Timeline for Why isn’t the tax system continuous rather than bracketed?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
16 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 30, 2019 at 17:18 | comment | added | Eric Buess | Great comment. I’ve updated the question to add some context and hopefully avoid some confusion. | |
| Jun 27, 2019 at 22:45 | comment | added | owjburnham | @alastair Thanks for the link. That was... unexpected. But there’s a logic to it, at least. And I imagine is more a case of being designed for use by people who don’t understand rounding, rather than having been designed by people who don’t. | |
| Jun 25, 2019 at 11:26 | comment | added | James | The maths is usually done by the civil servants. The politicians weigh up the political costs of proceeding with oddities that affect a particular group. Austerity politics has given lots of cover to allow them to introduce a lot of dog-whistling changes. | |
| Jun 24, 2019 at 20:27 | comment | added | JAB | @Delioth The "round half to odd" rule is to prevent the rounding from introducing bias that could occur if everything were rounded up or down. | |
| Jun 24, 2019 at 19:57 | comment | added | Delioth | @alastair At least in the linked documents, the rounding isn't too bad. It's not great and it slightly contradicts their wording (they say to ignore half a pence or less, when really they're saying to ignore anything less than .6 pence). It still feels nicer than the "round half to odd" rule I've seen in places (where it's standard rounding, but X.5 rounds to the odd number: 1.5>1, 2.5>3) | |
| Jun 24, 2019 at 16:44 | comment | added | Mike Scott | Child Benefit in the UK is a bad example, because the withdrawal of the benefit for higher-rate taxpayers is tapered, to avoid precisely what you’re talking about. You’ll pay a pretty high effective marginal tax rate, but you won’t ever actually lose money by earning more. | |
| Jun 24, 2019 at 16:43 | comment | added | al45tair | @Luaan It isn't that rounding is tricky; the NI rounding rules are bonkers. They're the kind of thing that a schoolkid might come up with if they only half understood rounding. | |
| Jun 24, 2019 at 16:16 | comment | added | Luaan | @alastair Rounding is always tricky. We've had to do a lot of work to fix our tax rounding issues when my country switched from 20% VAT to 21% VAT, and suddenly, half the software dealing with taxes failed. Mind you, the difference amounted to about a cent every year, but try telling that to the accountants (or your version of IRS) :P | |
| Jun 24, 2019 at 15:53 | comment | added | al45tair | @owjburnham IIRC it's in the Notes for Software Developers (at least, it was, it's been a while). You can find the latest version of that here: gov.uk/government/publications/… | |
| Jun 24, 2019 at 13:12 | comment | added | owjburnham | @alastair Do you have a link? | |
| Jun 23, 2019 at 13:57 | comment | added | al45tair | Politicians are definitely bad at mathematics. Take a look at the UK's National Insurance rules (in particular, the bit about rounding) if you don't believe me. | |
| Jun 22, 2019 at 21:47 | comment | added | Hagen von Eitzen | Given that a Federal Secretary of Finance(!) once could not answer the question how many zeroes there are in a billion, the last sentence has its merits. (Note that it was clear from the national context which of the two internationally possible values of billion were meant) | |
| Jun 22, 2019 at 21:35 | comment | added | ruakh | I'm neutral toward the last sentence, but I upvoted for the rest of it. ;-) | |
| Jun 22, 2019 at 18:29 | comment | added | EvilSnack | I though the last sentence was spot-on, so I upvoted for you. | |
| Jun 22, 2019 at 18:14 | comment | added | IMSoP | I was about to upvote this, then read the last sentence, which feels unnecessary and biased. | |
| Jun 22, 2019 at 14:17 | history | answered | gnasher729 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |