A recent article in The Economist entitled “The Welfare States of America” surprised me to the point that I thought the information was worth passing on to my readership. The fact that these states have instituted programs in basic defiance of the Federal Government, and are maintaining them, despite the Trump Administration’s campaign to eliminate anything they interpret as socialism, is encouraging.
My cynicism might suggest that Trump has yet to get to these programs but, then, at least in theory, he can’t touch state authorizations, although he may well try and penalize those states in other ways once he gets around to it as he has already demonstrated in Minnesota.
On the positive side, more states are joining this movement towards providing support for their constituents; the number of states offering paid family leave during pregnancy has quadrupled since 2017, when just three states had such programs – around 114 million people now live in states with such support, California being the largest. In a chart showing fully-paid equivalent weeks of maternity leave (2026), Canada tops out at 20 weeks, followed by France (19 weeks), New Jersey (18 weeks), California (16 weeks), Belgium (15 weeks), New York (14 weeks), Minnesota (13 weeks), U.K. (12 weeks), Massachusetts (12 weeks), Australia (8 weeks) and Ireland (7 weeks). Quite a surprise! The common denominator in these programs is both obvious and, in the case of the U.S., surprising; higher taxes to pay for them voted and passed by the legislatures. Even more surprising in the U.S. is that the vast majority of the states, unlike the federal government, are legally bound to balance their budgets, which translates into higher taxes to support such programs, and yet they are law.
Imagine a hard-up family. The mother has given birth to her second child. The government paid for her prenatal care, the birth and her newborn’s medical expenses. She will get four-fifths of her wages during five months of maternity leave and her husband will take three months off, both under a government scheme. Later they can count on subsidized child care and child tax credits. By the time her infant son is off to nursery school her daughter will be three and can enroll in state-funded pre-kindergarten. If either parent lost their jobs, they would be eligible for unemployment benefits and, if things got really bad, food assistance. That sounds like France or Germany and certainly not the U.S according to popular conception. The surprising thing is that this is the situation in Massachusetts for families earning around $50,000 a year or less.
Opponents of these laws will use the old adage of “this is socialism, or worse, communism, and they will ruin and destroy the country”. As a commentary to this, the name “Welfare States of America” is certainly a slogan Trump will use against them. However, the California experiment has shown that these programs have led to less children living in poverty, improved breast-feeding and vaccination rates and less children ending up in hospital, all without damaging women’s labor market trajectories or HURTING THEIR EMPLOYERS’ PROFITS.
It all requires a balance on both sides of the equation, and a willingness on the part of the legislatures to mitigate political ideologies with the realistic needs of the people who put their representatives there. A difficult thing to achieve in any situation, let alone in one where the leadership of the country is moving away from “government of the people, by the people” to a flat-out dictatorship.
I have often considered the concept that the United States is not actually a country. It is a collection of somewhat independent countries/states held loosely together by a somewhat ineffective federal government. My reasoning for this concept is that the result of this structure is citizens of the U.S. that have quite radically different rights and laws governing them, depending where in the country they live. Educational quality and opportunities are glaring examples, among many others. However, in this case, even though massive discrepancies exist in these welfare programs, state-to-state, at least with the system of separate state governments, they do actually exist and are growing.
Realistically, if it was all left to the federal government, none of them would exist, and the plight of U.S. citizens would be far worse.
