Should laws
have an expiration date? It is no secret
that once something becomes law it almost never goes away. Our country has operated on a single
government for 225 years or so. In that
time we have passed thousands of laws and most of them are dated at best. They stay in force (or often stay unenforced)
because it's just too hard to change them.
Witness the uproar over obamacare for the last few years. Now whether or not you like it, you know that
a majority of congressmen and senators have been trying to get rid of it for
years. It just displays how hard it is
to remove a law.
So perhaps
an improvement would be to pass laws for a specific period. They would automatically expire after a
pre-set time unless congress wanted to renew them by a fresh vote. That way instead of trying to remove bad laws
they could concentrate on trying to keep good ones. It would also allow congress less time to
create new bad laws. I suspect that
there should be some sort of variation in the lifespan of laws. Perhaps if a law passed by a very narrow
margin it was good for two years. If it
passed by say 55% it would be good for 5 years and 65% would give it 10
years. Or the life span of the law could
be built in as part of the law but with a limitation on the maximum of probably
10 years.
That would
tend to make our laws much more representative of the current values of our
society. It would also make them change
to reflect changes in society. The way I
see it if we don't find some way to make our government responsive to the
values and desires of the majority of our citizens we are facing a popular
uprising and a violent revolution that none of us wants. Nearly all of my income now is in the form of
retirement payments that I earned and paid taxes on during my earning
years. And yet, I pay a huge proportion
of it back in income taxes even though I'm no longer earning anything. On the other hand, the "middle
class" worker here in Florida is paying no income tax at all. I don't see how that is a sustainable
plan.
In my much
younger days, I semi jokingly proposed that everyone retire at 21 for 10 or 15
years. Then everyone should work for the
rest of their life to pay for the other folks who were retiring at 21. It seems to be happening now except the ones
who are retiring at 21 have no intention of going to work when they turn
35. What do you think?
