It's Tax Day, and you are either sweating out your tax forms at the last minute or you’ve already spent your refund and are smugly awaiting your stimulus payment. Or you’re like me, bleary eyed and cranky because you wanted to make sure you had an extra day to deal with problems and thus stayed up incredibly late last night.
Has I been snug in my bed right on time, though, I would still hate paying taxes to our current government and be extra pissy today because I had to. Especially after looking at this press release from the Council on Contemporary Families at the University of Illinois at Chicago. It lays out what family-friendly benefits US families get for their tax money versus what people in other industrialized nations get for their (admittedly higher) tax dollars. Check it out:
• In Norway, parental leave allowance is 54 weeks at 80% pay or 44 weeks at 100% to be shared any way the parents wish, although the mother must take three weeks before birth and six weeks immediately after and the father must take five weeks off if they intend to use any leave (yes, must, not "if they have a sympathetic boss and can afford to, maybe"). Adoptive parents are eligible for 51 weeks off at 80% pay or 41 weeks at 100%.
• In Greece, either parent can use up to 17 months of leave time, and receive an additional hour off per day until the child is 30 months old, or two hours per day for 12 months and one hour per day for the next six months.
• In Belgium, free early childhood education is available to all children starting at the age of 2 1/2.
We couldn’t even deduct child care.
Sigh.
