Quote:
Originally Posted by gerntz
So if a future Congress ever changes the benefits/filing rules again they couldn't say they were doing so because the previous rules had unintended consequences? I mean, every rule/law is always fully thought out till its end?
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They can do whatever they want, but I would call that changing a law or backing it out, not fixing an unintended consequence.
I'm trying to think of an example. The best one I come up with is the ACA subsidy cliff. The intent of the law is to provide affordable health insurance by giving subsidies to lower income people. In doing so, they created a situation where $1 of extra income can result in $100s in lost subsidies. Since normally tax cutoffs like tax deduction limits for medical expenses or IRA limits are phased such that you don't have cliffs like this, I would call this an unintended consequence. (It's just an example, so if you want to argue that maybe they really intended for the subsidy cliff to exist, I'm not interested in going there.) If they passed a way to smooth the subsidy so that extra income never costs you more in lost subsidy than you had extra income, that would be a correction to an unintended consequence. The primary goal of the program was to provide a sliding scale subsidy, not to have such a cliff.
Without getting into the whole political discussion, and I'm sorry I couldn't quickly think of a less political example, if they were to rescind the whole program, that's not a "correction", that's backing out or reversing the program.
It's just a terminology thing and not very important. The poster I referenced was hoping for a "correction" in the file and suspend change. Since there seems to be no side consequence arising from the change that needs to be changed to make it really work as designed, there is no "correction" he should hope for, but rather he would have to hope they change their mind and back it out.
Put more simply, if congress passes a law to make A happen, and A happens, but B happens as well, they might try to make a correction to eliminate B so that only the intended A happens, especially if B isn't a good thing. But if they pass a law for A, and only A happens, it's not a "correction" to eliminate A.
I don't know why you seem to be having trouble understanding what I am trying to say, but I'm not going to waste any more time on it. If I'm not explaining it well enough, I don't know how to do it better.
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