81–90 of 307 posts
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It’s the stated goal of the party in power to throw as many kids off food assistance as possible. If the program has quirks that is by design.
What is “the party in power”? Democrats control the House and Republicans control the Senate. No laws can be passed right now without bipartisan support.
The perverse incentives around these discontinuities is one of the worst misfeatures of programs intended to help people. Here is a real example. My niece wound up with 3 kids, divorced, with inconsistent child support payments. So she went on food stamps. She was looking for a better job. She found one, interviewed, and they wanted to hire her. But the salary that they offered was $0.50/hour too much for her to stay…
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-41487126
>Under the old system many faced a "cliff edge", where people on a low income would lose a big chunk of their benefits in one go as soon as they started working more than 16 hours.
>In the new system, benefit payments are reduced at a consistent rate as income and earnings increase - for every extra £1 you earn after tax, you will lose 63p in benefits.
In other words, after fixing the cliffs of the system, you would "only" face a 63% effective tax rate for working more. So whatever system they have no is even more discouraging. (That understates it because it's phrased post-tax; including a positive income tax, the total effective tax is even more!)
How about the US killing like 10 “Al Qaeda No 2”s in a row for a while in Iraq
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Either that or a more progressive stance on socialist policies that provide basics to everyone. At least with socialist style policies there isn't the possibility of those spending their UBI on junk food or wine our whatever, but I really would prefer either to the current state of affairs.
Government paternalism is terrifying. People are going to screw up, and make bad choices, but having choices is better than being treated like a child your entire life.
The perverse incentives around these discontinuities is one of the worst misfeatures of programs intended to help people. Here is a real example. My niece wound up with 3 kids, divorced, with inconsistent child support payments. So she went on food stamps. She was looking for a better job. She found one, interviewed, and they wanted to hire her. But the salary that they offered was $0.50/hour too much for her to stay…
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>I wonder if we shouldn't group kids by size for sporting activities instead of by age. Depending on how small your buckets are, you may end up with a scarcity problem (players and admins/coaches). Also, age matters a lot in regards to coordination. A 13 year old who is roughly the size as a ten year old will, on average, have a large advantage. Some people just aren't cut out for athletics genetically. Some grow lat…
> Some people just aren't cut out for athletics genetically. Some grow later on and may or may not be interested. Age seems like a fair sorting criteria and general enough to not introduce too much complexity. Age isn't particularly fair but it isn't the worst either. As a kid, being around kids younger than you can be really displeasing. When you're a kid, the only thing you want is to be treated like you're older/b…
Football was the only sport that segregated by size in my school system's leagues, in middle school. Well, besides wrestling, of course. They're contact sports.
> One reason people were looking for ways to lose money was that, in the U.S., there's a hard income cutoff for a health insurance subsidy at $48,560 for individuals (higher for larger households; $100,400 for a family of four). There are a number of factors that can cause the details to vary (age, location, household size, type of plan), but across all circumstances, it wouldn't have been uncommon for an individual…
...and if you do qualify for a subsidy, you aren't out of the woods yet as far as year to year surprises go. There was a nasty one in my county for people getting subsidies. There were only two insurers available through the ACA exchange in my county in 2019. They were Kaiser and Premera. The cheapest plans from Kaiser were a pair of bronze level plans (one with an HSA, one without) for about $770/month. The cheapest…
(edit: deleted parent quotation)
Still, it would have been nice to do something more productive than spend six months at Intel for ~5k after taxes.
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What is “the party in power”? Democrats control the House and Republicans control the Senate. No laws can be passed right now without bipartisan support.
Moreover, these discontinuities and the perverse incentives that they lead to on the cusps have been elements of these programs for longer than I've been alive.
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Where did you see that? From the link I gave it looks like the average 25 year old is about 2” taller than the average 55 year old. Even anecdotally, the height difference is noticeable (although I am in NZ, the variation between cohorts depends strongly upon what country you are in).
The dataset you linked is from 1971. The older cohorts were born near the turn of the century when nutrition wasn't exactly the greatest for large segments of the population. It's most likely that the skew is due to environmental factors rather than ethnic ones there. See [1]. Age related height declines don't even start until age 40 and are quite small for some time, so it's unlikely to be a factor in dating-related…
Over 60's are about 1" shorter. Hispanics are a lot shorter.
I am pointing out that the sampling biases are important when looking for cause and effect when comparing against a population average.