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Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

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Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#51

Post by MichaelZuo »

lesuorac wrote: post #25

> It's generally believed that this is caused by a discontinuity in youth sports: > 2. Within a given year, older kids are stronger, faster, etc., and perform better I've seen a few youth ice hockey games and by god it's just unfair; there's a kid like a foot taller than the rest. I'm kind of surprised there isn't some system that buckets kids by size , it can't be fun for the small kids to get elbowed in the neck ev…

I noticed the same in Ontario, any kids who weren’t born in the first few months of the year had a huge disadvantage.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#52

Post by armchairhacker »

At least in the government, there should be a law that any hypothetical scenario where someone making more money before government taxes/incentives would cause them to earn less after, must be quickly resolved by replacing hard cutoffs with gradients.

No benefits should apply 100% for anyone making under a certain amount and 0% for anyone making over. Instead there should be a range they slowly decrease, so that if you make $1 more before the benefit you still get less than $1 after. Maybe even a lot less, like only $.30. But you should never lose money.

This is obvious. It goes to show how bad beaurocracy and subtle misaligned incentives are that these hard cutoffs ever existed in the first place.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#53

Post by JohnMakin »

danaris wrote: post #47
JohnMakin wrote: post #18

I went to school at a relatively late age and started in community college. The school/state had a policy where any independent income earners making less than 35,000/year would not pay tuition. A single dollar over that would require paying full tuition of ~$60/unit or about $750 a semester. One year I worked a little more overtime during the holidays than usual and realized with a week to go in the year that I'd go…

Frankly, because many people think that any kind of welfare or assistance is, at best, a necessary evil—and more often just evil —and they want to make it painful, complicated, and hard to access.

There were parts of what I described that were brutally difficult. Particularly, we would receive a certain $ amount to purchase books (that were frequently $500+ dollars per semester). However, the office that doled this fund out would frequently be weeks behind, or your scheduled disbursement just wouldn’t show up. Then you’d have to find multiple hours out of your work week to go down to the financial aid office to wait in line for hours in an office that was only open 10am-2pm. Or sometimes the complete scam of a bank/card they forced you to use had some issue.

So, frequently, you wouldnt even be able to purchase books without a loan or extending credit til 1-2 months into the semester. by that time you could be having midterms and tons of assignment with no textbooks. I would frequently have to beg other students to let me photocopy sections of their books so I could do the assignments. Or resort to pirating.

To them that’s “working as intended” I guess. no amount of complaining ever got anywhere.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#54

Post by groestl »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #15
Simon_ORourke wrote: post #2

A friend of mine from a farming family in Europe once told me a story that his family would wait until the year one of his siblings was due to go to college and then invest in new farm machinery. Their reported net income for the year would reduce or go negative and the sibling would get to college effectively for free on a hardship tuition grant.

At least in America, they usually look at the past 2-5 years of income to avoid these types of shenanigans.

In Austria, we just don't have tuition fees, which also avoids these types of shenanigans :)

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#55

Post by Macha »

jeffbee wrote: post #10

Similar to car prices, we see the same mental rounding effect in rents. People will rent a home for $2100 or $2200, sometimes even $2150 for those truly dedicated to price finding, but hardly anyone rents an apartment for $2137. Source: my data for the city of Berkeley https://observablehq.com/@jwb/berkeley-rent-board-data#cell-...

The car pricing seems to be that some amount of people round 79,999 down to 70,000 when determining mileage and so cars with 79,999km on the odometer are penalised much less than cars with 80,000km.

I think the rent one is much more driven by "some landlords like round numbers for posting ads/doing their finances".

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#56

Post by SilasX »

Simon_ORourke wrote: post #2

A friend of mine from a farming family in Europe once told me a story that his family would wait until the year one of his siblings was due to go to college and then invest in new farm machinery. Their reported net income for the year would reduce or go negative and the sibling would get to college effectively for free on a hardship tuition grant.

Huh? Wouldn't they have to depreciate it over several years so only a fraction of it would be a deduction in the current? Or is the idea that they'd buy so much capital equipment that even the fraction they could depreciate that year would wipe out all the other income?

AIUI, the concept of depreciation exists in tax law precisely to prevent indefinitely deferring taxes via reinvestment (though it can't do anything about the portion of reinvestment going to pay salaries a la Amazon):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15061439

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#57

Post by chefandy »

autoexec wrote: post #33
hammock wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An instructive image of the welfare trap: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Welfare_trap.png People making $30K on welfare would need to make $81K at an actual job to have the same income after tax. More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_trap

Something seems very off with that image. I've known a lot of different people who were on welfare over the years, and not one of them had a standard of living anywhere close to what someone who nets $60,000 a year does. That said, there is absolutely a cliff where you could risk a loss just by taking in more money.

Well, this is well outside of my area of expertise, but the only factual dispute attached to the image in wikipedia is that SSI is only available to people essentially assumed to be out of the work pool. From the SSI site: "Little or no income, and Little or no resources, and A disability, blindness, or are age 65 or older." That's a pretty tiny slice of that graph. Maybe it just hasn't been thoroughly interrogated but my gut says that whoever attached that SSI criticism would have probably addressed more severe discrepancies first.

The source-- a libertarian blog-- implies that the problem is welfare itself, but I think the bigger problem is a naive approach to means testing that is entirely divorced from economic reality.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#58

Post by pksebben »

nullhole wrote: post #16
bitcoin_anon wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: > Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes. Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for…

If we all just followed the letter of the law and not the spirit of the law, society would be a lot worse than it currently is.

What we need to do is construct systems that are robust against this kind of gaming and don't reward the gamers as heavily as ours does.

The wealthiest people and companies on the planet pay a pittance of taxes, if any at all. We lavish those who totally ignore the spirit of the law all the time.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#60

Post by bombcar »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #45
JohnMakin wrote: post #18

I went to school at a relatively late age and started in community college. The school/state had a policy where any independent income earners making less than 35,000/year would not pay tuition. A single dollar over that would require paying full tuition of ~$60/unit or about $750 a semester. One year I worked a little more overtime during the holidays than usual and realized with a week to go in the year that I'd go…

> I have never understood why things like this don't use some sort of sliding scale, rather than absolute dividing line. Because it's easier to pass a law that sets up such welfare when it has a simple threshold, or at least it was. Last time this article came up, someone referenced a group of lawmakers in the US who were working at smoothing out these awful discontinuities, but I can't quickly rustle up the link.

And there are tons of these various programs, all with differing requirements, and some take into account others and some don't.

Some trigger "automatically" (if you apply for X and receive it, you qualify for Y, Z) and that can have weird side effects, too.

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