If you had Scandinavian bennies ...
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If you had Scandinavian bennies ...
| Mon, 04-19-2010 - 7:40am |
I am curious. If you had Scandinavian social benefits – 1 year of paid parental leave, free health care and dental/ortho for the kids, no future college costs as well as subsidized daycare and after school care – would it affect your decision about SAH or WOH, either way?
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What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce.
Mark Twain
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What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce.
Mark Twain
*^*^*^*^*
What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce.
Mark Twain
That I agree with, and in fact, I've shared a similar opinion with several people lately, as state budget cuts have resulted in public schools looking at referendums to keep the schools open, and of course, many of the residents with no children don't see any reason to support the schools with additional tax dollars.
Right, the Danish system simply extends that idea into the postsecondary realm. As far as cost, I only know that it costs the university about 10K in euros to educate one student FT for a year. That is not counting the living grant, which is about 6K a year.
If you think about it, rather than you paying for everyone else's kid to go to college, instead of just having to save for your own, the cost is being spread out to everyone and over everyone's lifetimes. So, if you have no kids, you still contribute to someone's college and if you never get sick, you contribute to paying for someone else's health care etc. For most people though, I think it works out to their advantage over all, directly and indirectly.
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What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce.
Mark Twain
Everything she said.
Our day care is going to be $70 less a month than our mortgage. I would love subsidized day care. I would also love the full year of paid leave. Do both parents get to take this? I think if we had those benefits, we would have more kids. We would both still work, though.
With the Swedish subsidized care, we paid about $250 per month for two children in full time care. A third child would have only added about $80 to the total bill.
The daycares are excellent, btw.
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What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce.
Mark Twain
This is the way it works in Sweden:
1) each parent gets 220 days of parental leave after the birth of a child. A parent can "give" the other parent part of the leave, but 60 days cannot be given to the other parent (that parent has to use it or lose it).
2) for 180 of those days, the parent taking the time off gets paid approximately 80% of their salary up to a maximum. I think it caps out at about $2500 per month, but am not sure. The other days are paid at a very minimum level (I think around $300 per month, but am not sure exactly what it is now).
3) the days can be taken immediately or saved and used until the child turns 8. That means that it is theoretically possible for a family to, for example hire a nanny for the baby then used the parental leave days later on when the kid is older.
4) the days can be taken as 0.25, 0.5, 0.75 and whole days. This is quite commonly used actually as many parents end up each taking half-days and working half-days. It allows people to get back into work earlier on a part-time basis.
5) These days are not paid for by companies, they are paid for by the national health insurance. This means that the companies do not have to cover the salaries for the time a person is on parental leave. Most companies take advantage of this to hire in new people on temporary (9-12 month contracts) to "test them out". Since the contracts are more or less without any strings attached with regard continuing the temp employee, it ends up being a good opportunity try out new people and either let them go at the end of the contract or hire them on a more permanent basis.
Denmark and Sweden actually have quite different rules about parental leave. I can't find the article I read years ago, but I think this one came up with the same conclusions:
http://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp1050.html
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What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce.
Mark Twain
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