Why Taxpayers Pay McKinsey $3M a Year for a Recent College Graduate Contractor

Re:Why Taxpayers Pay McKinsey $3M a Year for a Recent Colleg... by smacktoward on Thursday December 05, 2019 @01:29PM (#21714825)

In terms of lawmaking, the usual way to deal with this problem isn't with front-end analysis, but rather by adding a "sunset provision" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunset_provision). That's a clause in a bill that requires it to be re-authorized periodically in order to stay in effect. If a law with a sunset provision ends up causing unintended consequences, then lawmakers can let it die just by doing nothing. That's an easier lift than you get in a bill without a sunset provision, which can only be killed if you can convince a majority of lawmakers to actively kill it.

Sunset provisions aren't nearly as widely used as they probably should be.

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Re:Why Taxpayers Pay McKinsey $3M a Year for a Recent Colleg... by codesforhugs on Thursday December 05, 2019 @02:04PM (#21715238)

If I were writing the constitution for a representative democracy today, I think it would include mandatory sunsets for all legislation.

Yes, this would lead to the legislature spending a lot of time just reauthorizing existing legislation, but I would argue that the majority of new legislation being passed in modern representative democracies would be better off as revamps of existing legislation anyway.

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Re:Why Taxpayers Pay McKinsey $3M a Year for a Recent Colleg... by icandoit on Thursday December 05, 2019 @04:22PM (#21716696)

Idaho does this. Through disfunction they repealed the entire state regulatory code in May of this year.

https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/commentary/idaho-repeals-its...

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Re:Why Taxpayers Pay McKinsey $3M a Year for a Recent Colleg... by sjy on Thursday December 05, 2019 @05:49PM (#21717555)

Would you apply the same rule to a software codebase? Perhaps if nobody can be bothered refactoring that code, it’s not needed anymore and should just be deleted?

Sunset provisions are a pain for anyone who administers the law or makes plans for the future based on it. Laws that depend on the current date are bad, and stable legal institutions are good. That’s why we incrementally “reform” the law, rather than periodically replacing it like some depreciating asset.

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Re:Why Taxpayers Pay McKinsey $3M a Year for a Recent Colleg... by johnnyo on Thursday December 05, 2019 @02:58PM (#21715857)

This assumes you don’t have gridlock in the House/Senate, so it’s a bad idea.

We already have govt shutdowns when we can’t pass a budget, imagine if a law that legalized gay marriage was allowed to expire, or one that granted people health care or immigration status.

Even if a non-discrimination law only expired for a short period of time, that would be enough to do real damage to people’s lives.

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Re:Why Taxpayers Pay McKinsey $3M a Year for a Recent Colleg... by guntars on Thursday December 05, 2019 @03:14PM (#21716012)

Other countries have solved this issue simply by automatically forcing an election if a budget is not passed. Their representative are somehow able to overcome ideological differences and pass legislation once their jobs are on the line.

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Re:Why Taxpayers Pay McKinsey $3M a Year for a Recent Colleg... by johnnyo on Thursday December 05, 2019 @04:12PM (#21716578)

That doesn’t solve the problem because the idea here is that some laws should sunset, some shouldn’t.

When a civil rights law sunsets, lots of bad can happen in a short period of time.

I’m using the example of the government unable to agree on a budget as an analogy.

What happens when we can’t agree on how to renew the Civil Rights Act and it sunsets for a period of time?

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Re:Why Taxpayers Pay McKinsey $3M a Year for a Recent Colleg... by guntars on Thursday December 05, 2019 @04:48PM (#21716959)

If the civil rights act requires over 1/2 votes to extend it and it doesn't gather that much support, maybe it should sunset. The budget votes are different because they require 2/3 of the votes which is what allows the minority party to block it from passing.

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Re:Why Taxpayers Pay McKinsey $3M a Year for a Recent Colleg... by mschuster91 on Friday December 06, 2019 @02:05AM (#21719810)

The problem with this is that there may be laws that are highly valuable for poor people (e.g. minimum wage, workplace safety, building/fire codes), but irrelevant for rich people/politicians and thus end up way way down on the priority list compared to, let's say, budget laws or the next big tax cuts package.

A mandatory sunset provision can only work if the legislators act with the interests of their country and constituents first and their individual pockets second, which isn't the case any more in many Western democracies. The US are just the most obvious example where Republicans blocked everything Obama tried to pass through.

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Re:Why Taxpayers Pay McKinsey $3M a Year for a Recent Colleg... by codesforhugs on Thursday December 05, 2019 @03:04PM (#21715915)

Gridlock problems are particular to two party systems. A modern constitution would also include voting methods that don't result in a two party system.

You could also reduce the risk by the constitution itself being exempt from sunsetting and enumerating crucial rights and services therein.

Anyway it's not something that's ever going to be implemented anywhere, so it doesn't really matter if it could work.

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