Legal Reformer Has Deficit Solution: Sunset Provisions in Every Law
Legal reform activist Philip K. Howard has a proposal to cut the deficit: All laws should automatically expire after 10 to 15 years.
Howard, a Covington & Burling partner, says laws are nearly impossible to repeal after their adoption, “bogging the country down” in regulations that result in higher taxes and public debt. Sunset provisions would force lawmakers to re-evaluate whether laws are working, he says in a Washington Post op-ed. Without such scrutiny, he argues, existing entitlement programs remain entrenched, and the national deficit can’t be tackled.
“To an amazing degree, our government’s choices are dictated by political leaders who are long dead,” he writes. “Health-care programs and Social Security—eating up about 70 percent of each year’s federal revenue—don’t even come up for annual authorization and are not limited by a budget. Many programs outlived their usefulness decades ago: New Deal subsidies intended for starving farmers now go mostly to corporate farms ($15 billion annually), and inflated union wages on government contracts (more than $11 billion per year), another relic of the 1930s, have the effect of limiting public works and employment.”
Howard argues that ineffectual laws need to be abolished in his new book Life Without Lawyers: Liberating Americans from Too Much Law.
