trust fund already has insolvency issues—an issue Republican lawmakers like House Speaker Paul Ryan are all too eager to bring up when it would mean cutting benefits in the future—that need to be addressed, not multiplied.

It’s also galling when you consider that the author of the plan, Kristin Shapiro, estimates the benefit would cost about $7 billion a year. The GOP just gave corporations $1.5 trillion in tax cuts over the next decade. Was there no room to pencil paid leave into that equation?


Don’t forget, too, that the Trump administration has put on hold a financial regulation aimed at ensuring your financial planner would act in your best interest when advising you on your retirement investments. Instead, we stand to lose $10.9 billion in savings over 30 years, as advisors pad their pockets with our potential 401(k) contributions. And Trump signed House Resolution 67, which killed an Obama-era Department of Labor rule that encouraged cities to develop auto-IRA programs for private-sector workers. Added all together, it doesn’t equal a healthy retirement, if it equals one at all.


A Better Policy

Arguments in favor of the proposal go like this: Well, parents get nothing now except 12 weeks of unpaid leave, so this is better.


It may be in the short term, but an even better option is New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s, which would provide 12 weeks of leave to new mom and dads, paid up to 66 percent of their salary, as well as to people caring for a loved one with a serious medical condition. It would be paid for via a payroll tax of 0.4%. And according to Politico, Ivanka Trump, too, “has discussed raising payroll taxes or otherwise paying into Social Security to create a new, personal paid leave fund” in private conversations. She should keep having those.

You could argue that Gillibrand’s plan penalizes childless people who don’t have children, except for the fact that children are the ones who’ll be working to pay for everyone else’s Social Security and Medicare down the road. And on the flip side, the Rubio-Trump idea would penalize people who do have children, by forcing them to retire later. A party so obsessed with family vales really needs to rethink if that’s the message it wants to send.


What Rubio and Ivanka Trump are trying to achieve is an admirable goal—paid parental leave is long overdue in the U.S. And while the two have positioned themselves at the forefront of the discussion, it’s Nebraska Senator Deb Fischer, according to Politico, who helped usher in one of the more interesting parental leave policies in recent years: Included in the GOP’s recent tax bill is a tax credit for businesses that offer paid family and medical leave to their employees. It’s a good first step, but a federal mandate would be even better, for all working families.

“Social Security is premised on the assumption that it is more important for workers to have their money when they are older than when they are younger,” the IWF’s fact sheet reads. “But many new parents understandably might decide that having 12 weeks of paid leave to care for their new child is worth a short deferral of their retirement benefits.” They might also understandably want both paid leave and full retirement benefits, like every other industrialized country. It does not have to be an either/or situation.