Proposals to have the federal government help new parents take paid leave from theiremployment have generally come with serious disadvantages.

If the government makes companies eat the cost, it might alsomake them less willing to promote or hire women of child-bearing age. Ifthe government instead makes taxpayers as a whole pay for leave, then itpenalizes families that have chosen to have one parent stay out ofthe paid labor force to take care of children. This seemsespecially unfair since those families have lower average incomesthan two-earner families.

A new proposal on paid leave, however, avoids these pitfalls. Itwould instead let new parents finance time off from their jobs byslightly delaying the time at which they would collect SocialSecurity benefits. Kristin Shapiro, a lawyer in Washington,explained the idea in a recent paper for theIndependent Women’s Forum. She estimates that new parents couldfinance 12 weeks of leave in return for a six-week delay in takingSocial Security checks.

While the Trump administration and Republican senators haveexpressed interest in the idea, it has already drawn some criticismfrom the left and the right. None of their arguments seemcompelling.

On the left, the critique is that theplan “would penalize the elderly for their decision to have raisedfamilies,” and penalize them even more if they had large families.It wouldn’t. The plan wouldn’t force anyone to participate; itwould just give them the option to collect an existing governmentbenefit now or later. Having more children would not lower (orraise) anyone’s total Social Security benefits.

There’s a case that fiscal policy should treat parents better,and I’ve made it. If wewant to go down that route, we should do it by providing additionaltax relief for parents, which they could use to finance leave fromwork, or other things. But wanting additional pro-parent policiesis not a good reason to object to the Shapiro proposal.

The criticism of the proposal from the right has beenno stronger. The conservative and libertarian critics say thatpeople shouldn’t have to pay for other people’s time off with theirinfants, and that Social Security is already underfunded withoutits taking on new burdens.

But this plan wouldn’t add a new burden to the program or raiseanyone’s taxes: It would just let parents move some federalspending from the future to the present. It wouldn’t make SocialSecurity's overall finances any worse.

Nor would it make reform of the program any more difficult.Policymakers in the future could still moderate the growth ofSocial Security benefits, as they should, while leaving the optionfor parents to pull a small fraction of their benefits from theirretirements to their children’s infancies.

It is probably just a matter of time until someone raisesanother concern: that employers will be less likely to pay for timeoff themselves if their employees have access to future SocialSecurity benefits. But this is also a misplaced worry. Employerswill offer the compensation packages that bring them the workersthey want at a cost they can afford.

If the federal government makes these funds available toparents, employers might offer employees less money in the form ofpaid leave — although they could always supplement what SocialSecurity pays for — and more in the form of wages. There’s noreason to think employers would offer less compensationoverall.

Shapiro’s idea, in short, is a good one. I still haven’t seen abetter plan, or a valid criticism of her idea.

This column does not necessarily reflectthe opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.For more columns from Bloomberg View, visit http://www.bloomberg.com/view.

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