This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, August 9th, 2018. I'm Caleb Brown.

The newest incarnation of a paid family leave proposal involves allowing new parents to take something of an advance on potential future Social Security benefits.

There are a number of things wrong with that idea.

Charles Blahhouse of the Mercatus Center in Cato's... There are a number of things wrong with that idea.

Charles Blahhouse of the Mercatus Center and Cato's Vanessa Brown Calder

offer their thoughts.

The proposals that are floating out there right now,

I remember Ivaca Trump took this up as an issue early when the Trump

administration came into the White House and I guess at the initially it was just for mothers but I think they figured out that that would be pretty blatantly unconstitutional to mandate that kind of thing just for women.

What are the proposals that are floating out there right now?

That's right, so there is the Family Act, which is something that the Democrats have proposed,

and basically the Family Act uses a payroll tax on employees and employers in order to fund a subsidized

leave program which would be in addition to Social Security the Social Security

program but the program that we're going to or the proposal that we're the Social Security Program.

But the program that we're going to, or the proposal that we're going to talk about today, I think,

is the Social Security paid family leave proposal, which actually originated on the right.

It was sort of a conservative group that put this forward and

then Ivanka Trump has apparently kind of latched onto it. She likes it and is

promoting it and there's also a couple of conservative senators that seem to support it both

Marco Rubio and also Joni Ernst and the idea here with the Social Security paid family leave

proposal is that you could

actually take your Social Security benefits early as a young parent and you could

...