ok that was my slightly more than wild ass guess. I do dream of a jump of a jump like the Epstein Drive in the Expanse, but those are obviously rare.
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I donât know where to put this, so here it is. The article is long but it is a nice history of the Iowa caucuses and why they were greatâŚand terrible. The 2020 stuff is really just a frame for the story of the history of the caucus.
As someone who has worked on several campaigns now, the influence of the Iowa caucuses on how candidates (up and down the ballot) conduct their campaigns is hard to overstate. Literally everything we do on the field organizing side stems from McGovernâs, Carterâs, and Obamaâs successful Iowa campaigns. All the âgrassrootsâ stuff that is de riguer on modern campaigns was born there. Local offices, phone banking, canvassing, volunteer-driven campaignsâŚall of it.
I know itâs passe now, but there is definitely something about Iowa. I truly wish everyone here who hates on disengaged voters, the process, and yes, even Iowa itself, could have had a chance to go work on a campaign in Iowa. Literally everyone there is an engaged voter, and I sincerely hope that South Carolina can figure out how engender that same level of interest and participation in their own population.
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I feel like Iâve come around to universal welfare just from the administrative side of things
The initial shape of the new Working Families Tax Credit (WFTC) starts off simple enough: every family in New York will receive $1,500 per child per year paid out in quarterly installments. Had the policy writers stopped there, the WFTC would be a very straightforward universal child allowance that was easy for parents to sign up for and easy for the state to administer.
But they didnât stop there. Instead, they decided to add a phaseout to the program that would reduce the $1,500 benefit by two cents for every dollar earned beyond $25,000 for singles and $50,000 for married couples. The two percent phaseout is applied until the benefit declines to $500 per child at which point it stops. In graphical form, it looks like this.
Hereâs how they administer the phaseout
Introducing this phaseout into the program creates a long list of administrative headaches and reading the policymakers try to resolve them in the bill text is the best case anyone can ever make against designing programs this way.
The first problem this design presents is that, in order to apply the phaseout, the tax administration has to know what tax unit a child will belong to and what the annual income of that tax unit is going to be. Neither piece of information is knowable until December 31 of a given year but the quarterly payments happen before December 31.
So how do you make the quarterly payments while applying a phaseout that requires information that does not yet exist? In this bill, the answer is that you have the New York tax commissioner guess what the variables are going to be for each tax unit. It does not say how they are going to make these millions of guesses, but the most likely approach will be to assume that every tax unit will remain intact and have the exact same income as it had the year before.
However you do it, the tax commissioner is clearly going to guess wrong in a large minority of cases, meaning that many people will receive quarterly WFTC payments that are incorrect.
So how do you deal with these tax units that are receiving incorrect quarterly payments? The bill states that the quarterly payments will âbe subject to adjustment due to changes in employment or family status over the course of the year.â Another way of putting this is that parents who are receiving WFTC payments that are too big or too small due to the tax commissioner making an incorrect guess about them will have to file tax forms in the middle of the year to get the tax authority to correct their payments. This will be annoying for parents and require the tax authority to waste money to hire a bunch of workers to process these mid-year WFTC adjustments.
Of course, in reality, a lot of people who are getting the wrong payment due to the tax commissionerâs wrong guess about them will not file any mid-year paperwork because they donât know they need to or because they just donât want to mess with it. This will probably especially be true for families who are receiving WFTC overpayments.
So how do you deal with the overpayments that occur due to an incorrect guess from the tax commissioner followed by a failure by the parent to report the need for a mid-year WFTC adjustment? The bill states that, instead of providing the $1,500 of WFTC payments in four equal installments of $375, the tax commissioner will knock the first three payments down to $300 and then states that âthe fourth advanced payment shall be made after the end of the tax year and shall be adjusted to match the actual credit due.â Put differently, $225 ($75 times 3) of the first three quarterly payments will be held back from every parent until the end of the year solely so that the tax authority can reduce the extent of overpayment to the parents that end up receiving too much due to the tax commissioner incorrectly guessing their income.
But if you do the math, youâll see that holding back $225 from the first three payments and then holding back the entire fourth payment does not fully solve the overpayment problem. Some tax units who are only owed $500 from the credit will receive $900 from the first three quarterly payments. Even if they donât receive any of their fourth quarterly payment, they still wind up overpaid by $400.
So how do you deal with the overpayments that are left over even after the oversized fourth payment is garnished? The bill text appears to answer this question indirectly with this sentence:
If a taxpayer establishes that they are requesting and receiving payments under this paragraph in good faith by establishing that they properly claimed payments under this subsection in the prior year and that they have not experienced a substantial change in circumstances such that they have a reasonable expectation of eligibility in the current year, then they shall not be held responsible for an incorrect prepayment/refund amount.
From this, it appears that these residual overpayments will be clawed back by the tax authority unless the parent goes through some kind of process to prove that they made a reasonable mistake in receiving them. As with the mid-year adjustments, this is going to be an enormous pain for parents who get hit with it and require wasting money on administrative staff to work through these appeals.
as opposed to
What they should do instead is pay out the $1,500 benefit to all children and then create a two percent surcharge tax for incomes beyond $25k/$50k for families with children up to $1,000 of tax per child. This is distributively identical to the phaseout being proposed but very different administratively.
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Do people think there would be any interest in an ethics thread? I started a philosophy thread awhile ago that didnât get much traction. But you would think that ethics would be a subject of interest to posters here based on the most popular topics of conversation.
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Seems bad! Too bad Iâm not a subscriber. 
You might be the one filet o fish they sell a year. I always assumed it was sort of a gag menu item.
*ahem*
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Filet-o-fish is pretty good, donât knock it if you havenât tried it. Iâm leery about ordering it during off-peak hours though, if it isnât freshly made itâs dogshit. Same window of edibility as McDonaldâs fries.
I thought Filet o Fish was a thing for Catholics on Fridays.
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Thatâs how it started
They sell over 300 million per year. Suzzer sounds like he can make some big orders, but I donât think thatâs all him.
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2007-02-20-fish2-usat_x.htm
[Article also includes a fun little story about how the sandwich got on the menu. A franchisee in Ohio proposed it b/c he wanted to offer something people could eat during Lent. Roy Kroc thought having an beef/chicken alternative was a good idea, but proposed a âMcHulaâ (a pineapple ring on a bun) instead. They ran a sales competition between the two products, and when the Filet won, it was put on the menu nstionally]
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I had a freind who worked for McDonalds who swore that the Filet O Fish was just a Quarter Pounder with different packaging. They literally come from the same tap in the kitchen.
They still do 2-for-whatever filet-o-fish deals during Lent. Or at least they do where I am.
I believe fish fillets were added to the menu because it used to be a sin for Catholics to eat meat on Fridays. They sold huge numbers of sandwiches in areas that were heavily catholic.
Later the Vatican went back on it being a sin, but still some Catholics practice this, especially older ones.
