This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Monday, March 19th, 2018. I'm Caleb Brown.

Paid Family Leave is an idea that the Trump administration has kicked around for more than

a year, but how would such a program function and why do prominent Republicans regard the

benefit as conservative?

Vanessa Brown Calder is a policy analyst at the Cato

Institute. We spoke Friday.

The paid leave proposal that the president mentioned very briefly in his State of the Union address was essentially

not the first time that we've heard this proposal from him. So what was that initial proposal and where did it

come from? Well, Ivanka has always been interested I think from day one in producing some type of paid family leave bill.

And it's kind of transformed over time what exactly that looks like.

Initially in the fiscal year 2018

budget the Trump administration put out some very vague sort of vagaries

around providing some type of paid leave that would be based on

state unemployment insurance programs and basically some type of savings in

those unemployment insurance programs would be used to provide paid family leave at the state level, but through the federal program.

That has now been, I think a little bit, it's been been disbanded and instead what we're talking about

now is a proposal which has come from the right which would be to use the

Social Security program the federal Social Program, and allow people to borrow

against their future benefits in order to provide themselves with paid family leave

today. On the surface, this sounds like maybe it's a good thing and I think that

superficially it sounds that way and so it's appealed to many people on the

right because who doesn't like a budget neutral proposal that provides additional choices to people?

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