Chebucto Regional Softball Club

@ThreeSigma @futurebird That's a very math-knower type of a reaction. I kind of feel the same way but I think it's already beyond the point where many policy people will find it comprehensible, let alone the general public.

@futurebird The thing is, I remember people getting this wrong even in the days when most people filled out a paper 1040 by hand. So they had actually gone through the calculation and they still didn't understand it. Now, most of them probably did this crucial step with a table lookup. But you *can* look at that table in the 1040 and see that it's a function that doesn't have gigantic steps in it. And if I recall correctly, if your income is too high for the table there's a bit where they actually explain the formula, which is piecewise linear.

@futurebird Back in the 2000s when I was active on LiveJournal, I do remember actually educating one of my LJ friends about this, and it was one of my proudest moments there. He was a pretty smart guy who worked in movie CGI in San Francisco. But the circles he moved in were pretty right-libertarian and he was exposed to a lot of their theorizing and would pass it on.

At one point we were discussing taxes, and I mentioned in his comments that when you pass a bracket boundary, only your income above the threshold is taxed at the higher marginal rate, so you don't take home less money. The lightbulb actually went on in his head, and he was so stunned that he made a whole other post explaining this at length and credited me with telling him.

So not everyone who doesn't get it is in bad faith. But I think they've been exposed to bad-faith discussion.

@futurebird I think the inability to get marginal tax rates is motivated reasoning/propaganda. People purposefully don't get it for ideological reasons, then other people hear the tales and unthinkingly accept them.