7 ms·

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

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 a few hundred dollars over, so I called out of a few shifts and nearly got fired over it. I barely squeaked in under the limit, and if I hadn't, there was pretty much no way I would have been able to continue school. It's not like I could suddenly afford it now that I made $35,001 vs $34,999. I have never understood why things like this don't use some sort of sliding scale, rather than absolute dividing line.

hammock 3y ago
An instructive image of the welfare trap: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Welfare_trap.png 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_trap
- autoexec 3y ago
  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.
  - amanda99 3y ago
    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.
    - autoexec 3y ago
      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.
      - danaris 3y ago
        That graph is also showing an ideal situation—that is, you fully qualify for and fully receive all of the benefits listed. That means you have to also know that you qualify for them, apply for them, prove that you qualify, oh, nope, whoops, you missed one piece of proof there—that means you have to start all over. You have to apply for each one, prove that you qualify, jump through all the hoops, you start receiving benefits! Now it's time to apply for the next one, get the slightly different proofs together, send them all in—oh, what's that? someone gave you just enough money that you went over one of the limits? you get nothing this year! A new year, you have to apply for each one, prove that you qualify....
        GolfPopper 3y ago
        So, are you going to go for that 14th job interview, or are you going to go spend four hours making sure you have childcare next month? Do you finish the online test, or do you fill out the form on the benefits website for the fifth time this month?
        UncleEntity 3y ago
        In my cab driving days I hauled around a bunch of people to/from medical appointments and they talk on the phone a lot... Some people are absolute experts at navigating the bureaucracy to the point I expect they know the rules better than the people that work at the various government agencies. It was quite impressive to be honest. One example off the top of my head; this lady was talking on the phone with a friend (or whoever) explaining how their benefits would be impacted if they declared the father of the children resided in the household and how it was much better to just lie and claim to be a single mother. No judgement from me as it was quite the education on governmental programs. As an added bonus I also learned a bunch of methods on how to steal groceries from walmart since people are surprisingly candid on these things when they're just having a conversation with some random cab driver they probably won't ever see again.
  - chefandy 3y ago
    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 but my gut says that whoever attached that SSI criticism would have probably addressed more severe discrepancies first. The source-- a libertarian blog-- implies that the problem is welfare itself, but I think the bigger problem is a naive approach to means testing that is entirely divorced from economic reality.
    - hammock 3y ago
      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 https://youtu.be/Ruzo8bm96Io?t=2191
      - p_j_w 3y ago
        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.
        pierat 3y ago
        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?
        p_j_w 3y ago
        No, that's not my critique at all. If you go back and read the comment I was replying to and then my reply, you'll understand why I said what I said.
      - autoexec 3y ago
  - heroprotagonist 3y ago
    How much of that standard of living is based on credit, though? Credit is largely based on income. Housing, payment flexibility for amenities and vacations, big ticket purchases that reduce long-term costs, etc. When 3/4 of those making less than 50k and 2/3 of those making less than 100k are living paycheck to paycheck, that extra flexibility influences quality of life quite a bit. Quote (https://www.bankrate.com/finance/credit-cards/living-paycheck-to-paycheck-statistics/ https://www.bankrate.com/finance/credit-cards/living-paychec...): * Statistics vary, but between 55 percent to 63 percent of Americans are likely living paycheck to paycheck. * Three in four Americans who earn less than $50,000 are living paycheck to paycheck, compared to roughly two in three of those making $50,000 to $100,000.
    - autoexec 3y ago
      I'm sure that's part of it. It could help explain how one person has to live in a roach infested apartment while another can get a nice house in the suburbs. Same with having no car or only being able to afford a used one in poor condition vs having nice new cars with very low monthly payments. Those two things alone can mean a lot in terms of standard of living. I know that they say it's expensive to be poor but it'd be a very broken system if we had a $60k a year social safety net for everyone, but poor people still couldn't afford fresh healthy food, reliable transportation, or adequate housing and were still fighting to keep their heads just above water.
- deathanatos 3y ago
  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 largest and most problematic benefits cliff in the graph — appears to be specific to PA. But PA doesn't offer a monetary childcare benefit: one would have to be arguing that this is the specific dollar amount that the care is worth … which … IDK. I'd like to at least see that argument. But the vesting cliff, as depicted, doesn't line up with any of PA's cutoffs, either. So, this graph smells of statistical lies.
  - hammock 3y ago
    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-Works-Program.aspx https://www.dhs.pa.gov/Services/Children/Pages/Child-Care-Wo... [1]https://youtu.be/Ruzo8bm96Io?t=2191 https://youtu.be/Ruzo8bm96Io?t=2191
  - em500 3y ago
    Here's an older CBO report making the same point (p.15): https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/11-15-2012-MarginalTaxRates.pdf https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments...
- dclowd9901 3y ago
  I… can’t figure out what you’re saying. 1) “making $30k on welfare”. What is the dollar amount here? Literal checks? All support including food stamps? 2) someone making $81k will take home something like $50k of their income. That’s _way_ more than $30k
- LoganDark 3y ago
  That's an incredibly concise description of it, thank you.
AceJohnny2 3y ago
> 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.
- bombcar 3y ago
  And there are tons of these various programs, all with differing requirements, and some take into account others and some don't. Some trigger "automatically" (if you apply for X and receive it, you qualify for Y, Z) and that can have weird side effects, too.
- cranky908canuck 3y ago
  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".
danaris 3y ago
Frankly, because many people think that any kind of welfare or assistance is, at best, a necessary evil—and more often just evil—and they want to make it painful, complicated, and hard to access.
- JohnMakin 3y ago
  There were parts of what I described that were brutally difficult. Particularly, we would receive a certain $ amount to purchase books (that were frequently $500+ dollars per semester). However, the office that doled this fund out would frequently be weeks behind, or your scheduled disbursement just wouldn’t show up. Then you’d have to find multiple hours out of your work week to go down to the financial aid office to wait in line for hours in an office that was only open 10am-2pm. Or sometimes the complete scam of a bank/card they forced you to use had some issue. So, frequently, you wouldnt even be able to purchase books without a loan or extending credit til 1-2 months into the semester. by that time you could be having midterms and tons of assignment with no textbooks. I would frequently have to beg other students to let me photocopy sections of their books so I could do the assignments. Or resort to pirating. To them that’s “working as intended” I guess. no amount of complaining ever got anywhere.
- lynx23 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - munk-a 3y ago
    > some people think they deserve everything they can claim If they are able to claim something doesn't it stand to reason that we think they deserve it? I am confused how you'd measure your qualification for welfare without using the qualification metrics. At the end of the day welfare in the US extremely stingy even if you manage to max it out - it can be a struggle to survive in a lot of areas due to a lack of CoL adjustments.
  - JoshTriplett 3y ago
    A program strict enough to ensure that absolutely zero people get it who "shouldn't" is also a program strict enough that many of the people who should get it don't. Not because they don't meet the criteria, but because the bureaucracy around vetting people is sufficiently hard to navigate.
dragonwriter 3y ago
> I have never understood why things like this don’t use some sort of sliding scale, rather than absolute dividing line. They often do use sliding scales, but that’s more complex (and expensive) to administer, and (because of multiple interacting programs) ends up not actually solving much of anything. Also, because of the way things (including available funds) work, but even ignoring budgeting for the increased admin cost, a sliding scale probably would start stepping down from full benefit where a sharp cutoff is, that would probably be more like the middle of the sliding scale, so if you “barely squeaked in under the limit” on the sharp cutoff version, you’d probably get far less benefit under a sliding scale system.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
duxup 3y ago
I changed career paths post age 40 via a coding bootcamp. Despite being a terrible student when I was younger, I found had a great time learning, and I've really enjoyed my job ever since. I found myself in a strange position though, lots of services offered benefits to students, discounts, internships, storage / compute time etc. I was not enrolled in a traditional university (although they were administering it), and so I didn't qualify, for much of any of those kinds of offers. Most of the systems in place thought of students as a typical 4 year university student and frankly ... younger. One internship I applied to did not seem to clearly indicate they were only really interested in younger, and more traditional students until the second interview. Some of these rules I get, they don't want someone abusing their free / discounts for other reasons and they have systems in place for dealing with traditional students. With people changing jobs and seemingly continued potential for the need for job market retraining and related disruption and etc ... it feels like it's time to make some adjustments as far as what a "student" is and so on.
- thfuran 3y ago
  >One internship I applied to did not seem to clearly indicate they were only really interested in younger, and more traditional students until the second interview. Well, you missed out on a lucrative lawsuit there if you're in the US. An interviewer telling someone they're not going to be hired because they're over 40 (or even just because they're not young enough, when they are over 40) is legally equivalent to telling them they're not going to be hired because they're black or Jewish.
  - duxup 3y ago
    When you're changing your career and trying to get into an industry ... it's hard to know how that plays out. More directly a buddy of mine, also my age, and in the same camp was straight up told by a recruiter they were looking for someone younger. He had her on speakerphone and asked her to repeat it and she did. Then the question was, do you want to be the guy who calls that out? Trying to get a job... I don't think the outcome is a sure thing, in that case I wanted to do / say something but I felt like it was the applicant's call. Not an easy decision. I respected his choice to just move on, still burns me up a little, but his call IMO.
kwhitefoot 3y ago
It's because the people who make such rules are both innumerate and if not lazy then uncaring.
Wowfunhappy 3y ago
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?
- gringoDan 3y ago
  Probably not relevant unless you have itemized deductions/donations above the value of the standard deduction.
IIAOPSW 3y ago
>I have never understood why things like this don't use some sort of sliding scale, rather than absolute dividing line. Try translating your idea of a sliding scale into a piece of legislation which matches your intention.
- QuadmasterXLII 3y ago
  Here’s my shot: Anyone may at any time declare a portion of their income to be “cliff income,” pay 40% percent tax on it to the feds and 20% to the state, and then keep the last 40% to do with as you please. All govt and private programs that measure income are required to disregard cliff income.
- korhojoa 3y ago
  The usual solution is something like: for x units of excess past the set limit, remove y unit of subsidy/support. Example: something costs 20 money, if you earn 100 money or below, then it is subsidized to cost only 10, where 10 money is a subsidy. For every 2 money you gain, 1 money in subsidy is removed. If you earn 104 money, it will now cost 12. The x and y values vary depending on what kind of things are subsidized, but this is a fairly simple way of doing it that doesn't punish you harshly for a small difference in earnings.

hammock 3y ago

An instructive image of the welfare trap: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Welfare_trap.png 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_trap

autoexec 3y ago
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.
- amanda99 3y ago
  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.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    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.
    - danaris 3y ago
      That graph is also showing an ideal situation—that is, you fully qualify for and fully receive all of the benefits listed. That means you have to also know that you qualify for them, apply for them, prove that you qualify, oh, nope, whoops, you missed one piece of proof there—that means you have to start all over. You have to apply for each one, prove that you qualify, jump through all the hoops, you start receiving benefits! Now it's time to apply for the next one, get the slightly different proofs together, send them all in—oh, what's that? someone gave you just enough money that you went over one of the limits? you get nothing this year! A new year, you have to apply for each one, prove that you qualify....
      - GolfPopper 3y ago
        So, are you going to go for that 14th job interview, or are you going to go spend four hours making sure you have childcare next month? Do you finish the online test, or do you fill out the form on the benefits website for the fifth time this month?
      - UncleEntity 3y ago
        In my cab driving days I hauled around a bunch of people to/from medical appointments and they talk on the phone a lot... Some people are absolute experts at navigating the bureaucracy to the point I expect they know the rules better than the people that work at the various government agencies. It was quite impressive to be honest. One example off the top of my head; this lady was talking on the phone with a friend (or whoever) explaining how their benefits would be impacted if they declared the father of the children resided in the household and how it was much better to just lie and claim to be a single mother. No judgement from me as it was quite the education on governmental programs. As an added bonus I also learned a bunch of methods on how to steal groceries from walmart since people are surprisingly candid on these things when they're just having a conversation with some random cab driver they probably won't ever see again.
- chefandy 3y ago
  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 but my gut says that whoever attached that SSI criticism would have probably addressed more severe discrepancies first. The source-- a libertarian blog-- implies that the problem is welfare itself, but I think the bigger problem is a naive approach to means testing that is entirely divorced from economic reality.
  - hammock 3y ago
    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 https://youtu.be/Ruzo8bm96Io?t=2191
    - p_j_w 3y ago
      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.
      - pierat 3y ago
        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?
        p_j_w 3y ago
        No, that's not my critique at all. If you go back and read the comment I was replying to and then my reply, you'll understand why I said what I said.
    - autoexec 3y ago
- heroprotagonist 3y ago
  How much of that standard of living is based on credit, though? Credit is largely based on income. Housing, payment flexibility for amenities and vacations, big ticket purchases that reduce long-term costs, etc. When 3/4 of those making less than 50k and 2/3 of those making less than 100k are living paycheck to paycheck, that extra flexibility influences quality of life quite a bit. Quote (https://www.bankrate.com/finance/credit-cards/living-paycheck-to-paycheck-statistics/ https://www.bankrate.com/finance/credit-cards/living-paychec...): * Statistics vary, but between 55 percent to 63 percent of Americans are likely living paycheck to paycheck. * Three in four Americans who earn less than $50,000 are living paycheck to paycheck, compared to roughly two in three of those making $50,000 to $100,000.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    I'm sure that's part of it. It could help explain how one person has to live in a roach infested apartment while another can get a nice house in the suburbs. Same with having no car or only being able to afford a used one in poor condition vs having nice new cars with very low monthly payments. Those two things alone can mean a lot in terms of standard of living. I know that they say it's expensive to be poor but it'd be a very broken system if we had a $60k a year social safety net for everyone, but poor people still couldn't afford fresh healthy food, reliable transportation, or adequate housing and were still fighting to keep their heads just above water.
deathanatos 3y ago
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 largest and most problematic benefits cliff in the graph — appears to be specific to PA. But PA doesn't offer a monetary childcare benefit: one would have to be arguing that this is the specific dollar amount that the care is worth … which … IDK. I'd like to at least see that argument. But the vesting cliff, as depicted, doesn't line up with any of PA's cutoffs, either. So, this graph smells of statistical lies.
- hammock 3y ago
  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-Works-Program.aspx https://www.dhs.pa.gov/Services/Children/Pages/Child-Care-Wo... [1]https://youtu.be/Ruzo8bm96Io?t=2191 https://youtu.be/Ruzo8bm96Io?t=2191
- em500 3y ago
  Here's an older CBO report making the same point (p.15): https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/11-15-2012-MarginalTaxRates.pdf https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments...
dclowd9901 3y ago
I… can’t figure out what you’re saying. 1) “making $30k on welfare”. What is the dollar amount here? Literal checks? All support including food stamps? 2) someone making $81k will take home something like $50k of their income. That’s _way_ more than $30k
LoganDark 3y ago
That's an incredibly concise description of it, thank you.

AceJohnny2 3y ago

> 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.

bombcar 3y ago
And there are tons of these various programs, all with differing requirements, and some take into account others and some don't. Some trigger "automatically" (if you apply for X and receive it, you qualify for Y, Z) and that can have weird side effects, too.
cranky908canuck 3y ago
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".

danaris 3y ago

Frankly, because many people think that any kind of welfare or assistance is, at best, a necessary evil—and more often just evil—and they want to make it painful, complicated, and hard to access.

JohnMakin 3y ago
There were parts of what I described that were brutally difficult. Particularly, we would receive a certain $ amount to purchase books (that were frequently $500+ dollars per semester). However, the office that doled this fund out would frequently be weeks behind, or your scheduled disbursement just wouldn’t show up. Then you’d have to find multiple hours out of your work week to go down to the financial aid office to wait in line for hours in an office that was only open 10am-2pm. Or sometimes the complete scam of a bank/card they forced you to use had some issue. So, frequently, you wouldnt even be able to purchase books without a loan or extending credit til 1-2 months into the semester. by that time you could be having midterms and tons of assignment with no textbooks. I would frequently have to beg other students to let me photocopy sections of their books so I could do the assignments. Or resort to pirating. To them that’s “working as intended” I guess. no amount of complaining ever got anywhere.
lynx23 3y ago
[flagged]
- munk-a 3y ago
  > some people think they deserve everything they can claim If they are able to claim something doesn't it stand to reason that we think they deserve it? I am confused how you'd measure your qualification for welfare without using the qualification metrics. At the end of the day welfare in the US extremely stingy even if you manage to max it out - it can be a struggle to survive in a lot of areas due to a lack of CoL adjustments.
- JoshTriplett 3y ago
  A program strict enough to ensure that absolutely zero people get it who "shouldn't" is also a program strict enough that many of the people who should get it don't. Not because they don't meet the criteria, but because the bureaucracy around vetting people is sufficiently hard to navigate.

dragonwriter 3y ago

> I have never understood why things like this don’t use some sort of sliding scale, rather than absolute dividing line. They often do use sliding scales, but that’s more complex (and expensive) to administer, and (because of multiple interacting programs) ends up not actually solving much of anything. Also, because of the way things (including available funds) work, but even ignoring budgeting for the increased admin cost, a sliding scale probably would start stepping down from full benefit where a sharp cutoff is, that would probably be more like the middle of the sliding scale, so if you “barely squeaked in under the limit” on the sharp cutoff version, you’d probably get far less benefit under a sliding scale system.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

duxup 3y ago

I changed career paths post age 40 via a coding bootcamp. Despite being a terrible student when I was younger, I found had a great time learning, and I've really enjoyed my job ever since. I found myself in a strange position though, lots of services offered benefits to students, discounts, internships, storage / compute time etc. I was not enrolled in a traditional university (although they were administering it), and so I didn't qualify, for much of any of those kinds of offers. Most of the systems in place thought of students as a typical 4 year university student and frankly ... younger. One internship I applied to did not seem to clearly indicate they were only really interested in younger, and more traditional students until the second interview. Some of these rules I get, they don't want someone abusing their free / discounts for other reasons and they have systems in place for dealing with traditional students. With people changing jobs and seemingly continued potential for the need for job market retraining and related disruption and etc ... it feels like it's time to make some adjustments as far as what a "student" is and so on.

thfuran 3y ago
>One internship I applied to did not seem to clearly indicate they were only really interested in younger, and more traditional students until the second interview. Well, you missed out on a lucrative lawsuit there if you're in the US. An interviewer telling someone they're not going to be hired because they're over 40 (or even just because they're not young enough, when they are over 40) is legally equivalent to telling them they're not going to be hired because they're black or Jewish.
- duxup 3y ago
  When you're changing your career and trying to get into an industry ... it's hard to know how that plays out. More directly a buddy of mine, also my age, and in the same camp was straight up told by a recruiter they were looking for someone younger. He had her on speakerphone and asked her to repeat it and she did. Then the question was, do you want to be the guy who calls that out? Trying to get a job... I don't think the outcome is a sure thing, in that case I wanted to do / say something but I felt like it was the applicant's call. Not an easy decision. I respected his choice to just move on, still burns me up a little, but his call IMO.

kwhitefoot 3y ago

It's because the people who make such rules are both innumerate and if not lazy then uncaring.

Wowfunhappy 3y ago

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?

gringoDan 3y ago
Probably not relevant unless you have itemized deductions/donations above the value of the standard deduction.

IIAOPSW 3y ago

>I have never understood why things like this don't use some sort of sliding scale, rather than absolute dividing line. Try translating your idea of a sliding scale into a piece of legislation which matches your intention.

QuadmasterXLII 3y ago
Here’s my shot: Anyone may at any time declare a portion of their income to be “cliff income,” pay 40% percent tax on it to the feds and 20% to the state, and then keep the last 40% to do with as you please. All govt and private programs that measure income are required to disregard cliff income.
korhojoa 3y ago
The usual solution is something like: for x units of excess past the set limit, remove y unit of subsidy/support. Example: something costs 20 money, if you earn 100 money or below, then it is subsidized to cost only 10, where 10 money is a subsidy. For every 2 money you gain, 1 money in subsidy is removed. If you earn 104 money, it will now cost 12. The x and y values vary depending on what kind of things are subsidized, but this is a fairly simple way of doing it that doesn't punish you harshly for a small difference in earnings.