This week newly elected D.C. city council members, David Grosso and Elissa Silverman, proposed what they take to be a model of progressive legislation, a mandatory 16 week paid leave for maternity, paternity, transexual surgery, death of a parent, returning from military service, and other major life events believed to make returning to work difficult. The program would be paid for by a new tax on employment, a new local FICA-like tax, which proponents claim will be under 1%. As Silverman notes, extensive government imposed paid leave is on President Obama’s wish list for a transformed and government controlled America.
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David Grosso |
Grosso is obviously a Democrat, having served for years as a staffer to D.C.’s Democratic Delegate to Congress, Eleanor Holmes Norton, simply using the election law loophole to more easily be elected.
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Elissa Silverman |
Supporters of the law, like Silverman, are already discussing how the new paid family leave policy will be a model that can be copied by other cities. This is unlikely. Like Silverman’s (and to a lesser degree Grosso’s) shifting political masks and guises, the paid family leave policy is not what it seems.
Additional sections of D.C.’s urban elite are employed by government contractors. It’s hard to find the number of D.C. residents who work for a government contractors or the number of people (including people from the Maryland and Virginia suburbs) employed at a location inside D.C. by a government contractor. But that it’s another huge section of D.C.’s workforce is obvious. D.C. comes in at 5th place with $18 billion in revenue from government contracts (behind first place Virginia with $51 billion and 4th place Maryland at $27 billion). That’s about $29,000 for each of D.C.’s 650,000 residents, though of course the point is, for those in Anacostia, it isn’t creating employment opportunities for everyone. People born in D.C. whose education consisted of graduating from D.C.’s failed public school system rarely end up with the law degrees or the master’s degrees in cybersecurity, urban planning, economics, or environmental science, that are needed for lucrative federal jobs.
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Anita Bonds |
It mainly just means that once again businesses will not be offering jobs in Anacostia and other poorer parts of D.C., to the chronically unemployed long-term residents who don’t have law degrees. If they have to pay extra taxes to operate in D.C. they’ll just operate in Maryland or Virginia. And poor black residents in D.C. will eventually move to neighboring Prince George’s County, or to North or South Carolina or some state where they have family. And they won’t be voting for Anita Bonds or other holdovers from the old Marion Barry machine. Many will never be eligible for paid family leave because they won’t have a job to take leave from.