> 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?) support for disabled people is too low, is that right?

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eigenman 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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disgruntledphd2 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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.

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butlike 3 hours ago | parent [-]

But at a certain level, you'll need a step function to go from 0 (none; no taper) to 1 (taper).

	▲	zbentley 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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AnimalMuppet 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Perhaps too low. Definitely too much of a step function.