The approved, this week, from five to up to twenty days. The project’s rapporteur, deputy Pedro Campos (PE), had an articulation that united (-SP) and () in defense of a measure with high social return: allowing parents to spend more time with their newborn children.
Even with this consensus, the proposal was dehydrated in plenary from 30 to 20 approved days, after strong action by business entities against the expansion and the silence of several parliamentarians who usually invoke the defense of the family. The new rule will be implemented gradually and will only reach the twenty-day limit in 2029, subject to compliance with fiscal targets.
The argument for the limitation was the budgetary impact. The project predicts that the cost of the license will be covered by, with an estimate of R$3.3 billion in 2027 and R$5.4 billion in 2029. The value is equivalent to less than 0.1% of the R$678 billion in federal subsidies granted in 2024, including tax waivers, subsidized credit and financial transfers.
The difficulty lies not in the lack of resources, but in the priority given to each public policy. The country maintains a spending structure that protects specific sectors, but is reluctant to finance measures that benefit ordinary families. The budget, in the end, is always a mirror of political choices.
The decision exposes a problem in political economy: when costs are concentrated and benefits are dispersed, the proposal loses strength. In the case of the license, the main ones, while the costs fall on sectors capable of directly putting pressure on Congress. These, evoking loss of productivity and new charges, although the account has been shifted to the public sector.
This design helps explain why our fiscal debate is shortened: there is a lot of talk about targets and little about merit. Sectoral subsidies resist cuts almost by reflex; When the policy involves care and , cost containment appears before the benefits are even weighed.
With the license, children have better and lower school performance, fathers increase their participation in daily care and mothers have fewer absences due to health issues over the years.
These results appear in studies with data from Norway, such as those analyzing licensing reforms that induced greater . Among them, works by Cools, Fiva and Kirkebøen document the effects on learning and school retention, while Dahl, Løken and Mogstad show an increase in parental involvement and a reduction in maternal absences due to health problems.
Economist Emily Oster, in the Data Parenting project, reaches similar conclusions based on meta-analyses: paternal presence early in life reduces symptoms of , improves children’s sleep and cognitive development, and increases marital stability. These are broad effects, but have a low initial cost, especially compared to the volume of tax exemptions maintained.
Discourses about family are frequent, policies that serve them are much rarer. While the project was being processed, there was a lack of voice from those who claim to defend it. Protecting the family means creating conditions for fathers and mothers to care for their children with time, health and safety. The next step would be shared parental leave, with a minimum guaranteed for each guardian and the possibility of joint and alternate use, as already adopted by countries that record gains in well-being for children, fathers and mothers.
Therefore, in the fiscal and productivity debate, care should be counted as an economic investment. In the debate about values, if the family is so important, expanding it should also matter.
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