| The magic phrase you want for Mr. Google is “legislative drafting”. In fact there is a long-existing methodology in government for writing laws and regulations. Here, for example, is the US House of Representatives’ guideline document: http://legcounsel.house.gov/HOLC/Drafting_Legislation/Drafti... Chesterson’s Fence. Having said that, I am a tax lawyer and I view the output of the Federal government as astonishingly bad. Poorly-written laws cause millions or billions of dollars of friction to taxpayers. There are many reasons for why laws are written so poorly: - the people are stupid or malicious or lazy (appealing but this conclusion reveals more about its holder than its object) - the task of writing the law is impossible - the people writing the law are technically deficient in this style of writing I’m sure you can think of others. There is another factor. After you have been a lawyer for a long time, you see the folly of believing it is possible to write binary yes/no rules to govern human behavior. Politicians believe this. An economist would call this a belief in a static economic model. Thus, politicians think “we will impose this tax and collect a lot of money”. Then they are shocked because people change their behavior and avoid paying the tax. I do not mean maliciously. I mean like a toll-road. Imposing a toll for driving on a road will affect the traffic patterns and fewer people will drive on the road. Less money will be collected. Economists think that way. Politicians are not as . . . astute. (That statement reveals more about me than it reveals about politicians as a group). :-) Back to why laws are so badly written. There is a second reason and it is mentioned in another comment. Lawyers and judges are comfortable with ambiguity. In tax law, we often ask for penalties to be waived for “reasonable cause”. WTF is that? Yet it (more or less) works. At the margin, some people get away with stuff that “should” be penalized. And some people are penalized “unjustly”. This discovery in law is the result of centuries of evolution. It works. So if you see ambiguity, understand that it is a feature, not a bug. But for tax law, quite often I think of the rules as a broken set of algebra rules written by teenage sociology majors while drunk, for bribes. Over decades. Again, this reveals more about me than the United States Code and the Treasury Department. |