Joe Biden’s “build back better” legislative train stalled at the station in October. West Virginia Democrat Senator Joe Manchin joined the entire Republican caucus in rejecting a version of the president’s spending plan, sharply reduced from the $3.5 trillion he originally hoped to disburse to about $1.75 trillion. The investment in U.S. infrastructure, broadly defined, was intended to get the nation back on its feet in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Biden’s plan included a variety of new social spending long sought by Democrats, but what stopped it in its tracks was a proposal to include a 12-week paid family leave program. That social investment would have allowed all U.S. workers to take advantage of paid leave to deal with family health crises or normal life experiences like childbirth, not just the small percentage of white-collar workers whose businesses already sponsor it.

Manchin, a Catholic, presumably shares the church’s long-standing belief that a nation’s social policy should not only protect human dignity but support the family as a privileged social unit. But investments in family, and let’s include child care and early education, are often torpedoed by U.S. politicians concerned about their cost.

That continuing political indifference to the success of U.S. families only grows more stark. The United States is the only member of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) without a paid leave policy and among only seven other nations in the world that don’t have social policy in place to help families welcome a new child into the world.

U.S. stinginess is of course not limited to family or maternity leave. The average spending by an OECD state on child care for toddlers is a little more than $14,436 per child. Big spenders at $29,726 and $24,427 are Norway and Iceland and Hungary and Israel lag near the bottom at $7,222 and $3,327 per child, but no one comes close to the parsimoniousness of the United States, spending just $500 per child.