4 ms·

The amount of written law in the US gov has grown exponentially since the 1970s. https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/20190903_R43056_5083d3b879cd8395f19720a2c

by dmix 3y ago

The amount of written law in the US gov has grown exponentially since the 1970s. https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/20190903_R43056_5083d3b879cd8395f19720a2c91304df5d2d49f9.html https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/20190903_R43056_5083d3b... The only time it slowed has been during brief gov shutdowns. As this report explains this includes plenty of non rules and administrative stuff and does count repeals but anyone who has followed Congress knows that the bulk of those bills is new spending and new rules imposed on civilians/business. It's rarely ever reducing the scale of gov. And to repeat another post I made recently, the staffing and funding for US federal regulatory agencies has grown near exponentially since the 1970s (edit: or more accurately a consistent upward trendline) https://regulatorystudies.columbian.gwu.edu/sites/g/files/zaxdzs4751/files/downloads/RegulatorsBudget/GW%20Reg%20Studies%20-%20FY2017%20Regulators%20Budget%20-%20SDudley%20and%20MWarren.pdf https://regulatorystudies.columbian.gwu.edu/sites/g/files/za...

ethanbond 3y ago
Why should the government be shrinking when our population and the complexity of our society + economy is growing?
- ibejoeb 3y ago
  I was expecting to find that federal employment has grown faster than the US population, but it looks like that's not the case. Since 2000, the federal workforce seems to have grown about 14%, while the overall population increased by about 20%.
  - mikeyouse 3y ago
    If you go back further it’s even more stark - there are 5% fewer Federal employees than there were when Clinton took office, overall population is up 30% and real GDP is up like 120%: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1cCLR https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1cCLR
    - jonhohle 3y ago
      I wouldn’t imagine a government needs to scale proportionally to the population much like a business shouldn’t need to scale proportionally to its customer base. Most businesses should be able to handle twice as many customers with fewer than twice as many employees.
- _heimdall 3y ago
  You may be assuming there isn't a connection there. Could it be that our society and economy are growing more complex because the government continues to grow? More government agencies and employees create more rules. More rules almost certainly play into the growing complexity of both our society and economy. Population growth is nothing new, its only the last 60-80 years that we've really cranked up the size of our government.
  - llamaimperative 3y ago
    I am absolutely confident that our society and economy aren’t growing more complex exclusively due to government growth. The whole virtue of capitalism is that it finds increasingly niche ways and outright novel ways to change the world, that’s by definition net new complexity. I’m comfortable attributing the vast majority of complexity growth to that. Not only is the population growing exponentially but one would reasonably expect the complexity of the overall economy would go up exponentially even with linear additions to the population (each new person is N new possible economic relations).
- stronglikedan 3y ago
  They should be minimal in their powers over the people and the bureaucratic waste they produce, but that doesn't mean they are shrinking. They can grow their administration workforce to accommodate the growing population and economy without adding new powers and while gaining efficiencies. Plus, the federal government should be very minimal, while not infringing on state's rights, which isn't the case any longer, unfortunately.
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    Sure, the disagreement stems from one’s presumption of what “minimal” means.
    - tastyfreeze 3y ago
      Minimal is defined in the Constitution. It explicitly says we give the federal government limited powers and no more.
      - ethanbond 3y ago
        One of those powers is to rely on interpretations of the Constitution by SCOTUS and to pick SCOTUS’s interpretation when it comes to conflict with an HN commentators’ interpretation. So this is still just putting the cart before the horse.
      - rtkwe 3y ago
        It defines a proscribed set of powers but doesn't say the use of those must be minimized. On top of all of that all the powers currently used have either been ruled constitutional, are untested extensions of tested uses of powers, or haven't been challenged/are currently being challenged, we can all have our own opinions about what the Constitution does and doesn't allow but within the system defined the only opinion that directly matters is the Supreme Court's. Everyone else's only gets filtered through their selection and ... optional shall we say extra-constitutional means? Ultimately my stance is the founders weren't perfect, their creation isn't some mystical perfect system handed down from on high [0] so we shouldn't weld ourselves into some imaginary form of what precisely they would or wouldn't want. They're dead it's our country now we have to live with it in a world they couldn't even imagine. Even the groups that do try to lay claim to the founders original vision are cherry picking their favorite version of the founders and their ideas. [0] Remember their first try at it, the Articles of Confederation fell apart in 4 years and the Constitution was a broad overreach of the mandate that the convention was even convened for.
- ComputerGuru 3y ago
  I can’t believe this argument is being made in good faith, but just in case: do you not realize that the number of laws need not scale with the size of the population? Especially when that growth is less than an order of magnitude?
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    I said size of the government, not size of the code. Both were mentioned in GP's comment.
ibejoeb 3y ago
It's a real shame. Legislating isn't a full-time job naturally, but we've made it so by turning it into one of the most lucrative careers. We judge congress perversely by output of new laws.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- kasey_junk 3y ago
  Most legislative action happens at the state and local level where it’s not particularly lucrative. If anything we should probably make it more lucrative so that the already well off aren’t the only ones who can afford to do it.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    Even federal legislative service isn't lucrative. Biden made the bulk of his wealth only after being vice president and writing books / speaking. And he was a senator for multiple decades! Being a federal senator is a middle class salary: https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/politics/a31265187/joe-biden-net-worth/ https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/politics/a31265187... Presidents make ~$400k. And before someone points out the "ancillary" financial benefits to being a legislator: (a) most of those are illegal if discovered & (b) typically the big money is made after retiring or losing office, by leveraging connections.
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
I absolutely agree that the U.S. government has gotten more powerful since WWII almost monotonously. The times of honest reduction were in the 1990s and, potentially, now. That said, I would be careful about conflating the volume of rules and staffing with power. The bureaucratic imperative will drive a bureaucracy to expand. But it also does that to others, the net effect being a lot of intragovernmental arguing that diminishes the state’s actual power. That doesn’t make the bureaucracy less annoying. Just less powerful. In fact, part of the present problem stems from it being easier for politicians to create blocking bureaucracies than to liquidate the ones they don’t like.
- IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago
  what are rules, but merely (legal) attempts to make the rule-maker more powerful ?
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > what are rules, but merely (legal) attempts to make the rule-maker more powerful You've got to be kidding me. Here's one: coordination. Everyone drive on the right. That wasn't done to make anyone more powerful; it was done to prevent stupid crashes. Here's another rule: don't fly you plane past its spec. That isn't to oppress the pilot. It's because the plane wasn't designed to be flown harder.

by dmix 3y ago

ethanbond 3y ago

Why should the government be shrinking when our population and the complexity of our society + economy is growing?

ibejoeb 3y ago
I was expecting to find that federal employment has grown faster than the US population, but it looks like that's not the case. Since 2000, the federal workforce seems to have grown about 14%, while the overall population increased by about 20%.
- mikeyouse 3y ago
  If you go back further it’s even more stark - there are 5% fewer Federal employees than there were when Clinton took office, overall population is up 30% and real GDP is up like 120%: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1cCLR https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1cCLR
  - jonhohle 3y ago
    I wouldn’t imagine a government needs to scale proportionally to the population much like a business shouldn’t need to scale proportionally to its customer base. Most businesses should be able to handle twice as many customers with fewer than twice as many employees.
_heimdall 3y ago
You may be assuming there isn't a connection there. Could it be that our society and economy are growing more complex because the government continues to grow? More government agencies and employees create more rules. More rules almost certainly play into the growing complexity of both our society and economy. Population growth is nothing new, its only the last 60-80 years that we've really cranked up the size of our government.
- llamaimperative 3y ago
  I am absolutely confident that our society and economy aren’t growing more complex exclusively due to government growth. The whole virtue of capitalism is that it finds increasingly niche ways and outright novel ways to change the world, that’s by definition net new complexity. I’m comfortable attributing the vast majority of complexity growth to that. Not only is the population growing exponentially but one would reasonably expect the complexity of the overall economy would go up exponentially even with linear additions to the population (each new person is N new possible economic relations).
stronglikedan 3y ago
They should be minimal in their powers over the people and the bureaucratic waste they produce, but that doesn't mean they are shrinking. They can grow their administration workforce to accommodate the growing population and economy without adding new powers and while gaining efficiencies. Plus, the federal government should be very minimal, while not infringing on state's rights, which isn't the case any longer, unfortunately.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  Sure, the disagreement stems from one’s presumption of what “minimal” means.
  - tastyfreeze 3y ago
    Minimal is defined in the Constitution. It explicitly says we give the federal government limited powers and no more.
    - ethanbond 3y ago
      One of those powers is to rely on interpretations of the Constitution by SCOTUS and to pick SCOTUS’s interpretation when it comes to conflict with an HN commentators’ interpretation. So this is still just putting the cart before the horse.
    - rtkwe 3y ago
      It defines a proscribed set of powers but doesn't say the use of those must be minimized. On top of all of that all the powers currently used have either been ruled constitutional, are untested extensions of tested uses of powers, or haven't been challenged/are currently being challenged, we can all have our own opinions about what the Constitution does and doesn't allow but within the system defined the only opinion that directly matters is the Supreme Court's. Everyone else's only gets filtered through their selection and ... optional shall we say extra-constitutional means? Ultimately my stance is the founders weren't perfect, their creation isn't some mystical perfect system handed down from on high [0] so we shouldn't weld ourselves into some imaginary form of what precisely they would or wouldn't want. They're dead it's our country now we have to live with it in a world they couldn't even imagine. Even the groups that do try to lay claim to the founders original vision are cherry picking their favorite version of the founders and their ideas. [0] Remember their first try at it, the Articles of Confederation fell apart in 4 years and the Constitution was a broad overreach of the mandate that the convention was even convened for.
ComputerGuru 3y ago
I can’t believe this argument is being made in good faith, but just in case: do you not realize that the number of laws need not scale with the size of the population? Especially when that growth is less than an order of magnitude?
- ethanbond 3y ago
  I said size of the government, not size of the code. Both were mentioned in GP's comment.

ibejoeb 3y ago

It's a real shame. Legislating isn't a full-time job naturally, but we've made it so by turning it into one of the most lucrative careers. We judge congress perversely by output of new laws.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
kasey_junk 3y ago
Most legislative action happens at the state and local level where it’s not particularly lucrative. If anything we should probably make it more lucrative so that the already well off aren’t the only ones who can afford to do it.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  Even federal legislative service isn't lucrative. Biden made the bulk of his wealth only after being vice president and writing books / speaking. And he was a senator for multiple decades! Being a federal senator is a middle class salary: https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/politics/a31265187/joe-biden-net-worth/ https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/politics/a31265187... Presidents make ~$400k. And before someone points out the "ancillary" financial benefits to being a legislator: (a) most of those are illegal if discovered & (b) typically the big money is made after retiring or losing office, by leveraging connections.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago

I absolutely agree that the U.S. government has gotten more powerful since WWII almost monotonously. The times of honest reduction were in the 1990s and, potentially, now. That said, I would be careful about conflating the volume of rules and staffing with power. The bureaucratic imperative will drive a bureaucracy to expand. But it also does that to others, the net effect being a lot of intragovernmental arguing that diminishes the state’s actual power. That doesn’t make the bureaucracy less annoying. Just less powerful. In fact, part of the present problem stems from it being easier for politicians to create blocking bureaucracies than to liquidate the ones they don’t like.

IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago
what are rules, but merely (legal) attempts to make the rule-maker more powerful ?
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > what are rules, but merely (legal) attempts to make the rule-maker more powerful You've got to be kidding me. Here's one: coordination. Everyone drive on the right. That wasn't done to make anyone more powerful; it was done to prevent stupid crashes. Here's another rule: don't fly you plane past its spec. That isn't to oppress the pilot. It's because the plane wasn't designed to be flown harder.