Laws, Upon Laws, Upon Laws
After seeing the length of the final health care bill that just passed, it prompted me to do some quick research.
This isn’t a debate about the healthcare bill that just passed Congress. That dead horse has been beaten already. What concerns me as much as what the bill says, is the length of the bill itself. The bill is over 2,300 pages long! Let me put that into perspective for you.
- The number of pages needed to define a nation: 6 (the US Constitution)
- The number of pages needed to define a religion: 1,200 (average length of a Bible)
- The number of pages needed to define a language: 1,600 (average length of an English dictionary)
The health care bill is 2,300 pages long! Can one single person even begin to comprehend that? Have any congressman who voted on the bill even read it? I mean really read it… not tasked interns to read it for them. Has the President read it? Will anyone (outside of teams of lawyers) ever read the bill?
This is the state of our government. I don’t know about you, but I find it chilling that we are governed by laws that the average citizen has no ability to even understand. Scary, isn’t it?
But wait… there’s more!
This got me wondering. How many pages long is our tax code? Well, it seems that nobody really knows for sure. The best answer appears to be “it depends on who you ask”. (Honestly? You can govern a nation like this?) If you try to get a more definitive answer, you would probably need to go to the US Government Printing Office and order a copy of the parts written by Congress and the federal regulations written by the IRS. You can do this for the low, low, price of only $1,153. The result will be a document 16,845 pages long that fills over twenty volumes. Keep in mind, this is only the core. More than likely, there are many other laws that apply.
The volumes of laws I just discussed only scratches the surface of everything that applies to you. Remember, old laws don’t really go away but new ones are always being created. I can only images that the entire set of laws that govern our country must fill libraries. At what point does this mess cease to be comprehensible? At what point do we as citizens say “enough is enough”?
