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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

>$100 million or more rule seems silly when that's the cost of ~10 stoplights and there are like 33 million businesses in the US.

A minute of internet research suggests that specific $100m figure is from a 45-year-old law[1]. I don't know why every government law and regulation that references specific monetary values like this aren't pegged to inflation. That equivalent value today is almost $400m.

EDIT: Actually the number might come from a 29-year-old amendment[2]. It is disappointing how hard it is to track these things down.

[1] - https://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/regulatory/rulemaking/flexibil...

[2] - https://www.congress.gov/bill/104th-congress/senate-bill/942

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Seems that the hard coded fixed dollar amount argument can apply everywhere, see small claims court maximums.

Not to mention > $10K financial transaction disclosures

> I don't know why every government law and regulation that references specific monetary values like this aren't pegged to inflation.

It's an utter mess. This job falls primarily to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who compiles the basket of goods that make up the Consumer Price Index - but this doesn't include food or fuel, for example.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis also maintains several indices which are used as inflation proxies when it's convenient (and which are most often used by the various working groups within the federal reserve system to, eg, determine interest rates). But these are somewhat more volatile and more subject to fluctuations due to international political affairs, etc.

The most obvious metric - the literal inflation in the money supply - is also tricky because the process by which money is created is so baroque.

The ability to have more coherent laws which reference amounts of money is a good reason to adopt sounder and more transparent practices in monetary policy.

I don't understand the point in raising these specific practical objections like my simple comment was intended to be the text of the legislation. There are all sorts of ways these issues can be addressed like pegging it to a specific index of inflation and have it run on a long delay to allow full transparency and predictability.

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