With the market already increasingly making parental leave routine, who needs government mandates from Congress?

From Mark Perry.

"That’s the question Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby asks in the title of his latest weekly op-ed, here’s a slice:

It isn’t the job of the federal government to provide, mandate, or encourage paid leave for new parents, and there was a time when Republican politicians would have said so. That was long ago, when the GOP was still the party of fiscal sobriety and limited government. Alas, Republicans today are as wedded as Democrats to the belief that anything desirable must come from Washington, even if it would be better left to state and local discretion, or kept in private hands altogether.

Expanding the welfare state to encompass paid parental leave is the latest example of this phenomenon. President Trump has endorsed the idea in his State of the Union addresses, and his proposed 2020 budget calls for providing “at least” six weeks of paid leave for new mothers and fathers. On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, several Republican senators are pushing a scheme to fund paid leave for working parents through the Social Security Administration, at an estimated cost of $10 billion or more each year.
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As Cato Institute scholar Vanessa Brown Calder points out, studies indicate that a large majority of working mothers are already offered paid maternity leave by their employers. Between 1961 and 2008, according to the Census Bureau, the percentage of women with access to paid leave to care for new children soared from just 16 percent to more than 61 percent (see chart above). More private employers than ever before offer paid leave for new parents, including all 20 of the nation’s largest corporations. Paid leave for new fathers, once unheard-of, is increasingly common.

In short, the want of a federal law compelling or facilitating paid leave has not kept private employers from supplying it. And if any federal boost were needed, Republicans can already point to the 2017 tax-reform law, which not only cut corporate income tax rates but also added an explicit tax credit for companies that make paid leave available to lower-wage workers.
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One estimate cited by Mercatus Center economist Veronique de Rugy puts the added 10-year cost of a parental-leave option at $114 billion. With Social Security already under extreme stress, requiring it to cut checks to yet another population of beneficiaries could hardly be more reckless. And once “hamburgers today, payment next Tuesday” goes into effect for new parents, it will be only a matter of time until other lawmakers want to draw on Social Security for other worthy beneficiaries, and then others — always with the assurance that the program will pay for itself and require no taxes.

Paid leave for new parents is an appealing idea. So appealing, in fact, that more and more American employers are making it a standard element of their employees’ compensation. Entangling that process with Social Security is not likely to make anything better. It’s all but guaranteed to make Social Security worse."