The stated base case is never the base case. This is an economic fact. When the government says employers have to pay 10% of your wages as payroll tax, employers pay you 10% less. When Amazon says free shipping unless your order is under a certain amount, they raise prices on everything else. When your bank gives you 3% cashback on your credit card, every merchant pays a 5% credit card interchange fee and raises their prices 5% to pay for that. And when we parole people at half their prison sentence, the sentence is twice what we think they deserve.