One Old Man Denies More Than 330 Million Americans Paid Family Leave

The movie trailers for action hero movies always intone “only one man can save humanity,” or whatever it is that needs saving in the movie. No pressure, Dude, but it’s all on you.

Joe Manchin is no action hero. He is a villain. Joe Manchin is a greedy old white man who made his fortune from federal coal subsidies (corporate welfare), and then he actually has the gall to be preachy about not wanting an “entitlement” society for paid family leave for more than 330 million of his fellow American citizens.

The United States is the only advanced nation in the world which does not have paid family leave because of generations of greedy old white men just like Joe Manchin who serve in the United States Senate.

Axios has this helpful factoid. Charted: U.S. at the bottom on parental leave:

With paid family leave out of the Build Back Better framework released by the White House yesterday, the U.S. remains one of seven countries without paid leave for new moms, Bloomberg reports.

The others: Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea and Tonga, per UCLA’s World Policy Analysis Center.

President Biden’s social spending plan initially called for 12 weeks of paid family leave.

That was whittled down to four weeks before being removed from the bill because of opposition from Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.).

Amanda Terkel writes, 74-Year-Old Man Blocks Universal Paid Leave:

A 74-year-old man is blocking Congress from providing American workers with paid family and medical leave, leaving the United States as the only industrialized nation without such a mandate.

On Wednesday, Senate Democrats said they would have to drop the provision from their Build Back Better legislation because they were unable to convince Joe Manchin from West Virginia to get on board.

“The fact that this one older white gentleman, who perhaps has never had to contend with family caregiving or the risk of losing his job or being unable to pay his bills, could stand in the way of paid leave for nearly 20 million people a year is shocking and upsetting,” said Vicki Shabo, senior fellow at the New America Foundation.

[As] HuffPost reported, Manchin privately expressed concern about the cost of offering paid leave, as well as the potential for fraud.

As me how I feel about federal coal subsides (corporate welfare), Joe. C’mon, I dare you.

Democrats had been trying to scale back their proposal to meet the cost constraints and satisfy Manchin. It went from offering 12 weeks of leave to just four. Then there were discussions about leaving out sick leave. But ultimately, they were unable to reach an agreement and communicated as much to their House colleagues Wednesday afternoon.

Still, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), who had been working on the compromise, was trying to hold out hope Wednesday. She said Manchin was still “looking over the details.”

Manchin, however, said the Build Back Better package was not the place for it.

“I’m looking at everything but to put this into a reconciliation bill — it’s a major policy — is not the place to do it,” Manchin told HuffPost.

Just 23% of private sector workers have access to paid family leave provided by their employer and 42% have access to medical leave.

Universal paid leave would allow workers to take time off for a new child, recovery from an illness, taking care of a seriously ill family member or issues arising from a loved one’s military deployment.

Unless Biden is able to address paid leave in some other form, former President Donald Trump will have made more progress on the issue. In 2019, he signed the Federal Employee Paid Leave Act, giving an estimated 2 million federal employees access to 12 weeks of paid parental leave.

Note: After the Mitch McConnell controlled Republican Senate defeated the Federal Employee Paid Leave Act on a vote of 49-48, the House rolled into the $738 billion fiscal 2020 National Defense Authorization Act—which also included the creation of the U.S. Space Force. It was ultimately agreed upon in exchange for establishing Trump’s Space Force initiative. “The president wanted a Space Force,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “We wanted parental leave.” The 2020 National Defense Authorization Act was approved by the Senate in a 86-8 vote after passing the House in a 377-48 vote. So don’t give Donald Trump the credit; thank Nancy Pelosi.

Supporters were especially frustrated that the possibility of a federal paid leave mandate was killed after the pandemic made so clear how essential it is for workers to be able to take time off without losing their jobs.

“I think it’s horrific that one white man can make this decision,” said Dawn Huckelbridge, director of Paid Leave for All. “But I think it’s also a failure of our entire government. This should have been a monumental legacy we could have left the American people in a time of need. And this could have been a cornerstone program that would have helped every working family in this country. And we’ve squandered that opportunity.”

Salon adds, Joe Manchin kills Democrats’ paid family and medical leave proposal in Biden’s spending bill:

Democrats are expected to drop their paid family and medical leave proposal from President Joe Biden’s spending bill, in the face of unrelenting opposition from Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va.

Biden has pushed for months to include a 12-week paid leave provision in the bill but Manchin repeatedly balked at the plan. Democrats in recent days tried to cut the proposal to just four weeks but Manchin shot the compromise offer down as well. Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and Patty Muray, D-Wash., confronted Manchin on the Senate floor on Wednesday to press him to agree to some sort of compromise but Manchin told reporters that he can’t support the legislation.

“I just can’t do it,” Manchin said Wednesday, raising concerns about deficits and debt even though Democrats aim to pay for everything in the bill with revenue increases.

“To expand social programs when you have trust funds that aren’t solvent, they’re going insolvent. I can’t explain that. It doesn’t make sense to me,” Manchin said. “I want to work with everyone as long as we can start paying for things. That’s all. I can’t put this burden on my grandchildren. I’ve got 10 grandchildren … I just can’t do it.”

Note: Manchin is talking about the social security and medicare trust funds, which are funded by payroll deductions. They are solvent, but threatened long-term. If this greedy old white man wants to improve the financial solvency of the trust funds, he can vote to remove the $142,800 salary cap (2021), and to impose a financial transaction tax (The United States instituted a transfer tax on all sales or transfers of stock in The Revenue Act of 1914, which existed until 1966) to capture more revenue from the very wealthy who are not paying their fair share into the social security and medicare trust funds. Paid Family Leave is not funded by the trust funds. You will notice that Manchin uses this misdirection excuse, but he does not propose any solutions.

Manchin’s opposition has frustrated Democrats in negotiations.

“People are pissed he wants to take out paid family leave,” one unnamed senator told CNN.

Molly Day, executive director for Paid Leave for the US, called the defeat of the proposal “outrageous and shameful.”

“A budget deal that does not include paid leave fails working families and will not allow us to build back better,” Day said in a statement.

Gillibrand insisted to CNN on Wednesday that reports that the proposal is completely out are “definitely premature” and stressed that she is still pushing Manchin to compromise.

“He hasn’t signed off on my recent proposal, and so it’s not yet agreed to,” she said, “but I’m not giving up and I’m not going to give up until the deal is signed.”

But Manchin suggested that Democrats should instead take the proposal out of the reconciliation bill and put it to a regular vote, where it would no doubt be filibustered by Republicans.

Manchin also supports the Jim Crow relic Senate filibuster rule. Did I mention he is a villain?

Democrats should be “examining all this stuff,” but “to put this in a reconciliation bill major policy … is not the place to do it,” he said. “I am just saying we have to be careful what we are doing, if we are going to do it, do it right.”

Opposition from Manchin has also led Democrats to cut proposals like free community college and the creation of new clean electricity standards, which was the cornerstone of Biden’s climate policy.

But this hillbilly coal baron is keeping his federal coal subsidies, damnit! He is willing to see all life on this planet killed off in the next mass extinction event, just so long as he continues to get paid his federal coal subsidies up until the day he dies.

Helaine Olen writes at the Washington Post, Joe Manchin just handed Trump a potent issue for 2024:

Paid family leave is out of the Democrats’ Build Back Better legislation. The man most responsible is Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), who claimed the massive and sprawling reconciliation package was “not the place” to enact such a sweeping policy change.

This is a moral failure and a political mistake of the first order. Not only is paid family leave extraordinarily popular, and not only was it a signature plank of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, it also leaves an opening for Republicans and for Donald Trump, should he run in 2024, to outflank the Democrats from the left.

Paid family and medical leave is something citizens of other wealthy nations take for granted. But in the United States, large employers are only mandatedto offer up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave. For more, new parents are reliant on the generosity of their employers and geographic luck. Only nine states and the District of Columbia demand it in some form.

So where does Trump come in? The former president made life difficult for federal workers in many ways, but he did one good thing for them: signing legislation granting federal workers access to 12 weeks of paid parental leave.

As I noted above, Republicans only supported the Federal Employee Paid Leave Act when Nancy Pelosi included it in the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act and exchanged that vote for the U.S. Space Force. Otherwise, Republicans voted against Paid Family Leave and they will do so again if Democrats bring a bill to the floor for a vote. Republicans do not support paid family leave, they never have.

And Trump also supported other less robust plans to offer new mothers a paid way to remain home. In his final State of the Union address, he endorsed a bipartisan effort by Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.) to give parents up to a $5,000 advance on their child tax credits.

But Trump and Republicans never followed through. President Joe Biden and Democrats actually delivered on advanced child tax credits (for one year) in the American Rescue Plan, and are seeking to extend the child tax credits in the American Families Act aka the Democratic budget reconciliation bill.

[A] CBS News/YouGov poll about the Build Back Better legislation found almost 3 out of 4 voters want to see family leave turned into a paid benefit, including half of Republicans. In a nation that likes to proclaim its commitment to family values, 1 in 4 women are back on the job within two weeks of having a child because they can’t afford to remain at home to bond with their child and recover from childbirth. (Yes, the woman taking your order in a restaurant or answering a customer service inquiry might well still be recovering from a C-section.)

In other cases, our lack of paid family leave pushes women out of the workforce. If Manchin is, as he claims, so concerned about people relying on “entitlements” and refusing to work, he might want to consider that paid leave helps keep mothers on the job. One study of California’s program, published by the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management in 2012, found it increased the likelihood a woman would remain employed after giving birth. (One likely reason: Daycares rarely accept children younger than six weeks.) Google says when they upped both the length and pay of their maternity leave, takers were 50 percent more likely to remain with the company.

But in the United States, those who need help the most are frequently the least likely to receive it. Access to paid family leave is often a sign of privilege. The higher one’s income, the more likely one will receive paid family leave from an employer. Black and Latina women are more likely to lack access to paid family leave than their White peers.

None of this is to say the Democratic plan was a particularly good one. It was not. In a failed effort to satisfy Manchin, it was pared down from 12 weeks to a less useful four weeks. At the rumored insistence of Rep. Richard E. Neal (D-Mass.), who is a leading congressional recipient of insurance industry PAC money, it was going to be administered not by the government, but by the insurance industry, all but a formula for bureaucratic snafus and bad faith.

But that flawed offering was still going to be much better than the national paid family leave policy that we have now, which is nothing, and will now continue to be nothing. Here’s hoping Donald Trump doesn’t notice. I’m not counting on it.

Don’t sweat it, Helaine, Republicans do not support paid family leave. Not one of them will vote for it. To claim they support it is yet another Big Lie.