Tuesday’s Democratic presidential debate featured quite a few ambitious proposals: free college for all, reducing income inequality, breaking up the big banks, moving the United States to a 100 percent clean electric grid.

Some of the items on this wish list would be expensive and extremely challenging to carry out. Some might be pipe dreams.

Here’s one that isn’t either of those: paid family leave.

You’d never know this from the tenor of our national discussions on this topic, though, including during the debate.

Paid family leave is often couched as some extremist, socialist, feminazi flight of fancy, something that sounds nice but is wholly unrealistic and would probably destroy the U.S. economy. Quoth Dana Bash, one of CNN’s moderators Tuesday: “Even many people who agree with you might say, ‘Look, this is very hard to do, especially in today’s day and age.’ There are so many people who say, ‘Really? Another government program? Is that what you’re proposing? And at the expense of taxpayer money?’”

Paid family leave is presented as something only those extremely liberal Californians do — or perhaps those crazy Swedes, or maybe overreaching Scandinavians more broadly. When paid-leave advocates want to pull out the big guns, they sometimes note that paid leave is something “every other industrialized country” already requires, or “every other rich country,” or “every other major country on Earth,” as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) put it Tuesday.

But this pitch actually undersells the case. It’s not just industrialized, rich, major, socialist countries that have paid family leave.

It’s also Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Andorra, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan.

And that’s just the countries that start with the letter A.

In fact, almost every country in the world requires some form of paid maternity leave, according to a recent report from the International Labour Organization. Of the 188 countries the report analyzed, just two don’t: the United States and Papua New Guinea.

Talk about American exceptionalism.

I point this out not because a policy’s near-universality proves that it’s a good policy; there have been plenty of laws common around the globe that were nonetheless objectively objectionable. There are also policies that the United States is virtually alone in upholding even today, such as birthright citizenship, that I personally believe we should continue to champion even if we go it alone.

No, the reason I emphasize the fact that paid maternity leave exists nearly everywhere else on Earth is to illustrate not its moral merits but its feasibility.

See, Americans already think paid maternity leave is a good idea. A recent YouGov poll found that 67 percent of Americans believe employers should be required to offer paid maternity leave to their employees.

The policy’s widespread appeal, cutting across genders and party lines, makes sense. Paid leave promotes “family values” (moms gets to spend more time bonding with their newborns without facing serious financial repercussions), as well as economic growth (productive workers aren’t forced out of their jobs just because they’ve had kids).

Americans’ primary reservation about requiring paid leave seems to be that it sounds impractical and financially onerous. Sure, it would be awesome if more than 13 percent of workers had access to paid family leave, or if 1 in 4 employed mothers didn’t have to return to work within two weeks of childbirth. But somehow we cannot imagine a reality in which these things are possible.

We cannot imagine such a reality because we have blinkered ourselves to the realities abroad — including in countries both richer and poorer, more and less regulated, faster- and slower-growing, than our own.

If we bothered to look at what other countries are doing, or even what some U.S. states are doing, we might learn from them.

We might learn that there are different ways to set up a paid family leave system, some of which are better than others. For example, paying for leave through a social insurance system (as we do with unemployment insurance) seems preferable to placing the cost burden entirely on employers. And finding ways to encourage fathers to also take parental leave — both so they’re more active parents and so employers are less likely to discriminate against women in the hiring process — is a worthy goal.

Right now, paid family leave is a fantasy for millions of hardworking U.S. parents. As literally every other country (except Papua New Guinea) has shown, it needn’t stay that way.