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Suspicious Discontinuities

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Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#101

Post by xyzzyz »

vageli wrote: post #87
tzs wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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…

The cynic in me wouldn't be surprised if these new plans were offered by subsidiaries of Kaiser or Premera. I certainly hope that isn't the case. (edit: deleted parent quotation)

It literally makes no difference to Kaiser, because they get the same amount of money either way, only thing that changes is how that cost is split between the plan beneficiary and the other taxpayers subsidizing him.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#102

Post by selimthegrim »

refurb wrote: post #83
selimthegrim wrote: post #30

How about the US killing like 10 “Al Qaeda No 2”s in a row for a while in Iraq

How is that weird? #2 gets killed, new #2 takes his/her place, #2 gets killed.

Do you really think they were all actually No 2s? That AQI had that bad opsec? Don't we hit the No 3 too every once in a while?

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#103

Post by Polylactic_acid »

btilly wrote: post #74

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…

I'm not an expert on the system in Australia but how I think it works from what I have heard is there isn't a cut off point where if you make x you are eligible and if you make x+1 you aren't. Instead its a slope where if you make x+1 you lose a certain % of the payments until you eventually make enough to lose them all. But at all times its still better to take the job.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#104

Post by mantap »

SilasX wrote: post #82
btilly wrote: post #74

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…

Relatedly, I learned about Universal Credit, an attempt by the UK to merge all their social benefits into one coherent system, and it seems like the cliff problem here is worse. From the BBC description: 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…

The purpose of universal credit was not to solve any particular problem - it was to give conservative politicians something to say when their voters demanded something must be done [about people on benefits].

The world makes a lot more sense when you realise that laws and regulations are primarily conceived and constructed to keep incumbents in power. Maybe we should vote in our representatives for life then they'd actually have to focus on making things better.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#106

Post by peteretep »

SilasX wrote: post #82
btilly wrote: post #74

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…

Relatedly, I learned about Universal Credit, an attempt by the UK to merge all their social benefits into one coherent system, and it seems like the cliff problem here is worse. From the BBC description: 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…

I think you have misread or misunderstood this.

Under the old system, it was possible to take a job, and then have less actual income than you did before.

Under the new system, _every_ extra hour of work you do causes you to have more money in your pocket, and you are always incentivized to do more work, or start a job that pays less now but might pay more as your experience grows.

I'm not sure how else you'd want this to be designed.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#107

Post by Balgair »

kauffj wrote: post #53

At least to me, the discontinuities in things like TANF, Medicaid, CHIP, etc. are some of the greatest signs of political dysfunction. There's nothing remotely partisan about these being a bad thing. _Everyone_ should agree that these make no sense and mis-incentivize behavior. Yet these flaws remain for decades despite being known and discussed for approximately the entirety of their existence.

Not to belittle the lives that depend on this stuff, but these issues go back to flippin Rome. The Grain Dole was a huge part of Roman politics and it's history is fascinating reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cura_Annonae#Politics_and_the_...

These issues are not very complicated: give people free stuff and they support you, let the next consuls/emperor worry about the revolts in Sicily (or whatever) that the Dole causes.

We keep saying that these problems will come back to haunt us, but that's all history has ever been.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#108

Post by jacques_chester »

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #103
btilly wrote: post #74

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…

I'm not an expert on the system in Australia but how I think it works from what I have heard is there isn't a cut off point where if you make x you are eligible and if you make x+1 you aren't. Instead its a slope where if you make x+1 you lose a certain % of the payments until you eventually make enough to lose them all. But at all times its still better to take the job.

I'm afraid it's not that simple. The key is the Effective Marginal Tax Rate, which is the compounded effect of withdrawal of benefits and moving up to a different tax bracket. Depending on the prevailing settings it's not uncommon to find points at which the EMTR is more than 100%.

I ran for the Federal Parliament for a libertarian party in 2007 largely because I supported their policy plan to reform taxation and welfare jointly. The concept was called "30/30": a 30% flat income tax, with negative income tax at 30% below $30,000 income. Capital gains and company tax would also be set at a flat 30%. The gist was to remove all distortions from different tax and welfare settings, so that any taxpayer was always facing the same deal: each additional dollar earned is taxed at 30%.

There were a lot of policies I didn't agree with, and naturally, those were the ones I got the most questions about. Running for a microparty that grabs anyone who puts their hand up is an ... interesting ... experience.

(I came second last with a whopping 0.7% of the primary vote, for those who were wondering)

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#109

Post by peteretep »

userbinator wrote: post #56
toomuchtodo wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is depressing to people who expect the dating and sexual marketplace to be some sort of meritocracy, or equality to be exhibited. It's more of a free market than some care to admit. The gritty truth is: people are depreciating assets, and some lose their value (perceived or actual) faster than others. One of the founders of Okcupid (a data scientist) wrote a book, Dataclysm [1], using data from Okcupid's platfor…

who expect the dating and sexual marketplace to be some sort of meritocracy, or equality to be exhibited Why/how would people come to think that way? As the parent comment says, this is fundamentally a biological thing.

> As the parent comment says, this is fundamentally a biological thing.

Disagree. Wikipedia quote "in the old indigenous religions, women married between 12 and 15 years of age". The most generous read of this (and the one I'm inclined to agree with) is that men genuinely factor emotional maturity and morality and so on into their sexual selection and preferences, where the least generous read is that men hide their ephebophilia when answering surveys.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#110

Post by mmis1000 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #10

> 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…

Some country interpolate insurance between different tires instead.

So, if $0 at $20000 income, and $5000 at $40000 income.

A person with $21000 income will need to pay $0 + ($21000 - $20000) / ($40000 - $20000) * $5000, a.k.a $250

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