71–80 of 151 posts
So now making 231k makes you worse off than someone making 230k? Why even have that threshold when it doesn't even exclude that many people, it just causes weird incentives.
The article also mentions a 50% subsidy up to $310,000. The details aren’t spelled out, but subsidies like this often phase out gradually to avoid a cliff at the threshold.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am also confused by cliffs. Maybe someone more knowledgeable than me could explain why you would ever want them for something like this instead of just having higher progressive tax rates for well off people to make up for it. Naively I would think that that’s significantly easier from and administrative point of view too.
It's because it's easy and administratively simple, and it's easy to figure out how much you have to earn before you can actually bear the cost. In reality, it leads to a grey area where in the short term you're better off earning less to get the benefit, but it's eminently fair and easy. And in general, increasing taxes is not easy, and the richer people are, the more able they are to fight against it. So we often c…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am also confused by cliffs. Maybe someone more knowledgeable than me could explain why you would ever want them for something like this instead of just having higher progressive tax rates for well off people to make up for it. Naively I would think that that’s significantly easier from and administrative point of view too.
> I am also confused by cliffs. Maybe someone more knowledgeable than me could explain why you would ever want them for something like this instead of just having higher progressive tax rates for well off people Because middle-income clawback with sharp cliffs rather than gradual clawback starting or reaching into upper income ranges pits the middle-income segment of the working class against the poor in funding batt…
Subsidizing childcare helps families stay, but it doesn't address why childcare, housing, and everything else are so expensive in the first place
Everything else is so expensive because of the second of those reasons, plus everyone having higher salary demands because of high housing prices.
Increasing housing supply can mitigate the problem somewhat, but the other drivers of cost will still remain, and I Think most people would agree you don't actually want to deal with the other cost drivers to aggressively. I mean, even dealing with the high-income-earners-as-cost-drivers problem softly by raising high-end marginal tax rates somewhat is a a highly controversial position.
Subsidizing childcare helps families stay, but it doesn't address why childcare, housing, and everything else are so expensive in the first place
I think this is just Baumols cost disease in action: you really cant have amazingly well paying jobs (like in SF generally) AND super low paid laborers without some kind of class system/feudalism/etc.
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I am also confused by cliffs. Maybe someone more knowledgeable than me could explain why you would ever want them for something like this instead of just having higher progressive tax rates for well off people to make up for it. Naively I would think that that’s significantly easier from and administrative point of view too.
It's because it's easy and administratively simple, and it's easy to figure out how much you have to earn before you can actually bear the cost. In reality, it leads to a grey area where in the short term you're better off earning less to get the benefit, but it's eminently fair and easy. And in general, increasing taxes is not easy, and the richer people are, the more able they are to fight against it. So we often c…
In the former case, I can think/worry about it for 10 minutes per year; in the latter case, if I’m close I have to think/worry about it a lot more and carefully plan out and estimate things like tax-deferred savings and capital gains/dividends/capital gains distributions to make sure I don’t earn an extra dollar and pay $10-25K of marginal tax on that dollar.
In a lot of 3rd world and less well off countries, childcare is done by the grandparents(mostly grandmothers), I'm always surprised why this isn't true in the west. Here we have an aging population, so grandparent/grandchild ratio should be very high.
In a lot of 3rd world and less well off countries, childcare is done by the grandparents(mostly grandmothers), I'm always surprised why this isn't true in the west. Here we have an aging population, so grandparent/grandchild ratio should be very high.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's also great (by American standards) public transit into/through the city. Caltrain and BART can get you into SF quickly from quite a large area nearby.
"by American standards" is doing a lot of lifting. On a scale of 1 to 10 I'd give SF about a 4 compared to cities like Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, London, Amsterdam, Seoul, Singapore, ...