I am disgusted with Congress’s penchant for producing kilo-bills. Those thousand-plus pages of gobbledygook require vast bureaucracies to produce multi-thousand pages of rules and regulations.

The most visible one today is the Affordable Care Act, which after three years has not had all the rules codified. Another one is on the way. The Dodd-Frank legislation of 2010 required the Volcker rule to be enacted. Simply stated, the rule says that commercial banks must not engage in the risky financial engineering practiced by investment banks. That was the law of the land until the Glass-Steagall act was repealed during the Clinton administration. Now, five separate federal agencies have produced kilo-pages of definitions, and have yet to agree on how to encode the rule. One of those agencies is the Federal Reserve, which has been practicing risky financial engineering since the Humphrey-Hawkins Act gave the Fed a dual mandate.

These kilo-bills will soon be killer-bills for our economy.

Ed Nussbaum

Nashua

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