[vel0city]

Your anecdote values time with your newborn children at $0 and assumes people are physically able to immediately return to work after having a child. Seems like a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of life with a newborn.

It also ignores the societal costs of separating mothers and babies at such extremely young ages, reducing the rates of successful breastfeeding, and more.

It also assumes a considerably above-average income job.

Your username is hellojesus. Which action is more Christlike, providing for children and families or hoarding your wealth? Are we called to build bigger barns?

[hellojesus]

I omitted the valuation of time with my child since it is hard to capture empirically.

> It also ignores the societal costs of separating mothers and babies at such extremely young ages, reducing the rates of successful breastfeeding, and more.

I'm not ignoring this cost. I'm stating that this cost should be borne by the individual that elected to have a child; e.g., lowered labor participation for some duration. The current US federal policy recognizes this by allowing unpaid leave for some duration.

> It also assumes a considerably above-average income job.

My point exactly. If above average compensation is actively harmed by this policy through deadweight loss, it means the policy is bad. This ignores the plethora of moral hazard that is introduced too. For example, how to we reconcile those laborers that take 12 weeks of paid taxpayer vacations only to promptly quit their job upon restarting it? These folks were always going to drop out of the labor force; now we've given them 12 weeks of free money redistributed from productive members.

> Your username is hellojesus. Which action is more Christlike, providing for children and families or hoarding your wealth? Are we called to build bigger barns?

Religious inclinations should direct followers how to execute behavior for themselves of a voluntary nature. It should not be used to dictate that everyone in society follow the same moral orders at the behest of a gun, which is what governmental policy does.

[vel0city]

That you phrase it as a "vacation" and can't seem to put a dollar value on it but obviously less than a couple hundred dollars a week really points to the idea you have no idea what you're talking about.

I don't think anyone thinks 12 weeks with a newborn is a vacation, and yet most people probably wouldn't trade that 12 weeks with their newborn for anything in the world.

> I'm not ignoring this cost

You literally are ignoring the cost, as its not your given model. And its not a cost that will only be borne by the immediate caregivers, there are knock-on costs throughout society that will be felt by this change.