Wednesday, March 03, 2010

We Are Great At Naming Laws

When our rulers in Washington, DC decide that they are going to create a law the first thing they do is spend lots of our taxes trying to come up with a real neat name for the law.

I used the word “neat” in the above paragraph. Many times the word “deceptive” can be substituted for “neat”. The objective is to sell us on the justification and/or dire need for law in the name of the law.

The same holds true where I live. In 2006 my home state passed a law called Georgia Security and Immigration Compliance Act. With a name like this the vote was assured as soon as the naming was done. Who of us could be against Security?

Now we find out, four years later, that the law’s name has tricked us, again
  • The law did not provide any funding for auditing of contractors.
  • Since there was no funding, there was no auditing.
  • If there had been funding for auditing and if auditing had actually been performed to determine if contractors were complying with the law, there are no penalties provided in the law for failure to comply with the law.

What if our Income Tax Laws were written by the geniuses that wrote the Georgia Security and Immigration Compliance Act? We would have our beloved IRS trying to enforce tax collections with something like this…

  • Citizens must pay their taxes.
  • No one will ever check to find out whether or not you paid your taxes.
  • If anyone in the government ever did find out that you did not pay your taxes, there are no penalties in the law for not paying your taxes.
  • If any member of our government ever did find out that you had paid your taxes, a team of tax-payer funded psychiatrists will be send out to examine your head.

I admit I got carried away with this last part … Or Did I?

Would I kid u?