One of the perennial problems with our system of government is that our laws, once passed, are rarely reevaluated. When Congress considers legislation, it is usually attempting to solve a problem . . . but it almost never comes back five or ten years later to consider whether the law actually solved that problem, and whether it had any major unintended consequences.

There are some exceptions. If a law’s consequences are negative enough, or if the problem it was supposed to solve remains a serious problem in the public consciousness, Congress will sometimes circle back and try to make improvements . . . but this only happens with a very small percentage of the laws we enact. Also, if a law is controversial enough when it first comes up, Congress will sometimes include a sunset date, at which point the law must either be reenacted by Congress or else expire.

Sunset provisions are better than nothing. One was included on the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, which President Bill Clinton (D) signed into law in 1994. The law had no discernible impact on gun violence, mostly because it was based on how guns look, not on how they operate or who uses them. Congress allowed it to expire in 2004, and there has been no subsequent bloodbath . . . on the contrary, our violent crime rate continues to drop. It was nice to see a useless, ineffective law drop off the books, instead of languishing there permanently.

The tax cuts signed into law by President George W. Bush (R) also had a sunset provision, but Congress renewed the vast majority of those cuts with President Barack Obama’s (D) support. The data shows that those reductions in the tax rates contributed to an eight billion dollar increase in annual federal tax revenue over the 2003-2007 period, which only began to drop again due to the largely-unrelated economic downturn. It is widely recognized that any significant tax hikes in our current economic climate would be devastating, and so Congress reenacted the bulk of a largely-successful law (although they still did increase taxes, directly on the ‘rich’ and indirectly through payroll tax increases on everybody else).

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