Via Ezra Klein, we have this chart from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, which shows the disparity between guaranteed paid sick leave in the U.S. and the rest of the world:

As Klein put it, “The light blue line measures paid sick days. This is what you use if you need to take three days off because you have a fever. The dark blue line is paid sick leave. This is what you use if you need to take three months off because you have cancer. Every other country on the list offers at least one. Most offer both. The United States is alone in guaranteeing neither.”

Yesterday, the Healthy Families Act was reintroduced in Congress, after going “nowhere during the presidency of George W. Bush.” The bill — introduced by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) — “would guarantee employees one paid hour off for each 30 hours worked, enabling them to earn up to seven paid sick days a year.” Employees could also use their time to care for a sick family member.

Lost productivity due to sick workers attending work and infecting other employees costs the U.S. economy $180 billion annually. For employers, the cost averages “$255 per employee per year and exceeds the cost of absenteeism and medical and disability benefits.” Providing sick days can also help cut down on the spread of infectious disease. And then there’s the simple moral argument against forcing ill workers to choose between their health and their paycheck.

As a Senator and during the presidential campaign, President Obama supported the Healthy Families Act. So will it fare better this time?

Our guest blogger is David Min, Associate Director for Financial Markets Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

A couple of weeks back, my CAP colleague Matt Yglesias asked whether Treasury might be trying to emulate the Japanese government’s response to its credit downturn, citing Richard Koo’s excellent book on the Japanese banking crisis.

Koo acknowledges that the Japanese response to its banking crisis, which consisted primarily of massive regulatory forbearance (propping up banks and putting off loss recognition) and stimulus packages to promote job creation, led to very little growth over time. But Koo challenges the conventional wisdom that the Japanese response was a failure, arguing in short that the massive devaluation of assets throughout the entire Japanese economy should have created a cataclysmic, Great Depression-like downturn, and that the fact that Japanese growth remained fairly stagnant was in fact a great victory.

Well, John Hempton over at Bronte Capital has just written a brief, but I think highly illuminating comparison of the Japanese experience with the roughly contemporaneous credit downturn in Korea:

Korea had a much worse recession than Japan. Vastly worse. Japan was just low growth for a very long time. By contrast the Korean economy crashed and burned. But it also recovered very fast and at one point (1999-2000) the Korean Stock market was 1932 Great Depression cheap. It bounced. It is my contention that the main difference between the Korean and Japanese crashes (and Korea’s case recoveries) was the funding of the banks. In this view Korea’s was so sharp because the banks simply ran out of money – and that caused massive liquidations across the economy – systemic failures.

One of the keys to the Japanese response to its banking crisis, according to Hempton, was its massive internal savings, which was fueled by a “multigenerational” ethos of saving instilled into “Japanese housewives” from a young age. So even though the Korean Chaebol industrial-bank complex model was similar in many ways to the Japanese Zaibatsu/Keiretsu model, the fact that heavy savings (even at zero percent returns) were not as embedded into Korean society meant that when the credit crisis hit, “the Korean banks — unlike their Japanese counterparts were short funds. Endless funding at zero interest rates was simply not possible.” Read more