December 21, 2018 5:45PM # Cato Paid Leave Poll Is Relevant to Conservatives By [Vanessa Brown Calder](https://www.cato.org/people/vanessa-calder) --- SHARE Hours after I published [*Why Conservatives Shouldn’t Support Federal Paid Parental Leave*](https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/X2V1Cwp79Kc1EA2FVWhef?domain=urldefense.proofpoint.com)*,* Ramesh Ponnuru criticized it and the work of other Cato scholars on the same topic. Ramesh takes exception with my use of the [new Cato paid leave poll](https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/kNIRCxkLq2HA59zFvBQlm?domain=urldefense.proofpoint.com) that tested the conservative response to paid leave costs, estimated using the Democrat’s plan for paid leave (the only formalized Republican proposal for publicly-provided paid leave is [Rubio’s plan](https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/3345/cosponsors?q=%7B%22search%22%3A%5B%22rubio+paid+leave%22%5D%7D&r=1&s=3), which is not popular). Yet the context was former Senator Santorum’s article, which argued for reaching across the aisle to find agreement with Democrats on a federal paid family leave policy. Santorum leaves the ultimate design of the policy open-ended. As Ramesh must know, the Republican plan for paid leave is not an appealing compromise for congressional Democrats. In fact, senator Rubio’s proposal has zero co-sponsors. On the other hand, the Democrat’s FAMILY Act has 34 co-sponsors in the Senate and [160](https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/947/cosponsors) in the House. ##### Related Tags [Social Welfare and Poverty](https://www.cato.org/social-welfare-poverty) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).