Good - just taking time off so I can go in a cave and focus on finishing the book. First draft is done and I’m working on second draft now.
I’ll probably mostly be around during football.
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I have never had the misfortune of encountering a JP fan
why no franchises?
https://mobile.twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1569463423985139712
Prepare to have your brow furrowed
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I made an honest effort to try to care about any of that and I just can’t. lol Harvardbros.
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Sadly it didn’t. It’s mostly stat juking by assuming the most optimistic scenario while knowing reality is different but still taking the most optimistic scenario
The three relative measures graphed above differ considerably from the anchored SPM measure but all four have one important thing in common: they massively overstate the extent to which the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (CTC) reduce child poverty.
As I discussed in my Myths of the Earned Income Tax Credit paper, the data used to measure the antipoverty effect of the EITC is based on a tax simulation that assumes 100 percent of families receive the benefits that they are eligible for. But the real number is 78 percent.
When you swap out the information produced by the tax simulation with actual IRS data about EITC benefit receipt, as Maggie Jones of the Census and James P. Zilak of the University of Kentucky did in a 2019 study, you find that the tax simulation overstates the overall antipoverty effect of the EITC by 50 percent.
For children specifically, the tax simulation overstates the antipoverty effect of the EITC by around 67 percent.
In addition to relying upon an incorrect simulation for EITC and CTC values, the researchers also effectively assume that EITC users receive the full value of the credit they are owed. In reality, 60 percent of EITC beneficiaries use a paid tax preparer to claim their benefits and tax preparers take an average of 13 to 22 percent of the benefit as a preparation fee.
The EITC and CTC benefits used in these poverty measures are also counted in the wrong year. Benefits that families receive from the IRS during tax time of one year are counted as if they were instead received in the prior year. This makes the income-targeting elements of the programs, especially the EITC, appear to be more effective than they actually are. Waiting until the end of the year to see which families had an income just below the poverty line and then giving them money a few months later that you pretend they received in the prior year produces some cool graphs, but it doesn’t actually get these children out of poverty in the year that they experienced it.
These points about how the EITC and CTC are measured may seem like nitpicks, but, when it comes to measuring child poverty trends since 1993, they are really important.
The main thing that happened during the 1990s welfare reform and period immediately after it was that cash assistance for the poorest kids (AFDC) was replaced with phased-in tax credits that were targeted at the upper half of poor kids (the CTC and the EITC). Indeed, in the paper’s section on the extent to which welfare state expansions have reduced child poverty since 1993, the EITC is doing by far the most work.
But rather than trying to measure how well these tax credits work in reality, these researchers have instead opted to assume it works exactly as the fantasy tax simulators say it does. Deep in the report, they even admit some of these problems with the following disclaimer, which doesn’t even include the fact that they are counting tax preparation fees as benefits received and counting the EITC’s benefits in the wrong year:
While we highlight the role of the EITC here, our findings regarding the EITC’s role in lifting children out of poverty have important limitations, so we frame our findings as the potential role of the EITC . Our estimates of the role of the EITC are likely overstated , as the EITC values in the Historical SPM Dataset are simulated based on family income, and on family structure and composition. They do not account for whether family members have Social Security numbers, which have, since 1996, been required of all household members in order to receive the EITC—making 21 percent of children in poverty ineligible to receive EITC benefits. The simulated values also do not account for the approximately 20 percent of tax filers who are eligible for, but do not claim, the EITC. Nor does the simulation account for workers who do not routinely file taxes because they have no tax liability, but are nonetheless eligible for, and would receive, the EITC if they were to file taxes.
There is no other word for this presentation than dishonest. The whole report up to this extensive (but still not quite extensive enough) disclaimer makes it sound like the welfare state — or “the safety net” in their idiom — is actually having an effect it is not having. Then they totally back off of this claim in chapter three and say that they just mean that the new welfare state could potentially have this role if it worked very differently from the way it actually works.
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https://mobile.twitter.com/IwalkVikCelts/status/1569109589035028480
If committing crimes is wrong, I don’t want to be right.
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Apparently, requesting is the new demanding.
Truth is that the person buried the lede as to why she’s actually angry and it has nothing to do with the initial request.
https://mobile.twitter.com/chaedria/status/1569395093999591424
On top of that personal beef with The Atlantic, the person who made the request has politics that this twitter user has issues with. So, it’s not really journalism ethics more than it is a personal thing.
On a lighter note
This looks like beginning of a porno.
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lol Columbia
#18?!?!?
The newly released texts, filed Monday by an attorney representing Nancy New’s nonprofit, show that Bryant, Favre, New, Davis and others worked together to channel at least $5 million of the state’s welfare funds to build a new volleyball stadium at University of Southern Mississippi, where Favre’s daughter played the sport. Favre received most of the credit for raising funds to construct the facility.
https://twitter.com/ryanlcooper/status/1569787874429501442
Just a reminder that Brett Favre and the State of Mississippi are bigger welfare cheats than any poor person ever could be.
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I am shocked that this is a state that cannot provide potable drinking water.
This could get interesting.
The potential shutdown, which could come as early as Friday, could freeze almost 30% of U.S. cargo shipments, stoke inflation, impede supplies of food and fuel, cost the U.S. economy about $2 billion per day and cause transportation woes.
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Maybe those creepy cop robots will start fighting these food ones
https://twitter.com/FilmThePoliceLA/status/1569758479149334530
Shout out to the guy who raised the police tape for the robot
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The fucking robot crossed the street despite having the red hand. These things wouldn’t make it through a single day in Massachusetts pulling moves like that.
I am going to die laughing when they try to set these things out in the Bronx