Bare except in wealth_decile_impact swallows signals and hides real errors

[MaxGhenis]

Summary

Bare except: clause in compare.py swallows KeyboardInterrupt, SystemExit, and GeneratorExit along with every unrelated bug. It also silently empties the wealth-decile impact blocks, hiding real regressions in the underlying calculation.

Location

policyengine_api/endpoints/economy/compare.py:816

What goes wrong

try:
    wealth_decile_impact_data = wealth_decile_impact(baseline, reform)
    intra_wealth_decile_impact_data = intra_wealth_decile_impact(
        baseline, reform
    )
except:
    wealth_decile_impact_data = {}
    intra_wealth_decile_impact_data = {}

• A bare except: catches BaseException, including signals (KeyboardInterrupt) and interpreter shutdown (SystemExit). Workers become harder to terminate cleanly.
• Any exception — a genuine ZeroDivisionError in the calculation, an attribute error from a model upgrade, etc. — is silently replaced with empty dicts, so downstream consumers see "no wealth decile data" instead of an error.

Suggested fix

except Exception:
    logging.exception("wealth_decile_impact failed")
    wealth_decile_impact_data = {}
    intra_wealth_decile_impact_data = {}

Narrow further to the specific exception types that are expected (e.g. KeyError, ValueError) if possible.

Severity

Low.