28 ms·

> Earn slightly too much, and vital support disappears My reading of this is that the threshhold for the USA government to withdraw financial (and other?) supp

• eigenman 2mo ago
  Not only is it too low, but it is the discontinuity in support. This leads to perverse incentives where for the wage you could make, you’d barely clear the threshold to lose benefits and make barely more money than on government support. This isn’t an argument to remove support—it’s an argument to remove binary thresholds with smooth ramps to incentivize people to work.
  • ghusto 2mo ago
    I would have said it needs to taper off, not just stop, but reading it described in black and white made me think "actually, why _not_ just stop at a threshhold?". If you can get 2k a month (all numbers pulled from my butt) in disability support, and at some point get a job offer which will give you the same, why _shouldn't_ you work? Non-monetary forms of support should probably continue, or even be increased, depending on what you're going to need to be able to work.
• disgruntledphd2 2mo ago
  > My reading of this is that the threshhold for the USA government to withdraw financial (and other?) support for disabled people is too low, is that right? In general, step functions (earn 200 get benefits, 201 no benefits) are really really bad from a public policy perspective. If you want to get people out of these dependency traps then you need to taper them more effectively. Even tapering them is problematic as you end up with astronomically high effective marginal tax rates, but it's better than a hard cut off.
  • butlike 2mo ago
    But at a certain level, you'll need a step function to go from 0 (none; no taper) to 1 (taper).
    • zbentley 2mo ago
      I'm not sure that's true, though most policies are implemented that way. If you get, say, a basic income payout that's a function of the income you make, that function scales all the way from 0 income/max UBI to >= max UBI income/0 UBI. Not that that's like ... a policy slam-dunk or anything. Even putting aside the massive hurdle of getting UBI enacted into law, you'd still have to cope with sources of unreported income, asset/gift valuation, and so on. But that second category are, at least, tractable problems as evidenced by most countries' tax codes having contingencies to deal with them.
      • inigyou 2mo ago
        The U in UBI is that you give the same amount to everyone to avoid all that bullshit work of deciding who should get it. Then you raise income tax percentages so that people with a certain income are paying zero net and people with more income are paying into the system.
    • ElevenLathe 2mo ago
      This is true only in the trivial sense that one can't process a payment for less than a penny.
• AnimalMuppet 2mo ago
  Perhaps too low. Definitely too much of a step function.