Okay but can we talk about how beautiful that Polish language exam score histogram is?
Suspicious discontinuities (2020)
151–160 of 294 posts
Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)
#152Is this true? You can't mark cap losses against income to reduce income more than a few thousand. You have to actively make less, not make bad investments.
Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)
#153>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…
> The "logic" there (from reading discussions of the cutoff) is that, "well, if you're below the poverty line, you should be on Medicaid and not on the ACA exchanges at all, silly!" Okay, but if you have wildly varying income, and a high income from previous years, you don't know that you'll be "in poverty" this year, and won't qualify because of the past year. This wasn't setup this way because it was thought to be…
People like me are an extreme edge case, I doubt this was a big factor in any debate.
Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)
#154Earlier 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
A conservative "welfare bureaucrat" who was brought in to gut the welfare system
Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)
#155At 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 y…
Right, and this is one of the reasons why I support a UBI that replaces most existing welfare programs. Amazingly some people criticize UBI on the grounds that it removes the incentive to work, when it's almost exactly the opposite.
Funnily, I'm okay with people not working if they didn't want to. Most people would end up getting bored doing nothing after a few months and work with what they like to do anyway.
Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
16k wouldn't cover daycare in much of the US let alone food, clothes, etc.
What are you imagining the typical rate is in much of America. When we lived in the city we had a range of about 225 to 300 per week as of last year. Outside of the city we pay 160 per week. The real issue was the waiting list…
Lol, over 400/week is standard in eastern PA, US. Many daycares sampled in our search. Medium cost of living suburban area.
Also over 1 year wait list.
Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
- Trust fund babies are far more rare than people making ~$50k - Trust fund babies will not qualify for much government assistance It is a net good for the economy and the individual if a person who is capable of making ~$50k does so within the workforce, rather than avoid improving their own life in order to qualify for assistance. This is not a moralization of the use of government assistance, it is a criticism of…
> It is a net good for the economy [for individuals to improve their lives] I agree. If you've just inherited $25 million, it would still be better for you and for society for you to get a job--even a job paying $50k a year if that is all you could get. But...are you going to be incentivized to do so? If you care about somebody not wanting to make $50k because they'd lose a $10k subsidy, how much MORE should you care…
> I advocate a 100% inheritance tax
What sort of nonsense half-measure is this? I propose a 100% tax on parent-child resource transfers starting from the moment of birth!
Although, you might just cut out the middleman, seize the children, and raise them in a state-run "Nurturing Center."
Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's often said that the cruelty is the point.
If it were, why would they offer welfare programs at all? Surely an "indolence tax" assessed on anyone with income below a certain threshold would be more cruel.
What do you think poor people would do if there were no welfare programs?
Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)
#159The worst one of these that affected me was money helping people in the 2008 housing crisis. qualifying was based on what percentage of your income your mortgage payment was. So I would have got it if I had made a little less money, or if i had bought a house I knew I couldn’t afford. It felt like being punished for making the right decisions.
So... people who'd been misled into making bad decisions and were being given help because they really needed it, made you feel like you were being punished by not getting similar help you didn't really need because you were making OK money and had avoided making the same kind of mistake? IMO, that's a really glass-half-empty way of looking at the situation. You did good! Try to give yourself a break. People like you…
It's definitely both a glass-half-empty way of looking at things, and also true. I think the point is that the people who did the right thing ended up, at the end, with smaller houses and the same money.
Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)
#160It's too bad income "cut-offs" even exist. Shouldn't it always be a smooth function?
It depends on public opinion. In some countries people think, taxes must be equal for all, or linearly grow (and with ideally smooth function).
They even sometimes change mind and make experiment with other function.
Many experts think, this is because in these countries, laws made entities tax agents (every entity pay all taxes for all hired people), so people just don't bother how many taxes they pay, and how much time spent to calculate all these things and to fill all papers.