If the County of Door offered 8 weeks of paid maternity and paternity leave, the policy could be seen as paying for itself
For the upcoming Brewers stadium improvements, new government subsidies are being justified by politicians saying that the payments will come out of certain future anticipated tax receipts, such as sales taxes associated with the games and income tax paid by the ballplayers.
This makes sense, because if they don’t subsidize the stadium and the Milwaukee Brewers move away from Wisconsin, this money would be lost anyway.
Similar reasoning underlies the property tax subsidies provided in special districts for new developments.
If the County of Door used the same sort of thinking for maternity leave, it would justify eight weeks of maternity and paternity leave. (Because of sex-discrimination law, paternity leave must be the same amount. The current policy is described at http://map.co.door.wi.us/agendas-minutes/CountyBoard/Misc/2013/2013-10%20Administrative%20Manual%20-%20County%20Board%2010-22-13%20-FINAL%20APPROVED.pdf#page=28, continuing onwards a page. The phrase parental leave is used instead of maternity and paternity.)
This is how it would work:
Per capita county sales tax revenue in Door County was $199.27 in 2022: https://www.revenue.wi.gov/Pages/RA/Sales-Tax-Per-Capita.aspx
Multiplying this by 79 years of life expectancy for the child, that would be $15,742.33.
However, some youth don’t live in Door County their whole life. Estimating from the graph at https://doorcounty.substack.com/p/door-county-is-experiencing-a-net, it seems that only a net 60% or 70% young adults who have been born in Door County will stay.
If you take the lower figure, 60%, and apply it to the $15,742.33, there is still $9,400 in additional lifetime sales tax revenue per birth.
Milwaukee County offers 8 weeks of paid maternity and paternity leave, it also goes to fathers:
If typical yearly earnings for a County of Door employee is $60,000 per year, eight weeks is 15.34% of the year, or $9,200, which is less than the $9,400 from above. So children who are born to county employees or their wives would, over the course of their lifetimes, more than repay the cost of the paid maternity leave benefits that their mothers or fathers took shortly after they were born.
There are some flaws with this math.
Favorable errors, making the net between future sales tax against present maternity and paternity leave higher than what calculated:
3% of births are twins, triplets, etc.; the amount of leave is not doubled for twins, although twins will pay twice the amount of lifetime sales taxes.
If more children are born, the additional economic benefit of more people, and the multiplier effect of how money spreads around in a community, would end up generating more sales taxes, from other people and businesses benefiting from the transactions with others.
The net percentage of young adults who remain in Door County has increased in recent years, and may continue to increase over the next several decades as today's babies grow up into adults.
The percentage charged as county sales tax could go up in future decades.
Unfavorable errors, making the net difference lower
The actual number of young adults who leave is must be greater than 60%-70%, since the figure estimated from the graph in the link is only a net figure.
A decent fraction of the per capita sales tax is really from tourists and seasonal residents rather than the full-time residents counted by the Department of Revenue when it reports per capita sales tax.
Situations where both spouses are employed by the county, and each take leave for the same birth.
The percentage charged as county sales tax could go down in future decades, or sales tax could be eliminated.
If replacing the absent employee’s labor during the 8 weeks is, on average, more costly than paying the employee would have been.
Another consideration is that most children will be born anyway, even without paid maternity leave. At the surface, this means children aren’t like baseball teams ready to relocate from a state due to the tax and subsidy considerations. To reflect on this angle more deeply than at a surface level, it is necessary to bring up abortion.
There are many non-economic arguments about abortion and paid maternity and paternity leave, but since some reading this don’t believe fetuses are entitled to human rights, or are really people, what follows is an economic explanation. Both pro and anti-abortion sides agree that money is real, so this is one way to discuss it for a broader group.
That there were 190 induced abortions to women residing in Door County from 2010 to 2021 compares to the 2,551 births during the same time period. Not accounting for twins, triplets, etc., that comes out to 7.4% of Door County babies being aborted, or one out of every 13 babies. Since the County of Door, as of 2012 statistics, is the third largest employer in Door County, https://www.co.door.wi.gov/DocumentCenter/View/1680/Chapter-5-Economic-Development#page=17, this is a high enough number to assume that some employees of the county, or their wives, have had abortions over the last five decades. Because a sizable enough percentage of abortions nationally are due to financial pressures, it is not impossible that some of these particular abortions over the years since 1973 have been due to financial pressures.
Whether paid maternity or paternity leave would change the behavior of employees and their wives cannot be known, but if it would influence some to not abort, this would counter the “children will be born anyway” argument. Instead, there would be an overall economic advantage for the area due to paid maternity and paternity leave, because instead of saving a baseball team from moving to another city, it would be saving unborn babies from death. Yet again, whether this is so is unknown, but if it is, the extent of the economic advantage per child born alive can be estimated.
Each abortion costs the national GDP, over the greatly reduced lifetime of each deceased fetus, $23.2 million in 2021 dollars. This figure, the value of a statistical life, comes from https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/24/2023-06081/notice-of-availability-proposed-draft-guidance-for-estimating-value-per-statistical-life. In 2022, the value of a statistical life figure was used to calculate the economic loss due to abortion in https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/b8807501-210c-4554-9d72-31de4e939578/the-economic-cost-of-abortion.pdf.
So even just one abortion due to economic considerations is bad for the community, and hurts the economy and also tax revenue in multiple ways. The entire $23.2 million benefit to the economy contributed on average by each additional child over his or her lifetime, is not entirely felt in the county or community of residence, but a decent amount of it must be local.
Using the figure and averaging the annual number of abortions to women of Door County residence from 2010 to 2021, the economic cost is $367 million. All 190 deceased babies together could have been expected to contribute $4.4 billion to the national GDP over their lifetimes, had they not been aborted over those twelve years.
Another way of thinking of it is in terms of the tornado from 1998. In 2021 dollars (the year used for the VSL figure), the tornado cost $11.64 million dollars in damage. Because of how property insurance works with premium hikes, some of the cost of a tornado is spread out over the following years, similar to how the cost of each abortion is felt over the following eight or so decades. So, nationally, each of Door County's abortions costs about the same as two similar tornadoes, and the cumulative economic damage over the twelve years is equivalent to having a tornado every eleven to twelve days.
If Door County really had such horrible weather, but there was some way which might possibly reduce the tornadoes by just a little bit, everyone would be in favor. Similarly, an employee compensation measure which gives the possibility of improving the situation with abortions ought to receive similar support.
Besides this economic consideration, another issue that both pro and anti-abortion sides can both reflect on is discrimination on the basis of race or national origin. In recent years, employee discrimination has been considered broadly at a federal level. Situations where a racial hiring imbalance has been created indirectly may still be used against an employer.
An earlier post, https://doorcounty.substack.com/p/thoughts-relating-to-bob-bultmans, discusses how from 1990 to 2020, Hispanic women in Door County had 2.54 lifetime children per woman, compared to the total fertility rate of 1.61 lifetime children for non-Hispanic women.
Because of this, paid maternity and paternity leave can be seen as a Hispanic-friendly policy, since Hispanic employees could be expected to use paid maternity and paternity leave benefits more than non-Hispanic employees.
Other posts related to protecting unborn babies:
https://doorcounty.substack.com/t/protecting-unborn-babies