• TheDoozer@lemmy.world
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    19 hours ago

    When you are talking large income to larger income, that makes total sense, but are there limits for access to things like child tax credits where if you go over you are no longer eligible, causing significant increase (I just looked, and it’s at $200k single of $400k jointly, so unless you have A LOT of children, I suppose there wouldn’t be a huge effect)? Similar to people on government assistance who go from getting full assistance to getting nothing at a certain income level?

    • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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      4 hours ago

      The big one there is food and housing subsidies. The way way we have it set-up can create a situation where a raise can cost you benefits that are worth more than the raise. With disability benefits there can actually be limits on the amount of money you’re allowed to have in general, which means that disabled people can find themselves in places where not only do they need to avoid trying to find work that they might be able to do, since trying and failing can still make them need to restart the benefits application process or even pay back historical benefits, but they also need to reject gifts above a certain value and can’t prepare for any type of emergency, like a car breakdown.

      It’s annoying because it creates a disincentive to do the things that would help people on assistance actually get off of it, when the people who push for those limits purport to want them for exactly that reason.
      Tapering off benefits as income grows, but at a slower rate than the income growth creates a continuous incentive for a person on benefits to increase their earned income. (If you lose $500 in benefits for every $1000 in income, your $1000 raise still puts $500 extra in your pocket, instead of potentially costing you your entire $8000 food subsidy)

      Can’t do that though, because it doesn’t punish people for the audacity of needing help.

    • Apytele@sh.itjust.works
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      18 hours ago

      This is a big factor. A lot of people conflate less benefits with higher taxes because fear-brain just knows they both equal increased hardship in the end. They’re technically wrong but their statistically slightly more active amygdalas are responding to a genuine threat, just one that they’ve been very skillfully misdirected into helping worsen.

        • Apytele@sh.itjust.works
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          11 hours ago

          tbh the more I learn and experience that’s most of the human experience. I had a Minister when I was young that said there’s really only two human emotions, fear and love, and that without significant intervention fear pretty much always wins. I’ve been working in psychiatry for almost a decade now and there’s lots of finer points to be made about human psychology but in the end it pretty much all does just boil down to fear and love.

          He was an exceptionally good Minister, to the extent that for while I didn’t understand how common it was for people to be deeply betrayed by a church leader. It was not uncommon for people in the community to genuinely compare him to Fred Rogers (who was incidentally also a Presbyterian minister). Very similar background, temperament, points of advocacy, and even appearance and mannerism; if they hadn’t both been alive at the same time it almost might make me believe in reincarnation.