Paid family leave gets its moment at the Democratic debate - Washington Post

Move over, Medicare-for-all. Paid family leave enjoyed a moment in the spotlight at last night’s Democratic presidential debate.

But unlike the issue of expanding health insurance – where there will be sharp fault lines between President Trump and the eventual Democratic nominee -- family leave may be less helpful in distinguishing the two candidates. That’s because Trump has also called in the past for paid leave.

It took five Democratic debates – and an all-female panel of moderators – for the issue to get any airtime, even though paid family leave is popular among voters including Republicans. All the Democratic candidates on the stage have said they’d seek at least 12 weeks of guaranteed paid leave for workers caring for a newborn child, and some have gone further, saying new parents should get a minimum of six months off (check out The Post’s tracker to see where the candidates stand).

My colleague Carol Leonnig, noting the leave question was asked by The Post's White House reporter Ashley Parker. The Post sponsored the debate with MSNBC:

Trump has accomplished little on paid family leave during his presidency, but during his 2016 campaign offered a plan for six weeks guaranteed leave and has proposed it in his budgets to Congress. His daughter Ivanka has called for it repeatedly and visited Capitol Hill on multiple occasions to weigh in on some GOP family leave bills.

Last night, two of the four female candidates — Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) -- spoke at length about why they feel paid family leave is crucial, while tech industry veteran Andrew Yang vowed it would be one of the first things he’d do as president.

The discussion didn’t spark fireworks among the candidates in the same way as Medicare-for-all at prior debates. But Klobuchar did use it to emphasize the importance of saying how any new benefits would be paid for — part of her pitch to voters that she’s the race’s pragmatic, electable moderate.

Klobuchar said she wants three months paid leave — versus something more generous — because she has “meticulously” shown how she would pay for it.

“My plan is three months. I think that’s good, I’d love to do more,” Klobuchar said. “As I’ve said before, I’d love to staple diplomas under people’s chairs. I just am not going to go for things….just because they sound good on a bumper sticker and then throw in a free car.”

Klobuchar has signed onto the leading family leave legislation in Congress, introduced by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.). The Family Act would give both parents up to 66 percent of their income for three months, paid for with a small increase in payroll taxes. Other Democratic candidates have also co-sponsored it, including Harris and Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

But Harris said she wants to go further, although she didn’t answer a moderator question about how she’d pay for it. She stressed that more women are juggling multiple responsibilities as they have babies older in life while caring for aging parents.

“What we are seeing in America today is the burden principally falls on women to do that work,” Harris said. “And many women are having to make a very difficult choice whether they're going to leave a profession for which they have a passion to care for their family, or whether they are going to give up a paycheck that is part of what that family relies on.”

“So six months paid family leave is meant to and is designed to adjust to the reality of women's lives today,” she said.

Yang prompted a wave of audience laughter when he said Papua New Guinea is the only country besides the U.S. that doesn’t guarantee paid leave for women.

“There are only two countries in the world that don’t have paid family leave for new moms, the United States and Papua New Guinea,” Yang said. “That is the entire list. And we need to get off this list as soon as possible.”

Yang also explained how he’d try to tackle a related issue – the extraordinarily high cost of childcare in the U.S. He wants a universal basic income of $1,000 a month for every adult, which they could use to pay for childcare or scaling back work to spend more time at home with a kid.

“We should not be pushing everyone to leave the home and go to the workforce,” Yang said. “Many parents see that tradeoff and say if they leave the home and work, they're going to be spending all the money on childcare anyway. In many cases, it would be better if the parent stays home with the child.”