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Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

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Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#111

Post by gringoDan »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #105
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…

Not to condone the school's policy, but could you have donated the excess income to charity to get your taxable income back under the limit?

Probably not relevant unless you have itemized deductions/donations above the value of the standard deduction.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#112

Post by whimsicalism »

> However, a tax system that encourages people to lose money, perhaps by funneling it to (on average) much wealthier options traders by buying put options, seems sub-optimal.

In expectation, they're likely not really funneling that much money to options traders. Indeed - if the option pays out, they likely will not have to worry about medicare/healthcare for quite some time.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#113

Post by hammock »

amanda99 wrote: post #40
autoexec wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The main feature of that image is "childcare" which seems to be a fixed subsidy of $16k (and "CHIP", ~$4k related to child health care). I don't know what the former means and how these are calculated, but if you don't have children, this graph would look a lot less exciting.

The chart (2012) is from Gary Alexander, Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Public Welfare - so take note the commenters who are trying to suggest this is libertarian propaganda.

Pennsylvania has a substantial program to pay for child care for many of its residents: https://www.dhs.pa.gov/Services/Children/Pages/Child-Care-Wo...

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#114

Post by hammock »

chefandy wrote: post #57
autoexec wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

The primary source is a welfare bureaucrat, Gary Alexander, Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Public Welfare, not a libertarian blog: https://youtu.be/Ruzo8bm96Io?t=2191

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#115

Post by hammock »

deathanatos wrote: post #84
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

That graph needs [citation]s. The source it cites does not mention how they obtained the figures for childcare, and a questioner in the comments asks for, and does not receive, a source for that information. The source article itself doesn't even seem to be the source, it links to yet another article. That article also doesn't seem to be the source, the source appears to be … a politician. The childcare part — the la…

The original chart (2012) is from Gary Alexander, Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Public Welfare.[1] Pennsylvania has a substantial program to pay for child care for many of its residents: https://www.dhs.pa.gov/Services/Children/Pages/Child-Care-Wo...

[1]https://youtu.be/Ruzo8bm96Io?t=2191

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#116

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

chubbyFIREthrwy wrote: post #48

>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). ... That means if an individual buying ACA insurance was going to earn $55k, they'd be better off reducing their income by $6440 and getting under the $48,560 subsidy ceiling than they are ear…

A reminder to anyone reading that there is no actual "opposite problem" to yours (which I'm very disturbed to hear about, hope things work out).

For now, there is no income level cut off for ACA premium subsidies, just a limit that says you should never spend more than 8.3% of your AGI (more or less) on health insurance (more or less).

This may change next year and/or in the future.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#117

Post by RhodesianHunter »

autoexec wrote: post #50
amanda99 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main feature of that image is "childcare" which seems to be a fixed subsidy of $16k (and "CHIP", ~$4k related to child health care). I don't know what the former means and how these are calculated, but if you don't have children, this graph would look a lot less exciting.

The ones I've known with kids all seem to have it far worse. If they were getting a $16k tax credit or whatever it must not have been making up for the other costs involved with raising children.

16k wouldn't cover daycare in much of the US let alone food, clothes, etc.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#118

Post by RhodesianHunter »

callalex wrote: post #107
baggy_trough wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It all comes back to the fact that government is a low accountability sector, despite what many people seem to think.

What is the point of saying something like this? Would you prefer that people just not bother to do anything and let poor people starve to death instead?

The "starve the beast" propaganda has been wildly successful and is seeded deep in American culture and psyche.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#119

Post by p_j_w »

hammock wrote: post #114
chefandy wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

The primary source is a welfare bureaucrat, Gary Alexander, Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Public Welfare, not a libertarian blog: https://youtu.be/Ruzo8bm96Io?t=2191

This fact alone doesn't mean much. He was appointed by a Republican governor and could very easily be a liberterian ideologue to the same degree of said blog.
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