Social Collapse At The Margin

Glenn links to this study noting the various "fiscal cliffs" faced by low income recipients of mens-tested Government aid. Why work, one wonders?

The Tax Policy Center looked at this problem last summer and reched a similar conclusion. However, they added a second question - why get married?

Marriage Penalties. Means testing and joint filing has resulted in hundreds of billions of
marriage penalties for low and middle income households. Essentially, when moderate-income couples marry, their marginal tax rate moves up from, say, 25 percent, to the 50 and 80 percent ranges shown above.

For instance, a moderate income male marrying a working mother with children can easily cause her to lose EITC, SNAP, Medicaid, and other benefits as well. Marriage penalties arise because of the combination of variable U.S. tax rates and joint, rather than individual, filing by married couples for benefits and taxes.

If graduated taxes were accompanied by individual filing or if all income and transfers were taxed at a flat rate, there would be no marriage penalties. The EITC, by the way, can provide both subsidies and penalties, and Social Security generally provides very large marriage bonuses.

Someone looking at our system from Mars would conclude that we don’t want moderate income families with children to marry, since we penalize them, but we do want older households (at ages when children are likely to be gone) to marry, since we subsidize them.  

Government assistance is an area where Obama could show Nixon-to-China leadership. And pigs might fly.

Comments

[Jim Eagle]

James D,

Will Smith is Judge in the movie. Here is the full cast:

"Film adaption cast

Peter Lake. Colin Farrell will play Peter Lake, a character in the book that gets help from a white horse (Athansor) with supernatural running and jumping ability [11].

Other candidates for this part included Tom Hiddleston and Benjamin Walker[12].

Pearly Soames. Russell Crowe will play Pearly Soames[13], a character in the book that leads a group of feared criminals and who wants to kill Peter Lake.

Pearly Soames' right-hand man Romeo Tan[14]. Kevin Corrigan will play Romeo Tan, a small character in the book, but maybe one with an expanded role in the movie.

Beverly Penn. Jessica Brown Findlay will play Beverly Penn, a character in the book that falls in love with Peter Lake and has a fever that makes her comfortable in extremely cold weather. One of Ms. Findlay's first acting roles was in the television series Downton Abbey.

Other candidates for this part included Bella Heathcote, Elizabeth Olsen, Gabriele Wile, Lily Collins and Sarah Gadon[15][16].
J
udge. Will Smith[17]

Isaac Penn. William Hurt[18]

Hardesty Marratta. TBD

Virginia Gamely. TBD

Virginia Gamely's mother. Jennifer Connelly will play Virginia Gamely's mother[19]. This character in the book has a flair for vocabulary and in the book is much older than Hardesty Marratta, who she houses after he and approximately 200 other people are rescued from freezing in a stuck train.

Connelly has worked in the past with both Mr. Crowe and Mr. Goldsman in A Beautiful Mind. That movie had a scene with Connelly in makeup as a much older person. She recently worked with Mr. Crowe in Noah, another movie partly filmed in the New York City area."

[James D.]

JiB, thanks for that!

[Jane - Mock the media]

This is why we will never come back as a nation.

[NK]

MelR-- I know the Flat Tax will never happen- even Reagan couldn't get it done-- although he and Bradley ( a very decent man) came close. I really despair; if GHWB hadn't screwed up tax rates in 1991, and if the 1994 Repubs were led by a politically astute leader (rather than Gingrich) in 1995 and they got Medicare reform done, the fiscal picture in this country would have been orders of magnitude better. Instead, we have the calamity that Pete Peterson, warren rudman(RIP) and Perot warned about 20 years ago. One bit of good news, Obama killed the American Jobs Machine, so he'll run out of OPM faster than anybody ever imagined. We'll be Greece -- in a Sovereign sense--very quickly.

[Extraneus]

Why do people respond to below-average trolls? It's pretty easy to identify and skip over their posts, but it's much harder to do the same for the replies.

[Melinda Romanoff]

Jane-

I don't think the powers that be will allow him to run. I'll know more later.

[Rick Ballard]

RSE,

Watch the weekly income number in next weeks employment report to get a feel for the increasing erosion in the economy. The Obamacare 28 hour week should actually increase employment slightly while decreasing average weekly earnings (and making more people eligible for supplemental benefits).

Bernanke is searching for other ways to rob bondholders via another QE?, it seems each attempt is failing more quickly. He's certainly established a handsome death spiral. Hit the accelerator, Mad Ben, we just can't wait to see how this ends.

[RichatUF (at my secret, undisclosed location)]

Ex-

Felt like spitballing in class today. Actually its a good time for bed.

[RichatUF (at my secret, undisclosed location)]

Nytol all.

[Ranger]

Meanwhile, on the other Mid-East front, flight are canceled from Damascus airport due to fighting, and the cell phone system appears to be down.

Things may be moving quickly to a culmination point... or not.

[Spending cuts first!--jimmyk]

I know a lot of people who love Winter's Tale, so I read it and tried to like it, but just didn't get it. Partly it's because I've never really gone for fantasy-fiction, which is probably a simplistic description of WT. I liked the first half, with the vivid depiction of 19th century NY, but then for me it kind of went off the rails. Maybe the movie will make sense of it.

[Jim Eagle]

Jane,

After reading that Andrew Malcom piece on Chicago politics I had to spray my office with Fabreeze:)

[Melinda Romanoff]

JiB-

That's nothing compared to some of the real doozies around here.

[narciso]

That will be a crossing the streams moment, no, didn't Reynold's resignation trigger the dominoes
that led Obama to run for the State Senate, along with Carol Palmer, whose signature he disqualified,

[narciso]

Lousiana is only the South end of Illinois;

http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2012/11/28/holders-doj-spanked-for-possible-misconduct-in-new-orleans-police-prosecutions/

[Extraneus]

Common lament: "Oh, woe are we! How can we regain our country if we can't somehow defeat the MSM? How are we ever going to be able to fight these titans of public opinion? They're too powerful!"

Well, the press is quite vulnerable to intimidation. Just saying.

Associated Press and the Profit of Mohammed

[MarkO]

I will continue to say this. A group of rich white conservatives should buy ABC, NBC or CBS. End of problem. Not only will they break the MSM embargo, they will make money.

[narciso]

Yes, that's why there is the lesson of Conrad Black, buying the Chicago Sun Times, don't try that again,

[Melinda Romanoff]

narciso-

The lesson from Conrad Black's ownership of The SunTimes is don't investigate the Mayor of Da Great City of Chicago. They'll hang everything on you.

[narciso]

Well that's a corollary, of the main theorem, he's Canadian, although as a fan of Dupleissis,
he should have known better,

[Trevor Saccucci]

First off - Hi Jane! You've gotten me commenting here again after eight years' absence!

Now... I had much of my thinking on the US's current economic and political situation crystallized by one of Jim Miller's comments in the previous thread, and an article in the American Thinker which I'm too lazy to look up and link. In short, our nation has been operating in a statist socioeconomic paradigm for about a hundred years, with the individualist paradigm making only slight deviations in that baseline, and never actually driving the it into individualist territory during that time. I think conservatives, particularly those in the federal government, have been ships of individualism - and not so many of them and not so much of the time as we'd like to think - afloat on a sea of statism for that hundred years. The voters may have to feel the full weight of statism upon them before being convinced that it should be rejected. Of course, the more heavily statism weighs on its subjects, the more it hurts, but the harder it is to throw off... We live in interesting times...

[Jane - Mock the media]

YAY Trevor! Welcome back! I've pretty much settled on doom. I'm hoping the cloud lifts at some point.

[Jim Eagle]

Jane,

There is another old JOMer that I haven't seen in a while. He was the guy who use to write those great parodies about Axelrod. Do you remember who I have in mind?

[Jane - Mock the media]

Nope - but someone will - undoubtedly Hit.

[Porchlight]

Fiscal conservatism is an easy sell. Voters love it.

In some ways bubu is correct here, in that Obama can make the laughable claim in two successive campaigns that he is interested in paring down government and some voters will hear this and applaud.

He won't ever do it and they won't ever notice - because their support for him is not predicated on it. It is just another "sounds good to me" box-checking device Obama can use to keep his supporters from listening to - and potentially voting for - an actual fiscal conservative.

It's like a salesman when asked "does your product do X?" The answer is always "yes, our product does X," even when it doesn't. The customer who really cares about X will drill down and ask for a demonstration of X. The customer who thinks X sounds pretty good but isn't truly invested in it will just make the mental check mark and allow the salesman to move along to the next part of the pitch.

[Trevor Saccucci]

Thanks, Jane! I'm really, really hoping that doom, if (more likely when) it comes to pass is rapidly transitory (a hint as to why: look carefully at my LinkedIn profile). I live in the DC metro area, and I've seen the economy take it in the neck here in terms of both employment and real estate prices, contrary to what you may have heard or read elsewhere.

[Porchlight]

Hi Trevor - welcome back.

[Jane - Mock the media]

Trevor,

I am clueless about how to look at anything on Linked in. It took me about 6 years to reconstruct my password. I swear I will plan to get to it.

[Trevor Saccucci]

Thanks, Porchlight. I've come here for years to get smart analysis of current events, typically much smarter than I could and can find anywhere else, and I eventually chagrined myself; here I was, getting the benefit of all of this insight, and not giving anything (for whatever it's worth) back. It was like having neighbors you never talked to for eight years, but listening in to their conversations during their backyard barbecues. The analogy is particularly apposite because many of you are my neighbors in real life - I live in Germantown, MD. Besides, much of what I've learned in life (professionally, even!) I've learned at parties, and JOM is like a good cocktail party without the intoxication or the hangovers, and even the most boorish party guests are pretty easy to deal with!

[Trevor Saccucci]

Jane,

No biggie. As for LinkedIn, try clicking the "forgot password" link on your sign-in page.

[Jane - Mock the media]

LOL - it really wasn't that simple. At least for me.

[Extraneus]

I've noticed some evidence of intoxication and hangovers from time to time.

[Trevor Saccucci]

Jane - oops! You've already reconstructed your password, and that didn't sink in on my first (or second, or third) time reading your post. Just try noodling around LinkedIn the next time you sign into it; they also have pretty good help links on-site. Failing that, feel free to e-mail me (or ChaCo; I seem to remember he's on LinkedIn, too) and one way or another you'll be using the site comfortably in no time.

[bunkerbuster]

News media is the freest market in America. Virtually zero government regulation, subsidies or other "meddling."
Yet conservatives ritually worship what they insist is their failure in the field.

[sbw]

Obviously, bunky, you never had to deal with independent contractor law with newspaper carriers.