Hillary Clinton Sets Up A Fight With Bernie Sanders Over Paid Leave - 0 views
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Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Thursday offered new details about her plan to make sure all workers can take time off, with pay, in order to care for a newborn or sick relative.
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During that time, the worker would be eligible to receive replacement wages, up to two-thirds of his or her salary.
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The proposal, if enacted, would patch a major gap in America’s safety net. Workers in every other developed country are entitled to paid leave, in some cases for more than a year.
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Some companies provide paid leave anyway. In the last year, high-profile employers like Facebook and Goldman Sachs introduced or expanded paid leave for their employees.
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“The benefit of being one of the last countries in the world to adopt paid maternity leave is that we have been able to learn from other countries' experiences and the results are clear,” Betsey Stevenson, a University of Michigan economist and former adviser to President Barack Obama, told the Huffington Post on Thursday.
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Clinton has criticized that approach repeatedly because it would mean higher taxes on lower- and middle-income workers.
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Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the only Republican presidential candidate to address the issue formally, has said he’d offer small tax breaks to companies that offer paid leave -- an approach unlikely to have much impact, except perhaps to help well-off workers.
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But Clinton’s proposal differs from the bill in one crucial way. In order to finance the replacement wages that workers would get, the Gillibrand-DeLauro bill would impose a small payroll tax, of 0.4 percent, that employers and employees would split evenly.
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To advocates like Heather Boushey, chief economist and executive director of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, that’s a welcome sign that American politics is finally talking about the challenges of parents who also have jobs.