Values in Current Law Policy

[brittainhard]

@MattHJensen @PeterDSteinberg

I'm working on the problem that causes the output of the _AGI_surtax_thd paramater to look like this:

The surtax parameter only has values for one year, so the expand_2D function adds in the missing values up to 2017. The problem is that inflation rates get applied to the 9e99 values, and you end up with strange numbers in the UI. If you are using the app and set the year to 2013, then the default inputs look fine, but they get larger as you increase the year setting, which is why you get values like 9.71309658528e+99.

Peter and I talked it out, and we both think that values ending in e99 are arbitrary placeholders, so the main problem here is fixing how these values appear on the frontend. Is it the case that these are arbritrary placeholders?

If so, there are a couple of options for fixing this. First, we could prevent inflation rates from being applied to numbers like 1e99 or 9e99 by adding some logic in the function. Second, we could just update current_law_policy.json and give it values for the missing years for _AGI_surtax_thd.

Let me know what you think, or if you need more clarification.

[MattHJensen]

@brittainhard said:

Second, we could just update current_law_policy.json and give it values for the missing years for _AGI_surtax_thd.

That makes the most sense to me. It is what we do to, e.g., _ID_c:

"_ID_c": {
    "long_name": "Ceiling on the amount of itemized deductions allowed (dollars)",
    "description": "The amount of itemized deductions is limited to this dollar amount. ",
    "section_1": "Itemized deductions",
    "section_2": "Ceiling on the amount of itemized deductions allowed",
    "irs_ref": "",
    "notes": "",
    "start_year": 2013,
    "col_var": "MARS",
    "row_var": "FLPDYR",
    "row_label": ["2013",
                  "2014",
                  "2015",
                  "2016",
                  "2017"],
    "cpi_inflated": true,
    "col_label": ["single", "joint", "separate", "head of household", "widow", "separate"],
    "value": [[1e99, 1e99, 1e99, 1e99, 1e99, 1e99],
              [1e99, 1e99, 1e99, 1e99, 1e99, 1e99],
              [1e99, 1e99, 1e99, 1e99, 1e99, 1e99],
              [1e99, 1e99, 1e99, 1e99, 1e99, 1e99],
              [1e99, 1e99, 1e99, 1e99, 1e99, 1e99]]
},

I will fix this now.