7 ms·

I can't find the original tweet, but someone (half?) jokingly proposed a law that all benefits must be defined as continuously differentiable functions (thus ma

• falseprofit 10mo ago
  I would guess that was not a joke. The benefits could drop all the way to 0 at a reasonable point unless you impose the stronger condition that the function be analytic.
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• conception 10mo ago
  They should be. And for the great majority of citizens, they should be calculated automatically along with taxes without the need for filing/paperwork. But we must think of the Intuit shareholders and the harm that that would cause them.
  • truelson 10mo ago
    If someone in the coming years ran on taking down regulatory capture and returning that as social safety net funding, public goods, and lower taxes, and had the chops to actually deliver, they'd do well. Though best to start local government first, obviously. We're reaching breaking points in so many places...
    • sharts 10mo ago
      The problem isn’t that such candidates would never accomplish anything let alone get elected due to the insurmountable amount of resistance from so many incumbents with a vested interest in that not happening, ever.
      • mcny 10mo ago
        We couldn't get carried interest legislation to pass. It was that easy of a question and not a single Republican crossed the aisle to support it. Simplifying the tax code and balancing the budget is what they talk about but they never walk the walk.
      • inglor_cz 10mo ago
        One of the biggest problem of a two-party system is that the two parties are thoroughly captured by lobbyists. In a PR system, fresh parties do arise over election cycles, and it takes some time for them to be thoroughly infested. These can then push for some reforms that threaten entrenched interests, and sometimes succeed.
    • jaredklewis 10mo ago
      “They’d do well.” That is not the lesson I’ve taken from the past 15 years of politics in the US and abroad. Political candidates actually interested in taking on the very difficult and nuanced task of governing are routinely drubbed by edge lord culture warriors or candidates that simply promise the world without any regard to annoying facts like existing laws, budget deficits, or basic tenets of economics. I definitely agree there is probably less disfunction and greater chance for reform at the local level.
      • alephnerd 10mo ago
        As someone who formerly worked in this space, the issue is administration is orthogonal to legislature. Administration and implementation is inherently technocratic in nature, but legislation is is often driven by short-term electoral needs. This isn't to say autocracy is the answer (it isn't), but the dysfunction arises when people assume that every single administrative decision needs to be made by "elected officials" and constantly second guess administrators. When administration from local to federal becomes politicized (as is increasingly the norm across the democratic world), implementation slows down severely because the "ideal" solution might not be political tenable. A good example of this is welfare expansion in the US - the assumption is lower income voters who voted for Trump voted irrationally, but in action, the majority of Trump voters tended to be in the 25th-75th percentile income bracket, which in most cases put them outside of the bracket for a number of social services. Those services which were available such as the ACA/Obamacare have been protected by legislators for that very reason because they know they would lose their seats as a result. You're in Japan so you've probably seen similar decisions being made with regards to Japanese rice protectionism [0] - unpopular with urban voters, but urban voters don't swing elections at scale. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41367653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41367653
        • eru 10mo ago
          There's actually plenty of examples out in the real world with competent administration to learn from. Especially if you generalise enough to look at how pockets of competence work even in an otherwise abysmal system, instead of demanding overall competence.
    • simianparrot 10mo ago
      DOGE tried, and despite it’s best efforts still couldn’t do more than make a dent
      • pjc50 10mo ago
        DOGE was a Potemkin organization. They destroyed USAID, smashed up a bunch of other institutions, then went home. Very little of which complied with Federal funding law, either.
        • simianparrot 10mo ago
          [flagged]
    • m_fayer 10mo ago
      Most people don’t even know what regulatory capture really means. There’s no “brand” to rally around and I don’t know how you’d go about building one. And without the concept spread through the population, where would you find the grass roots support you’d need for resisting the avalanche of interest-group pushback? “Draining the swamp” or “revolving door” were sorta in the neighborhood, but still ineffective and counterproductive.
      • potato3732842 10mo ago
        "The swamp" and "evil big corporations" are the left and right's respective brands for this.
  • almosthere 10mo ago
    They definitely should be. Some people might be in situations where asking your boss for a 10k pay cut gives them an extra $1k per year. Just dumb.
  • NoMoreNicksLeft 10mo ago
    I like my cliff. I earn enough that I and my family are ineligible for most welfare schemes. I do not want even 6 cents worth of SNAP. I spent my entire childhood on that, and it disgusts me. Thus, were this policy ever seriously proposed, I would do what I can to dissuade my legislators from voting it into law. There are others like me, too, I am not unique.
    • harvey9 10mo ago
      The cliff here means a disincentive to go for a slightly better paying job because you end up with less overall. I think the 6 cents was hyperbole.
    • hobs 10mo ago
      Right, so people who would use their trauma to prevent themselves from thinking logically about the problem and helping those in the middle instead of some arbitrary line your mind made up?
      • pjc50 10mo ago
        Never underestimate how many good policies go nowhere because some median voter is irrationally mad at them due to something that happened decades ago.
        • NoMoreNicksLeft 10mo ago
          Who would this policy be good for, and if it's not good for me, why should I care?
          • Bjartr 10mo ago
            Because you live in a world where other people exist, and how they go about existing can impact you negatively, both directly and indirectly. The fewer people living in and dealing with poverty, the better off the everyone else is.
      • NoMoreNicksLeft 10mo ago
• terminalshort 10mo ago
  To calculate the amount of your childcare benefit take the negative of the your adjusted gross income (box 26a), divide it by 10,000, and add 2. Then take the arctan of that result and multiply by 5,000. Add 2500π and write the result in box 46. You may round the value of π to 2 digits. If you are filing as head of household, divide the amount in box 46 by the definite integral from 0 to your adjusted gross income (box 26a) divided by 10,000 of sin^2(x)/(x^2 + 1) dx, and write that amount in box 48. If you are unable to find the function of the anti-derivative, IRS rules allow you to approximate with a Riemann sum using the midpoint rule and a rectangle width of 0.1.
  • smilekzs 10mo ago
    Or, as it has always been, piecewise linear approximate it.
• Chinjut 10mo ago
  Why continuously differentiable and not just monotonic?
  • hansvm 10mo ago
    Monotonic is what we have, and it allows cliffs. Suppose, e.g., that you can get $5k/yr in benefits if you make less than $10k/yr in other revenue and $0 otherwise. Unless you have a viable strategy for pushing past $15k/yr it's a strong financial disencentive against actually working, and even then your incremental ROI isn't very good past that cliff (if it takes an extra hundred hours to push to $15.1k/yr, then compared to your $10k/yr option you're only making $1/hr for the extra work).
    • Chinjut 10mo ago
      This doesn't sound monotonic. This sounds like a mapping from pre-benefit income to post-benefit income which sends just under $10k/yr to just under $15k/yr, but sends just over $10k/yr to just over $10k/yr. So it sends a larger input to a smaller output.
      • dgoldstein0 10mo ago
        Yeah I agree, it sounds like a misunderstanding. I'll go further and say what we probably want is for the derivative of net income as a function of earned income to be monotonic increasing but max out less than 1. So that there aren't ranges of income where you are receiving very little per dollar earned and then after some point start receiving more per dollar. But solving benefit cliffs really just means having earned=>net income strictly increasing with the marginal rate reasonable, say at least 30 cents more net income per earned income. Under that constraint, you could have ranged where net income grows slower until you hit some higher dollar amount of earnings, but imo that should also not be desirable.
        • eru 10mo ago
          I mostly agree. However that's all a gross simplification, because there are plenty of taxes and benefits that aren't just a function of income. Eg property taxes or capital gains taxes don't depend on your income at all.
• aidenn0 10mo ago
  That can still have work disincentives; anywhere the magnitude of slope of the benefits is close to (or steeper than) the slope of the income as it phases out, then working more can get you no gain (or lose you money).
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• littlestymaar 10mo ago
  It's not sufficient to make cliffs impossible, you just never want the effective marginal tax rate go above a certain threshold. It's insane that we cap marginal tax rates for the wealthy below 50% “because they need incentives to work harder” yet the working class family is facing an effective marginal rate near 100% because of reduced benefits. The solution would simply be to stop making benefits decrease when salary goes up. “But it's going to be insanely expensive” one may say, but it's an accounting illusion. All we need to do to break the illusion would be to stop counting gross public spendings and taxes and instead count the net public spendings/taxes for each individual (that is, over the whole population you take the difference between what they pay and what they receive and that gives you how much they contribute or how much they cost, instead of the current accounting system where we count people paying for their own benefits). What's really expensive is the economic inefficiency of the current system.
  • CalRobert 10mo ago
    I agree with you, but for what it’s worth I live somewhere top marginal rates are about 50% and indeed 32 hour weeks are very common. I think this is a good thing though.
  • dgoldstein0 10mo ago
    > The solution would simply be to stop making benefits decrease when salary goes up. That's an option, and I'd be interested in how the math works especially with predictions of how the economy would respond. That said I don't think not decreasing benefits is an important requirement. But net income (benefits + earned income - taxes) should be strictly increasing with earned income, and probably at a rate of at least 50% but ideally higher than that up to some reasonable definition of middle class income. It should never be the case that if you earn more you can end up worse off.
    • littlestymaar 10mo ago
      > That's an option, and I'd be interested in how the math works The math works because the derivative of a constant is zero, it's that simple. > That said I don't think not decreasing benefits is an important requirement. But net income (benefits + earned income - taxes) should be strictly increasing with earned income, and probably at a rate of at least 50% but ideally higher than that up to some reasonable definition of middle class income. Exactly, it doesn't need to be fixed, we could also have decreasing benefits, simply with a much lower rate of decrease (ideally the rate of decrease should be the marginal tax rate for this income). But in practice such a system would be much more complex than a flat benefit system for little gain (the more limited the decrease rate is, the closer to a flat rate your public spending would be).
• INGELRII 10mo ago
  There is idea behind that, but continuous is not enough. The variable is all transfers, taxes and benefits T = [all taxes - all benefits] as function of income per person (including children). T starts negative (benefits are negative taxes). Goal: monotonously increasing effective marginal T rate.
  • dgoldstein0 10mo ago
    This. No need for continuity in the derivative - the marginal tax rate should be fine to jump around - but should start low (I'm fine with negative) and increase as you earn more. Like US federal tax brackets, but with benefits also considered.
    • eru 10mo ago
      Continuously differentiable is fine with jumps in that derivative. I agree in principle. And I also suggest that we should probably only have one bureaucracy that does means testing that can then administer both taxes and benefits. No need to duplicate the effort. However most benefits and taxes aren't just means tested against income, but a myriad of other conditions. So net transfers aren't just a function of income.
• paganel 10mo ago
  If you continue with the idea of transfers, which is, in effect, the current government buying off parts of its constituents, then "democracy", whatever has remained of it in the West, will die for good. What happens if I receive money from the Government but in the same time I'm also actively opposed to said Government's actions? Will I be allowed to speak against the Government that is, as a matter of fact, paying me? Will I have second thoughts of doing it? Will the Government cut off aid to me if I'm too vocal against said Government's actions? All this to say that all we're doing is turning most of our countries' citizens into de facto slaves, people with no political free-will and who are well-aware that if they were to speak out against the powers that be they risk destitution.
  • eru 10mo ago
    You are mixing up lots of different ideas. You can have net transfers to the poor without turning most of your country's into net recipients. I also don't understand why you assume that people who are net recipients would stop complaining or voicing their opinion? That's not at all what happens in practice.
    • paganel 10mo ago
      You're turning the "poors" into slaves, into slaves to the Government that is keeping them (the "poors") on the Government's payroll. I'm not "mixing" anything, so if we can please leave that condescending tone behind that would be best. > who are net recipients would stop complaining or voicing their opinion Why? You're asking why the "poors" will have second thoughts about openly criticising the hand that, literally, feeds them?
      • eru 10mo ago
        > Why? You're asking why the "poors" will have second thoughts about openly criticising the hand that, literally, feeds them? No, I'm not asking why the poor would stop complaining. I am pointing out that empirically we observe that people who receive government largess don't shut up! (And that's true for all kinds of government largess, eg also for subsidies for rich people or companies.) No, the "why" question I am asking is: why do you think that recipients of government handouts would shut up, when in the real world they haven't done so? > You're turning the "poors" into slaves, into slaves to the Government that is keeping them (the "poors") on the Government's payroll. Would you say the same about eg car drivers, if the government provides roads free of charge to the user? Or about anyone who benefits from national defense? Or are in-kind benefits excluded from your calculus? In that case, would giving poor people food and clothing and shelter instead of money mean they are no longer 'slaves' by your definition? (For comparison: real-world, actual slaves like in the American South were usually provided with in-kind benefits to keep them alive. Money rarely changed hands, partially because it leads to autonomy.)
• eru 10mo ago
  Continuously differentiable doesn't mean your SNAP check couldn't go to zero.
• estimator7292 10mo ago
  You jest, but as an unemployed student I was approved for $6/mo of SNAP. Like... for what possible purpose would the calculation even go that low? Just deny the application instead of wasting everyone's time and resources. I have no idea how long they put $6 into the account. I never bothered to look.
• deleted 9mo ago
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