Lemon laws.

• Author: Segal, David
• Position: Idiotic legislation

Laws are like sausages," Bismark once famously intoned, "It is better not to see them being made." Comparing laws to sausages is, of course, grossly unfair--to sausages. Sure, the rough and tumble of a bench-clearing legislative brawl is probably not much prettier than a machine stuffing fats and fillers into pig meat. But a bad sausage will just ruin breakfast, while a bad law can turn your stomach for years.

We've had our share of howlers in the past, laws that cost us a fortune, taxed us incomprehensibly, or were just plain idiotic. The problem is that the confluence of forces that create any particular law is unique, which means there's no sure-fire way to tell when Congress or the president is about to hand us something really inane. The best we can do is look at past experience, examine a handful of genuine stinkers and ask, what went wrong?

The laws here have been chosen not because

they are necessarily the worst we have on the books, but because each is illustrative, in different ways, of how legislation can go haywire. In some instances, it's good intentions gone wrong; in others, it's greedy intentions gone right. With a new president coming to town promising a shopping list of reforms, now may be the moment to learn something from earlier disasters.

A legislative hall of shame

Mandatory Minimum Sentences for Drug Crimes

Approaches to criminal sentencing, like wide ties and Tony Bennett, go through periods of fashion-ability. Sometimes judges have discretion about how long convicts get sent away, other times their hands are tied. In 1984, Congress ushered in a new era of the latter and delivered a legislative triumph of hype over good sense by creating a system of mandatory minimum sentences for a wide range of crimes, while eliminating most time reductions for good behavior.

The idea was to bring some uniformity to the system and insure that convicts served at least 85 percent of their sentences. The premises were sound enough. Race, class, and even gender figured into too many sentences and some liberal judges were reportedly letting violent criminals off easy. But in practice, the new system forces judges to incarcerate criminals--even non-threatening ones--for far longer than is often necessary, which is not only unfair, but spectacularly expensive. Nowhere is this more evident than in the minimum sentences for drug-related crimes.

Congress, in all its wisdom, drafted these laws so that the amount of drugs involved in a particular offense is the paramount consideration, making the relative roles of the offenders secondary. An example: Say a guy, let's call him Bob, is part of an operation importing one thousand kilograms of cocaine into the country. Bob's role is little more than a

Where were the Democrats in the free-for-all that created '81 ? After gamely pressing for saner tax cuts for business and more relief for middle- and low-income earners, eye-witness accounts have the Democrats actually competing for the support of the business lobby, which found itself powerful enough to be courted by both parties. The results show it. Ultimately, most Americans didn't get any tax relief from '81. Which means that the supply-side theory-that if you put more money in people's pockets they'll work harder and save more--was only tested on the wealthy.

Just about all parts of the political spectrum can now find something to loathe in the 1981 Tax Act. Long-time Democratic insider Stuart Eizenstat reviles it because "it was a binge of tax cuts that have continued to leave the Treasury bereft." Herb Stein, a neoconservative economist with the American Enterprise Institute, decries its middle income tax cuts "because they only fed the deficit and were not enough to change behavior." Brookings Institute economist Charles Schultz says it was "the biggest single contributor" to our present deficit. At minimum, it was the harbinger of what was to come. There are estimates that...