[mcv]

No, it's more a matter of culture. Any wealthy industrialised country can easily afford this. The difference is in how much value they attach to family, child care and parenthood.

For all its talk about "family values", the US doesn't seem to care much about families; it's one of the few countries in the world without paid maternity leave (the others are Papua New Guinea, Lesotho and Swaziland), and it has the highest maternity death rate in the developed world.

And the US is not a poor country by any means; this is really a matter of culture and values.

[andrepd]

>It's not a matter of money, it's a matter of culture. Any wealthy country can afford this.

???

[mcv]

The hidden subtext in this discussion is that the US does not do these kind of things because of their culture. The US is not a poor country. It is in fact one of the richest countries in the world. It's a political decision not to take care of their people. There are countries that really are poor that do a better job at this than the US.

[andrepd]

But I'm not talking about the US.

[mcv]

I suspect many others here are. And I very clearly was. Exactly because the US is the most notorious country not providing these kind of things, despite being one of the richest countries in the world: that's a cultural issue.

Meanwhile, many countries much poorer than the US do a lot more. Maybe not quite as much as Scandinavian countries, but they do something.