I don't have issues with companies offering paternity leave as a benefit. However, an employer with say five employees could be crushed if mandated to offer paternity and maternity leave if two employees went out at the same time. I have known some to go out of business because of maternity leave. Small companies barely earn enough for owners to receive an income.

If you make paternity leave a "societal entitlement", you are asking single women and men right out of college that can't pay their college loans to pay more in taxes.

Politicians are reluctant to raise taxes to cover our existing entitlements (hence the huge deficits) and you are arguing for more. Politicians don't want to raise taxes, because people don't want to pay them.

Which entitlements do you want to take away to make room for paternity leave?

There is this tendency by people to consider "what government should do" without translating it into who should pay for it. That is what you are doing.

Let me give you one example. California, Vermont, and New York considered legislating universal single payor healthcare funded through taxes. The citizens of those states were all for it. But when all three independently came back and said it translated into an additional 15% payroll tax on top of the existing payroll tax, support overwhelmingly collapsed.

So, let's start with the premise most Americans don't want to pay more in taxes. If you were elected to Congress and proposed a bill for a national entitlement to pay paternity benefits, you had to balance the bill by cutting existing entitlements, which ones would you cut and why would that be fairer.

My guess is you would have overwhelming support for a paternity benefit, until you were forced to increase payroll taxes to fund it, which is the logical way to fund it.

So, if you could not raise taxes, what entitlement would you cut to fund it? Social security, Medicare, housing subsidies? You are correct, we have plenty of socialistic style institutions that we are funding... collectively they cost over 40% of what this country produces. Afraid to raise taxes, government has resorted to printing money (the so called "inflation" tax. But that may well see Democrats shown the door this November.

I don't have an issue with Congress sitting down an examining all the entitlements being offered and looking at which ones we should add and which ones we should take away as long as the total cost returns to levels in place in 2019 (which I think were more sustainable based on the inflation rate back then). But that is going to call for some steep cuts.

Where do you think those steep cuts should be made to make room for paternity benefits (exclude defense spending which is largely driven by our treaty obligations) and are already below historical levels).