The Annoyed Man wrote:Dave2 wrote:Birdshot70 wrote:Riles me up just thinking about how much we have lost in the past 3.5 years under the current follower in charge.
Very well done video...I recommend letting others know outside this forum about it too!
Not everything in that video falls on Obama... At least with regard to the tax code, the issue of regulations piling up has been around since WWII, and got another boost in the middle of Reagan's term....
And that was nearly doubled in 1995 under Bill Clinton.
Keep in mind that the
complexity of the laws is not proportional to their length, but increases exponentially. Double the amount of law on a topic, and you increase the complexity of it not twofold, but more like fourfold. In some cases, it's even worse than that; overreaching bureaucrats even contradict each other and make the same thing both illegal and mandatory.
True story: once upon a time, I owned a small business, and was told by a state tax authority that she wasn't sure what I should do in my particular circumstance -- whether I was required to do X or prohibited from doing so -- but I should know the consequences of my actions either way. If I did X (which would cost me a fortune and nearly put me out of business) and some bureaucrat determined that I wasn't required to do so, I would forfeit the amounts paid and could be charged with a felony on top of being broke. Perversely, I would then have opted into X and have to do it every year from that point on, even though it turned out to be illegal the first time. On the other hand, if I took my not-X option, but some bureaucrat determined that I was required to do X, I would likely be assessed tens of thousands of dollars in fines (again, likely putting me out of business) and, again, charged with a felony for failure to pay certain taxes. I took the not-X option, since (1) it seemed more likely to be correct and (2) at least there would be some chance of it not ruining my life. To this day, I have no idea what the correct answer is, or even if there is one.
I am now a lawyer, and trust me: the law on almost any topic in this country has gotten so complex that even the smartest, most experienced lawyers at the best firms often know only tiny slivers of the law, even within their primary practice areas. It often takes huge amounts of research to answer even the simplest questions, because every situation has wrinkles that require reading this case or that statute or yonder rule, which then opens up some other, unanticipated, new can of worms to keep you awake at night.
(And for anyone who thinks it's more about lawyers racking up fees than it is about the complexity of this stuff, please believe me that for most lawyers not a day goes by in which they don't wish
they could pay their
clients just to make some issue less head-poundingly difficult. On top of that, 60+ hour work weeks are the norm. It can be incredibly demoralizing, which is a major reason so many lawyers are dissatisfied with their careers.)
</rant>
Back to the point: This video is excellent. Thanks for posting it.
