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Comment by jlmorton | Hacker News Reader

The fact that there are unintended consequences in legislation does not mean no one read, or thought about it. These are thousands of Congressional staffers who read and study legislation, along with many more outside of Congress, but there are missed requirements, implementation bugs, and other problems in edge cases in legislation just like everything else, because the world is complex.

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I am a formal congressional staffer in both the House and the Senate and virtually no one reads any given bill or even cares much about what is in it other than memorizing the talking points about it. Bills are almost completely written by lobbyists and a bunch of 23 year old staffers are not knowledgeable enough to have any valid comprehension or input.

The job of a congressional staffer is to ensure reelection so we spend almost our time getting the member on the most powerful committees (for more campaign contributions) and getting on tv (for free media).

Committees do spend more time on the content of bills but each member usually only has one staffer for multiple committees and they are still told how to vote by the party.

This is true. I was a congressional staffer long ago, and before that I was an intern at the Legislative Digest, an official publication that summarizes legislation for the members of Congress. These summaries were often the only thing that members would read before they voted. If a member was really ambitious, he or she might read the committee report as well. But that's it.

I wasn't 23 years old when I was writing these summaries. I was 21. There was no one in the office over 30, and no lawyers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legislative_Digest

There are 435 House members and 100 Senators. On any given bill they are not all going to have a role in shaping and negotiating it, and their staff will not have access to bill language as that is happening. Or perhaps even right up to the vote.

That does not imply that no one reads any bills. As a change to the tax code, the Section 174 language we’re all talking about was read by at minimum the (very capable) professional staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation and the CBO, for purposes of scoring the revenue impact of the bill.

The impacts of the Section 174 changes are in fact intentional, done to change said scoring. Whether or not they would be popular was not the point; all changes to the tax code are unpopular to someone. The point was to find a configuration of changes that could pass both houses at that time and get signed. That usually means a few big-ticket changes, and then lots of monkeying around with other things (like R&D) to offset those.

This is one reason why I think there should be a cap on the total volume of legislation (measured in pages). If you want to pass a new law, you need to repeal an old, obsolete one.

Nobody should be subject to a corpus of rules too volumous for them to read and understand.

It's absolutely unforgivable that legislators don't even read the laws they pass.

A version of this system was apparently implemented in Iceland - under the traditional law, once a year a designated person had to recite the entire law, and whatever he forgot to include was no longer the law.

There's a difference between unintended consequences from something like an n-order affect on the system due to complexity vs a clearly written piece and uncomplex rule in the law. The latter suggests that due diligence was not performed. Of these thousands of staffers, it seems nobody bothered to read and understand it. We can look to history on how bills have been passed rapidly after introduction, without enough time to read and think about them. This makes me feel like the people in power don't really pay that much attention and don't care for careful deliberation.

Sure, bugs happen. But in a system that holds immense power over people's lives, we should be striving for the level of bugs to be similar to life critical safety systems and not some glitchy business website.

The bugs are a feature. Insane complexity in the tax code creates room for legal corruption through special favors that no one understands.

That's the bug.

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