John Hirschauer makes two solid points: No paid leave policy can create more time in the day, and there are real upsides to having one parent take paid employment while the other stays home with the children. He suggests that Republicans who are trying to come up with paid-leave proposals have lost sight of these points and should instead come up with “policy solutions that will make it easier for families to raise a family on one income.”


I don’t think the criticism really applies to the leading Republican paid-leave proposals, because those proposals are such policy solutions. The Romney-Rubio plan (which would let parents of newborns take some of their projected Social Security benefits earlier) would create a new option for both one-earner and two-earner households, without favoring one arrangement over the other. So, I gather, would the Cassidy-Sinema plan (which would let parents take child credits early).

The criticism makes more sense if deployed against proposals to raise taxes on everyone to help two-earner families — but the Republican plans have been devised in part to stave off those policies.