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Comment by jiofih | Hacker News Reader

> I"ve seen a lot of employers minimize wages and hours to get as much of their budget into workers pockets as possible.

How would that work? The tax bands are progressive, so you will never get less money from a higher salary and tax rate. That would be pretty dumb.

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If you consider government benefits too, there are "cliffs"[1] at low incomes where an increase in income can result in less take home. But probably not at the salaries a typical developer would get.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/kM6yxab.png

The problem seems to be the cliff of those welfare programs, no? I'm sure they don't make much sense.

Policy makers are smart enough to not intentionally design welfare cliffs (usually). Most of the time it’s the result of complicated eligibility criteria, multiple benefits stacking together, and the program designers not anticipating large increases in the value of the benefit (e.g. housing subsidies).

That's a fascinating chart. I would like to reference it in the future, but I cannot find a source for the data. Did you compile it yourself? Have you written your data and methodology somewhere?

It's from this presentation[1], but you can find similar analysis for lots of different places if you Google around (e.g. this one[2] for Illinois or this one[3] for Georgia).

[1] https://www.slideshare.net/kevinkmac/welfare-failure

[2] http://nebula.wsimg.com/92d8ac7d5aaf3b2df9d4dfaaddcde435?Acc...

[3] https://georgiaopportunity.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/GC...

Thank you.

Poster said NL. Not US.

If the tax brackets are 0% for the first $5, and 50% for the second $5, then if you pay one person $10, $7.5 goes into worker pockets. If you pay two people $5, then $10 goes into worker pockets.

Oh I see. He meant “better for the employer”.

I read it as “better for the employee”.

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