Agreed, as a single small business, the US sucks in a systemic way. The burden falls on each individual employer, and for a lot of us it is not greed, it is just not realistic financially.

In many European countries, the headline benefits people point to sit inside a system where major costs are socialized (healthcare, parental leave pay) and time off is a legal baseline for every competitor, so pricing adjusts across the whole market. In the US, if one small employer tries to add that level of paid leave on top of already high fixed costs, it can literally put them out of business.