7 ms·

If your kid is kidnapped you should get a break…

vikingerik 5y ago
If you reward something, you get more of it. This creates a black market of arranging kidnappings for the tax break. The original topic about stolen property is the patch for the same kind of loophole. Without this rule, you could arrange to have something of value stolen in order to avoid a taxable transaction. Imagine your employer giving a bonus by leaving an envelope of cash conspicuously unguarded.
- roughly 5y ago
  > If you reward something, you get more of it. This creates a black market of arranging kidnappings for the tax break. This is the kind of unhinged batshit economic thinking that leads to people dying because they can’t afford insulin.
  - ahzhou 5y ago
    It’s not that crazy. People sometimes sell their baby off to finance gambling debts. Some parents are terrible and we shouldn’t be giving them economic reason to have more children.
  - qeternity 5y ago
    No, it's not. This is a well studied phenomenon, and completely unrelated to healthcare affordability.
    - roughly 5y ago
      The core argument from economists for things like co-pays and against free healthcare is that absent a cost, people will over-consume health care, which misses the forest for the trees in the same way that the post I was responding does. The notion of humans as primarily rational actors and the conception of policy as needing primarily to guard against exploitation by those actors leads to policies like saying "sorry, as far as the IRS is concerned, those aren't your kids anymore" or "sorry, guess you gotta go without insulin or food," which are frankly fucking monstrous and should be rejected by reasonable people.
      - dragonwriter 5y ago
        > The core argument from economists for things like co-pays and against free healthcare is that absent a cost, people will over-consume health care People dying because they can't afford insulin are usually not dying because they have insurance where the prescription co-pays for insulin is too high, but because they either are actually uninsured, are effectively uninsured because of a high deductible, or have insurance that works on a coinsurance rather than co-payment model. And even then that's usually not really the problem, the problem is usually that they can't afford a more basic life necessity (often food or shelter) for themselves or their dependents, and voluntarily forego (or limit use of) insulin to afford the other need. Which is a real problem (and a real public economic policy problem), but usually not fundamentally a healthcare policy problem. (On the other hand, it's often a problem where moral hazard arguments of the type at issue here contribute to the failure to solve, so the argument about that being the problem may still be correct by a less direct route then seems to have been intended.)
        roughly 5y ago
        I am not arguing about health care policy, I am arguing about the core economic philosophy that makes "just give them the insulin they need so they don't die" not a tractable proposal in our society.
    - Sebguer 5y ago
      Please show me the studies that suggest people would arrange kidnapping of their children for tax improvement if the IRS hadn't put this in the codes.
      - motoxpro 5y ago
        I think it's similar to people adopting kids for the payment. Nothing to stop these people from then arranging for a "kidknapping" afterward. Some tangential articles to show that people exploit children for money. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/25/how-an-adoption-broker-cashed-in-on-prospective-parents-dreams https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/25/how-an-adoptio... https://www.npr.org/2019/10/09/768533784/arizona-official-arrested-in-multi-million-dollar-baby-mill-adoption-fraud-schem https://www.npr.org/2019/10/09/768533784/arizona-official-ar...
      - darawk 5y ago
        Every study ever done on demand curves for literally anything shows that they consistently slope downwards, with the exception of Veblen goods, which kidnapped children most certainly are not.
        dragonwriter 5y ago
        > Every study ever done on demand curves for literally anything shows that they consistently slope downwards, with the exception of Veblen goods Since Veblen goods are defined as anything where the demand curve slopes upward, that would only be a result of an empirical study if the study was designed to test, and strong enough to confidently disprove, the existence of goods with a flat demand curve. But it's not meaningful in any case. > Veblen goods, which kidnapped children most certainly are not. [citation needed]
        darawk 5y ago
        > Since Veblen goods are defined as anything where the demand curve slopes upward, that would only be a result of an empirical study if the study was designed to test, and strong enough to confidently disprove, the existence of goods with a flat demand curve. But it's not meaningful in any case. Look at the other things that are Veblen goods. They are status symbols. Handbags, rare cars, etc. Kidnapped children are clearly not a member of this category. > [citation needed] Please. This is a ludicrous demand for rigor, and not how science actually works.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - joshspankit 5y ago
    Kind of, yes. Health care for profit rewards companies who limit supply, increase prices, and set the goal of having long-term “customers” because each of those things brings in more cash. It’s not economic thinking that’s driving the ship though.
  - Guest42 5y ago
    I wish more data was available for this phenomenon, I estimate the number of deaths would be surprisingly high.
  - more_corn 5y ago
    I understand what you’re saying. I too hate the practice of discarding real solutions because of overblown fears of misuse. But on the other hand, go and look up The Cobra Effect.
    - roughly 5y ago
      > go and look up the Cobra Effect So, first, the "cobra effect," like most economic proverbs, is apocryphal. It didn't happen. It's a story economists tell their kids to keep them from sharing. Second, there's a big damn difference between "I'm going to grow a snake because I'm getting paid for it" and "I'm going to get my kids kidnapped so I can collect a tax credit without actually having to pay for the kids." It may not appear that way if one's working model of people is "dispassionate rational actor," but it turns out in the real world most people have some kind of irrational emotional attachment to their kids. Finally, I'd submit that "Cobra Effect"-type problems arise as a factor of two errors - the first is misunderstanding the cultural group for which you're designing practices, and the second is a weirdly inflexible view of society that accepts someone manipulating the system as just a sort of thing that happens and not an egregious breach of the social contract warranting a response.
      - manicdee 5y ago
        There are people who have no attachment to their kids and would happily use them as ammunition in personal conflicts, as cheap labour for their business, or as property to exchange for other goods. Don’t assume that everyone else subscribes to your morality, ideology or “ethics”. It’s a brutal world out there and some people value power much more than you do.
- musingsole 5y ago
  You get more of the thing, but you don't necessarily get so much more of it that it outweighs the benefit of having incidentally induced it. Using a corner case of behavior to justify systemic suppression of otherwise rational behavior just perpetuates the cycle of pain. Welfare royalty exist. But not nearly in numbers high enough to ethically justify hamstringing the system.
  - arbitrage 5y ago
    There is also the question of just how richly "welfare royalty" is actually living it up. If they exist, it's nowhere near the levels portrayed in popular media.
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      There was one tv opinion commentators who, upon seeing video from inside welfare recipients' home, remarked something along the lines off "They have a refrigerator! If they can afford that, how badly can they have it?" So, part of the problem is where people choose to draw the line on "royalty". If refrigerator ownership meet your criteria then sure, you're going to see royalty everywhere.
      - isoskeles 5y ago
        I hear people bring up this example to scoff at every now and then, but it’s always some unstated rationale. The progression of technology mostly allows us to live like royalty compared to people 300 years ago, minus the terrible indignity of having to work. I’ve yet to hear an explicitly stated argument for why I’m supposed to think someone who has access to a refrigerator, internet, food, etc. is impoverished, except for, “Somesuch CEO earns 100000000x more than they do.” That said, sure, “welfare royalty” seems like a misnomer. I assume they typically live like regular, “middle-class” people without the job part.
        ineedasername 5y ago
        I'm a little surprised: Do you honestly believe that having a refrigerator, internet, and food makes a person middle class? For refrigerator & food it's hard to have one without the other unless you spend a heck of a lot more money on takeout etc. As for internet, that's pretty much a bare minimum of communicating these days, and in many cases of poverty the way people get their internet is through their cell phones, which absent home internet (which many don't have) is both the gateway to the internet and absolutely necessary to function in today's society. Maybe we are talking about "welfare" in different ways? In the US, welfare is a constellation of programs, not just one single program that gives $$ each week/month. Everything from subsidized school lunches, medicaid (CHIP for additional care for children), SNAP... your comment about "without the job part" indicates that you might not be aware that a very large number of people are on one or more of these programs and work fulltime+ jobs. Where I live it was a real crisis during COVID school closures because the poorest children had parents with jobs that could not be done remotely and parents could not find or afford alternatives, at the same time that any internet they had was through cell phones (usually the parents phones) so the school district needed to send out wifi hotspots & chromebooks so that students at least had the basic tools to learn... but had to be left alone (if they were old enough) or parents quit their already low-paying jobs to watch over their kids. None of the above sounds like middle-class without the job part. As you began your comment: I hear people bring up your sort of argument to scoff at the idea that significant % of the population may fall through the cracks or just get left behind. I don't understand the point of view except as lack of direct experience with people living in these not-middle-class positions of poverty on the brink of collapse.
- thescriptkiddie 5y ago
  Economists love to hear an apocryphal story about a bounty on dead cobras backfiring, then generalize it until they do incalculable damage to society.
- zeteo 5y ago
  > If you reward something, you get more of it. This creates a black market of arranging kidnappings for the tax break. There's no reward, you'd be getting the same tax break if the child was not kidnapped. The rule is about how long it takes to lose the tax break in case of kidnapping.
  - masklinn 5y ago
    > There's no reward, you'd be getting the same tax break if the child was not kidnapped. Except if the kid was not kidnapped, you have to pay for the kid's expenses and welfare. I expect somebody who wants to keep the tax break without the kid is not too worried about the kid's intrinsic welfare.
    - isoskeles 5y ago
      I agree, but why bother to arrange to have them kidnapped? Surely the risk is much higher than the reward of a tax break. It seems like an inherently stupid idea compared to just abandoning the kid. Who would even agree to kidnap somebody else’s child for this purpose? I’d suspect the first 9 out of 10 convicted felons would still tell the police your plans. Most people would be too suspicious that you’re trying to entrap them, asking them to kidnap your child. And what can you offer someone to agree to do this if your own reward is a temporary tax break? At this point, you might as well kidnap your own child.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  >If you reward something, you get more of it. This creates a black market of arranging kidnappings for the tax break. you already have a tax break for the kid, it's a dependent, all that was being said if your kid gets kidnapped you can still claim it as a dependent for half a year and the commenter thought it would be reasonable to allow longer.
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    In fact to expand the tax dependency of a kidnapping - you should be allowed to write off whatever moneys are spent on trying to get the kid back - although for all I know that is already deductible in some systems.
- dmingod666 5y ago
  I mean "I'll have that large police investigation to go with my taxes" doesn't sound like a sane strategy..
- giantg2 5y ago
  It doesn't really reward it. You're still claiming the dependent as you did the year prior to them being kidnapped. It's basically status quo.
VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
The tax code doesn't deal with emotions
- Hamuko 5y ago
  But only because there's no monetary value with emotions. If your tears had price tags attached to them, IRS would be all over it.
- roughly 5y ago
  Of course it does. The tax code is a law written by humans, which means it’s a set of emotional value judgements written in dry enough language that we can pretend what you said is true.
  - VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
    The tax code itself does not deal with emotions. There's no code with a provision that says you can ignore it if you feel sad about something. The people applying the tax code can make exceptions at their discretion. It's a difference.
    - roughly 5y ago
      It's not, though. The code was written with a certain emotional state. If Senator Jones of the Great State of Wherever's kids were kidnapped, we'd have the Jones amendment to the tax code saying that kids were dependents until they clearly weren't, because we were all sad for Senator Jones at the time we wrote the code. Ignoring that fact means that we treat the law as some piece of inviolable logic, as opposed to something we thought made sense at the time, and prevents us from seeing it as something we both can and ought to change should it not deliver the results we want.
      - voakbasda 5y ago
        If ever you wanted to see a prime example of emotionally derived laws, look at how fast the Patriot Act was passed after 9/11. That body of legislation was sitting in a desk, waiting for the day where it could exploit our emotions about the situation. And their plan worked perfectly.

If you reward something, you get more of it. This creates a black market of arranging kidnappings for the tax break. The original topic about stolen property is the patch for the same kind of loophole. Without this rule, you could arrange to have something of value stolen in order to avoid a taxable transaction. Imagine your employer giving a bonus by leaving an envelope of cash conspicuously unguarded.

roughly 5y ago
> If you reward something, you get more of it. This creates a black market of arranging kidnappings for the tax break. This is the kind of unhinged batshit economic thinking that leads to people dying because they can’t afford insulin.
- ahzhou 5y ago
  It’s not that crazy. People sometimes sell their baby off to finance gambling debts. Some parents are terrible and we shouldn’t be giving them economic reason to have more children.
- qeternity 5y ago
  No, it's not. This is a well studied phenomenon, and completely unrelated to healthcare affordability.
  - roughly 5y ago
    The core argument from economists for things like co-pays and against free healthcare is that absent a cost, people will over-consume health care, which misses the forest for the trees in the same way that the post I was responding does. The notion of humans as primarily rational actors and the conception of policy as needing primarily to guard against exploitation by those actors leads to policies like saying "sorry, as far as the IRS is concerned, those aren't your kids anymore" or "sorry, guess you gotta go without insulin or food," which are frankly fucking monstrous and should be rejected by reasonable people.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > The core argument from economists for things like co-pays and against free healthcare is that absent a cost, people will over-consume health care People dying because they can't afford insulin are usually not dying because they have insurance where the prescription co-pays for insulin is too high, but because they either are actually uninsured, are effectively uninsured because of a high deductible, or have insurance that works on a coinsurance rather than co-payment model. And even then that's usually not really the problem, the problem is usually that they can't afford a more basic life necessity (often food or shelter) for themselves or their dependents, and voluntarily forego (or limit use of) insulin to afford the other need. Which is a real problem (and a real public economic policy problem), but usually not fundamentally a healthcare policy problem. (On the other hand, it's often a problem where moral hazard arguments of the type at issue here contribute to the failure to solve, so the argument about that being the problem may still be correct by a less direct route then seems to have been intended.)
      - roughly 5y ago
        I am not arguing about health care policy, I am arguing about the core economic philosophy that makes "just give them the insulin they need so they don't die" not a tractable proposal in our society.
  - Sebguer 5y ago
    Please show me the studies that suggest people would arrange kidnapping of their children for tax improvement if the IRS hadn't put this in the codes.
    - motoxpro 5y ago
      I think it's similar to people adopting kids for the payment. Nothing to stop these people from then arranging for a "kidknapping" afterward. Some tangential articles to show that people exploit children for money. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/25/how-an-adoption-broker-cashed-in-on-prospective-parents-dreams https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/25/how-an-adoptio... https://www.npr.org/2019/10/09/768533784/arizona-official-arrested-in-multi-million-dollar-baby-mill-adoption-fraud-schem https://www.npr.org/2019/10/09/768533784/arizona-official-ar...
    - darawk 5y ago
      Every study ever done on demand curves for literally anything shows that they consistently slope downwards, with the exception of Veblen goods, which kidnapped children most certainly are not.
      - dragonwriter 5y ago
        > Every study ever done on demand curves for literally anything shows that they consistently slope downwards, with the exception of Veblen goods Since Veblen goods are defined as anything where the demand curve slopes upward, that would only be a result of an empirical study if the study was designed to test, and strong enough to confidently disprove, the existence of goods with a flat demand curve. But it's not meaningful in any case. > Veblen goods, which kidnapped children most certainly are not. [citation needed]
        darawk 5y ago
        > Since Veblen goods are defined as anything where the demand curve slopes upward, that would only be a result of an empirical study if the study was designed to test, and strong enough to confidently disprove, the existence of goods with a flat demand curve. But it's not meaningful in any case. Look at the other things that are Veblen goods. They are status symbols. Handbags, rare cars, etc. Kidnapped children are clearly not a member of this category. > [citation needed] Please. This is a ludicrous demand for rigor, and not how science actually works.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- joshspankit 5y ago
  Kind of, yes. Health care for profit rewards companies who limit supply, increase prices, and set the goal of having long-term “customers” because each of those things brings in more cash. It’s not economic thinking that’s driving the ship though.
- Guest42 5y ago
  I wish more data was available for this phenomenon, I estimate the number of deaths would be surprisingly high.
- more_corn 5y ago
  I understand what you’re saying. I too hate the practice of discarding real solutions because of overblown fears of misuse. But on the other hand, go and look up The Cobra Effect.
  - roughly 5y ago
    > go and look up the Cobra Effect So, first, the "cobra effect," like most economic proverbs, is apocryphal. It didn't happen. It's a story economists tell their kids to keep them from sharing. Second, there's a big damn difference between "I'm going to grow a snake because I'm getting paid for it" and "I'm going to get my kids kidnapped so I can collect a tax credit without actually having to pay for the kids." It may not appear that way if one's working model of people is "dispassionate rational actor," but it turns out in the real world most people have some kind of irrational emotional attachment to their kids. Finally, I'd submit that "Cobra Effect"-type problems arise as a factor of two errors - the first is misunderstanding the cultural group for which you're designing practices, and the second is a weirdly inflexible view of society that accepts someone manipulating the system as just a sort of thing that happens and not an egregious breach of the social contract warranting a response.
    - manicdee 5y ago
      There are people who have no attachment to their kids and would happily use them as ammunition in personal conflicts, as cheap labour for their business, or as property to exchange for other goods. Don’t assume that everyone else subscribes to your morality, ideology or “ethics”. It’s a brutal world out there and some people value power much more than you do.
musingsole 5y ago
You get more of the thing, but you don't necessarily get so much more of it that it outweighs the benefit of having incidentally induced it. Using a corner case of behavior to justify systemic suppression of otherwise rational behavior just perpetuates the cycle of pain. Welfare royalty exist. But not nearly in numbers high enough to ethically justify hamstringing the system.
- arbitrage 5y ago
  There is also the question of just how richly "welfare royalty" is actually living it up. If they exist, it's nowhere near the levels portrayed in popular media.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    There was one tv opinion commentators who, upon seeing video from inside welfare recipients' home, remarked something along the lines off "They have a refrigerator! If they can afford that, how badly can they have it?" So, part of the problem is where people choose to draw the line on "royalty". If refrigerator ownership meet your criteria then sure, you're going to see royalty everywhere.
    - isoskeles 5y ago
      I hear people bring up this example to scoff at every now and then, but it’s always some unstated rationale. The progression of technology mostly allows us to live like royalty compared to people 300 years ago, minus the terrible indignity of having to work. I’ve yet to hear an explicitly stated argument for why I’m supposed to think someone who has access to a refrigerator, internet, food, etc. is impoverished, except for, “Somesuch CEO earns 100000000x more than they do.” That said, sure, “welfare royalty” seems like a misnomer. I assume they typically live like regular, “middle-class” people without the job part.
      - ineedasername 5y ago
        I'm a little surprised: Do you honestly believe that having a refrigerator, internet, and food makes a person middle class? For refrigerator & food it's hard to have one without the other unless you spend a heck of a lot more money on takeout etc. As for internet, that's pretty much a bare minimum of communicating these days, and in many cases of poverty the way people get their internet is through their cell phones, which absent home internet (which many don't have) is both the gateway to the internet and absolutely necessary to function in today's society. Maybe we are talking about "welfare" in different ways? In the US, welfare is a constellation of programs, not just one single program that gives $$ each week/month. Everything from subsidized school lunches, medicaid (CHIP for additional care for children), SNAP... your comment about "without the job part" indicates that you might not be aware that a very large number of people are on one or more of these programs and work fulltime+ jobs. Where I live it was a real crisis during COVID school closures because the poorest children had parents with jobs that could not be done remotely and parents could not find or afford alternatives, at the same time that any internet they had was through cell phones (usually the parents phones) so the school district needed to send out wifi hotspots & chromebooks so that students at least had the basic tools to learn... but had to be left alone (if they were old enough) or parents quit their already low-paying jobs to watch over their kids. None of the above sounds like middle-class without the job part. As you began your comment: I hear people bring up your sort of argument to scoff at the idea that significant % of the population may fall through the cracks or just get left behind. I don't understand the point of view except as lack of direct experience with people living in these not-middle-class positions of poverty on the brink of collapse.
thescriptkiddie 5y ago
Economists love to hear an apocryphal story about a bounty on dead cobras backfiring, then generalize it until they do incalculable damage to society.
zeteo 5y ago
> If you reward something, you get more of it. This creates a black market of arranging kidnappings for the tax break. There's no reward, you'd be getting the same tax break if the child was not kidnapped. The rule is about how long it takes to lose the tax break in case of kidnapping.
- masklinn 5y ago
  > There's no reward, you'd be getting the same tax break if the child was not kidnapped. Except if the kid was not kidnapped, you have to pay for the kid's expenses and welfare. I expect somebody who wants to keep the tax break without the kid is not too worried about the kid's intrinsic welfare.
  - isoskeles 5y ago
    I agree, but why bother to arrange to have them kidnapped? Surely the risk is much higher than the reward of a tax break. It seems like an inherently stupid idea compared to just abandoning the kid. Who would even agree to kidnap somebody else’s child for this purpose? I’d suspect the first 9 out of 10 convicted felons would still tell the police your plans. Most people would be too suspicious that you’re trying to entrap them, asking them to kidnap your child. And what can you offer someone to agree to do this if your own reward is a temporary tax break? At this point, you might as well kidnap your own child.
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
>If you reward something, you get more of it. This creates a black market of arranging kidnappings for the tax break. you already have a tax break for the kid, it's a dependent, all that was being said if your kid gets kidnapped you can still claim it as a dependent for half a year and the commenter thought it would be reasonable to allow longer.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  In fact to expand the tax dependency of a kidnapping - you should be allowed to write off whatever moneys are spent on trying to get the kid back - although for all I know that is already deductible in some systems.
dmingod666 5y ago
I mean "I'll have that large police investigation to go with my taxes" doesn't sound like a sane strategy..
giantg2 5y ago
It doesn't really reward it. You're still claiming the dependent as you did the year prior to them being kidnapped. It's basically status quo.

VWWHFSfQ 5y ago

The tax code doesn't deal with emotions

Hamuko 5y ago
But only because there's no monetary value with emotions. If your tears had price tags attached to them, IRS would be all over it.
roughly 5y ago
Of course it does. The tax code is a law written by humans, which means it’s a set of emotional value judgements written in dry enough language that we can pretend what you said is true.
- VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
  The tax code itself does not deal with emotions. There's no code with a provision that says you can ignore it if you feel sad about something. The people applying the tax code can make exceptions at their discretion. It's a difference.
  - roughly 5y ago
    It's not, though. The code was written with a certain emotional state. If Senator Jones of the Great State of Wherever's kids were kidnapped, we'd have the Jones amendment to the tax code saying that kids were dependents until they clearly weren't, because we were all sad for Senator Jones at the time we wrote the code. Ignoring that fact means that we treat the law as some piece of inviolable logic, as opposed to something we thought made sense at the time, and prevents us from seeing it as something we both can and ought to change should it not deliver the results we want.
    - voakbasda 5y ago
      If ever you wanted to see a prime example of emotionally derived laws, look at how fast the Patriot Act was passed after 9/11. That body of legislation was sitting in a desk, waiting for the day where it could exploit our emotions about the situation. And their plan worked perfectly.