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Suspicious Discontinuities

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Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#211

Post by loudmax »

dTal wrote: post #198
loudmax wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of welfare and food stamp recipients are the working poor. This was a single mom with three children. She needs to arrange for child care while she's working and it's a good idea to set aside money for medical emergencies. I'm going to guess this job probably pays a few dollars above minimum wage. Someone in this situation is absolutely eligible for food stamps. But if we get another four years of MAGA, then wh…

Right, that's not the point. The point is that taking a pay cut , with apparently no other change in circumstance, somehow rendered her ineligible for a social service she was already receiving . I want to know what rule made that possible, as it appears to be critical to this discussion of perverse discontinuities.

Yeah, we're missing some details here. Could be tips or hours worked as sibling comments suggested. Life is messy.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#212

Post by kazagistar »

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…

The leftist solutions are to get rid of of the conditions entirely, and find non-means-tested ways to accomplish goals more universally. The advantage here is significantly reduced administrative costs, freeing up time and energy of those in a tough situation on recovery rather then stress over beurocracy and limitations, and of course, people not viewing the people on the programs as morally deficient.

Social security, fire departments, medicare, primary education etc are all available broadly, and are broadly liked by people. People using these government handouts aren't considered lesser for it.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#213

Post by vxNsr »

mgraczyk wrote: post #88

I have firsthand experience of the frustration that these sort of discontinuities can cause. I lost all financial aid and nearly all "scholarship" money my senior year of undergrad after my 6 month coop at Intel put me over some income limits (probably around $33k per year). All told, I was probably ~$5k ahead compared to where I would have been with the scholarships and without the income. Still, it would have been…

Presumably the experience itself helped you get other jobs that would’ve been unattainable had you not had a prestigious internship at intel.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#214

Post by kazagistar »

RHSeeger wrote: post #201
SilasX wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point was that 63% is still very bad, and if it’s supposed to be an improvement, then the existing system is abysmal from an incentive perspective.

I have a hard time following this argument. It's not a tax, it's a limit to benefits. If the government comes along and says > You need $30,000 / year to live at a minimum in our society. We will make sure everyone that makes less than that gets enough in benefits to make up the difference. That's not a 100% tax rate for any money earned under $30,000 / year. It's reduced benefits because the definitions of the syste…

It behaves the same way from the perspective of the worker. For every hour I work of a minimum wage job, I see an increase to my spending abilities of 35% of minimum wage or whatever. It's only not a tax technically, but it still cuts into your direct benefit from working exactly like a tax.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#215

Post by kazagistar »

iainmerrick wrote: post #185
Dylan16807 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does 'willing to pay' mean, exactly? Surely they're not turning down a raise out of stubbornness. And pay of that caliber is not often hourly.

This was in the context of a political discussion about what the tax bands should be, not about paying the current taxes in reality. Some people want higher taxes and some want lower; what I’m saying is, 50% stood out as an arbitrary threshold that many people seemed possibly willing to agree on. Some complained that rich people shouldn’t be expected to prop up the rest of society, but conceded that progressive tax b…

Tax rates dont pay for services, they pay for preventing inflation. The government printing money pays for services.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#216

Post by kazagistar »

nkrisc wrote: post #194
chillacy wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Negative Income Tax which phases out would work too (though I think a UBI would be more popular and thus resilient to budget cuts, as Alaska has shown). The wonderful thing about cash (UBI, NIT, EITC) is that it's easy to divide up and low-cost to distribute.

Looked into NIT a little, and as I understand it, it could basically be a linear function where Y=0 when X (income) is, for the sake of example, $40,000 yearly. Then anyone over that pays increasing income tax while anyone below receives increasing amount of money from the government instead? Apart from whether linear actually makes sense or not in the real world.

It doesn't have to be linear, that's just the easiest model to visualize and understand it just should be smooth enough in a way that ensures no discontinuity.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#217

Post by smnrchrds »

kazagistar wrote: post #212
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…

The leftist solutions are to get rid of of the conditions entirely, and find non-means-tested ways to accomplish goals more universally. The advantage here is significantly reduced administrative costs, freeing up time and energy of those in a tough situation on recovery rather then stress over beurocracy and limitations, and of course, people not viewing the people on the programs as morally deficient. Social securi…

I reminds me of that quip that if libraries didn't exist already and did not have a history millennia long, no government would create one today. Instead, they would create a means-tested tax credit for purchasing books.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#218

Post by streb-lo »

zeveb wrote: post #195
taneq wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some sort of meritocracy What definition of merit are you using that it's not? > most people don't describe themselves as racist, but a surprisingly high number of people are Calling people racist for preferring to date a particular race is just silly, you might as well call people sexist for preferring to date a particular gender.

> you might as well call people sexist for preferring to date a particular gender. Just give it a few years. I know that Slate (a mainstream publication) a few years ago published an article which mentioned in an aside that it is bigotry for a heterosexual man to refuse to date a male who identifies as a woman. I will be completely unsurprised if in a decade or two the same argument is applied to gender preference, p…

Currently someone who has transitioned is noticeably different than someone who was born that way. I think it's not far-fetched to imagine that in the future there will no longer be any 'uncanny valley' and the stigma will disappear.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#219

Post by sombremesa »

dTal wrote: post #174
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…

>the salary that they offered was $0.50/hour too much for her to stay on food stamps, and was less than her current job I don't understand. How was she eligible for food stamps, if she already had a job that paid more ?

She probably didn't. I took "current job" to mean the job this person has at the time of the telling of this story - i.e. they have since found a greener pasture.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#220

Post by kazagistar »

thrower123 wrote: post #78
tjr225 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Means testing is paternalism. Just giving the poor straight cash and leaving it up to them to use that to get back on their feet is probably the least paternalistic strategy I can think of that isn't just cruel and results in systemically and permanently disenfranchising large parts of the population for bad luck.
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