Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

danluu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 294 posts

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#181

Post by y04nn »

vhcr wrote: post #142

We have some discontinuities in our tax code in Argentina, if you are an independent worker, and earn up to 11,916,410 pesos ($11,682) per year, you pay 793,332 pesos ($777) in taxes, around 6.6%, but if you earn one more peso, you enter the general regime, and start paying >50% in taxes.

A simple solution (probably used in many places) to this problem is to have brackets. Everybody is taxed 6.6% on its income until a certain threshold and the rest is taxed at 50%. You can add more brackets as needed. And so, there is no incentive to be just bellow a certain bracket threshold.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#182

Post by chefandy »

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

Thanks for the correction. I know nothing of that person.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#184

Post by cranky908canuck »

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.

The cliff might be a political feature: you save paying out the benefit (that you took credit for funding) since people who blow the cliff lose the money, but if they complain can be characterized as (some variation of) "welfare cheats".

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#185

Post by _carbyau_ »

jbboehr wrote: post #157
rhelz wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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."

I enjoy a gaming science fiction universe with such "Clanners".

Fun stories do not necessarily make for fun real life experiences I imagine.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#186

Post by dec0dedab0de »

Karellen wrote: post #99
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #72

The 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…

I forgot to mention that because of the crash I was underwater on the house and couldn’t afford to sell it even though I wanted to.

It was also something silly like the article, where if I made like $5k less annually I would have qualified for much more than that. I was struggling at the time and really could have used it.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#187

Post by pierat »

p_j_w wrote: post #119
hammock wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So you actual critique over the chart provided and the claims made therein, rather than your ad hominem?

I don't care who it was. Are the claims verifiable, and are the derived claims defensible?

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#188

Post by pierat »

mrguyorama wrote: post #126
RhodesianHunter wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"Vote for me and I'll show you how bad I can make government" has been supremely effective, somehow

Republicans want to cut funding to programs, then point at how bad the underfunded program is doing, thus demanding more cuts. Either the result is the department is killed, or is on a shoestring budget and everyone hates them. Many were welcomed departments doing good works. People eventually tire of chronically underfunded gov depts, and vote the other side.

Democrats want more taxes, which inevitable come from middle class, not being able to get it from the poor or rich. Then they set laws in those programs as "means testing", where the poor get the benefits, and the middle class doesn't. The rich never needed it. The middle class tire of paying for everything and getting nothing, and vote the other side.

And, that pendulum swings back and forth.

And that's how we get this horrible ass-backward system we have. And going back to first principles and doing is right is "against the other side!".

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#189

Post by richrichie »

inglor_cz wrote: post #6
richrichie wrote: post #3

> The following histograms of Russian elections across polling stations shows curious spikes in turnout and results at nice, round, numbers (e.g., 95%) starting around 2004. This appears to indicate that there's election fraud via fabricated results Two observations: 1. Why from 2004? Things were much worse in Russia before 2004. 2. The numbers of this election seem to agree with approval rating polls conducted by we…

By 2004, a former KGB spook was in power long enough to introduce a falsification system. The 1990s were worse economically in Russia, but Yeltsin was a relatively liberal politician and possibly didn't want to falsify elections.

I am not sure. Yeltsin was “our guy”. He was feted by us, he even addressed the congress, etc. Until he was not when he refused to deliver Russia on a plate.

Guys that are not “our guys” never win a legitimate election. Remember how integrity of elections were questioned when a guy that is not our guy won an election in 2016?

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#190

Post by tomrod »

amanda99 wrote: post #125
hammock wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

It is not: it's inspired by it. If you look carefully, the numbers are different. In Gary's picture, the cliff is from $29k to $69k or so; the one above is much wider. Also direct link: https://web.archive.org/web/20140205020059im_/http://www.aei... (It is funny though, the picture above seems to be very much from a serious libertarian.)

Does their political philosophy category make their argument more or less legitimate in some way?
Post reply on HN