k-12 Tax & $pending climate: Obamacare
The unreadability is the point. Jonathan Gruber, the MIT economist who helped design the thing, admitted in 2013 that “lack of transparency is a huge political advantage” and credited “the stupidity of the American voter” for its passage. You couldn’t debate what you couldn’t read, and Congress couldn’t be held accountable for text it delegated to unelected agencies to write after the vote. This is legislation as fog machine. Complexity becomes a moat.
Ask yourself who swims in that moat comfortably. Not you. Not your doctor. UnitedHealth and Aetna employ floors of compliance lawyers who parse those 20,000 pages for a living, and every page raises the cost of entry for any upstart insurer who thinks he can serve customers better. No central planner can possess the dispersed knowledge to price medical care for 330 million people. The regulators know this too, at some level. Their answer wasn’t humility. Their answer was paperwork: an estimated 165 million hours of it annually, a tax paid in human lifetimes.
