Complex Legislation Quotes

That’s why the tax code is so long [76,000 pages]. So we can take advantage of it.

First, the American legislative process isn't well suited to large and complex measures.

I prefer a simple bill which deals with a single basic issue. When you add new provisions to a bill you develop a larger coalition of opposition. Each new provision brings in more opponents who combine with the existing opponents until you no longer can pass the law.

Just read the farm relief bill. It's just a political version of Einstein's last theory. If a farmer could understand it, he certainly would know more than to farm. He would be a professor at Harvard.

[The Internal Revenue Code is] about 10 times the size of the Bible and, unlike the Bible, contains no good news

I love these members, they get up and say, 'Read the bill ... What good is reading the bill if it's a thousand pages and you don't have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?'

I frankly think we in the financial service world believe we need appropriate kinds of regulations. No question about that. But when something like Dodd-Frank has been created, sort of in the mystery of night, it is a huge document. It's vast. It weighs about 10 pounds when I carry it around.

Congress is not very good at explaining complex legislation to the public.

We have had on our desks 800-, 900-, and 1,000 page bills. Nobody knows what was in them. No one had read them. No one could.

I do not think it is going to be constructive to repeal a law that, at this point, is so interwoven in our health care system, and then hope that, over the next two years, we will come up with some kind of replacement.