As has long been common practice by our rulers in DC, they once again voted on and passed legislation that consisted of over 2,000 pages without giving anyone time to read it beforehand, including themselves.  They have been following the advice of their former leader, Nancy Pelosi, that  “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” 

This kind of reckless behavior has long been one of my many pet peeves about how business is conducted in DC and also in State capitols.  My dream is that there could one day be a law forbidding any public official from voting on any legislation until s/he has signed a sworn affidavit, under penalties of perjury just like we have to do on our tax returns (read the fine print above the signature line on your 1040), before they are allowed to cast a vote.  Only then, will they have a real incentive to reduce the length of their legislation to CliffsNotes size instead of matching the combined lengths of War and Peace and Moby Dick. 

Who among us would want to hire an attorney who advises his/her clients to just sign every document presented to them and then figure out what those documents mean later on down the road?  Those attorneys would be disbarred and sued out of existence for malpractice.  However, as we know all too well, our elected officials are held to completely different (lower) standards than those of us who work and live in the real world.  Just one of the many perks of elected royalty that our founding fathers definitely didn’t intend.

Back to the monstrous spending bill that Trump begrudgingly signed.  I don’t know anyone who has time to wade through it, looking for the tax related items included in its 2,200 pages.  Staying up to date on new tax laws is even tougher than normal at this time of year, as we are in the home stretch towards the April 17 Tax Day deadline.

Luckily, there are dedicated people at the tax publishing companies who have done that research for us and have boiled those 2,200 pages down to the tax related essentials.  Because I use their WebLibrary frequently, once again, the first of these special reports that I have come across is a 13 page PDF from TheTaxBook.  I have posted a copy in one of my online storage drives for your downloading and viewing pleasure.

This may just be the first analysis of the omnibus spending bill by TheTaxBook folks because the very last words on the very last page of this summary are:

Technical Corrections
The new law also amends a number of prior law provisions for technical errors that produced unintended results.

I hope they are planning to give us the specific details on those corrections so that we don’t have to pore over those 2,200 pages ourselves.