July 08, 2008
The Most Amended Statutes in America
Posted by David Zaring

I decided to see how often the Internal Revenue Code and Immigration and Nationality Act have been amended of late.  And, as you probably expected, nothing beats the IRC for congressional tinkering.  Here's the number of sections of the code amended since 2001:

                           
2007141
2006229
2005259
2004370
200367
2002125
2001140

For a little comparison, here's the number of sections of the INA over the past few years:

                           
20076
200632
200514
200426
200318
200262
200113

Both huge statutes, both big issues - but man, Ways and Means stays involved in our tax affairs.  The DHS oversight people and Tom Tancredo have nothing on those guys.

Of course, the methodology employed here might be suspect.  Here's what I did, and I'd welcome your comments about what I did wrong.  I downloaded the credits for each section of each act from Westlaw.  That gave me a massive text file.  Then I used Concordance to give me a frequency count for each time a year was cited in the credit sections.  And voila, a hit for each year that the GPO recorded an amendment for each section.  Of course, I'm sorta depending on the GPO or whoever to accurately record amendments, but I'm not really sure how else I could do it.  Thoughts?

Taxation | Bookmark

TrackBacks (1)

TrackBack URL for this entry:
https://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8345157d569e200e5538e0d658833

Links to weblogs that reference The Most Amended Statutes in America:

ยป THAT'S HOW THEY SAY THEY AREN'T A 'DO-NOTHING' CONGRESS from Roth & Company, P.C. ...
"Congress wants to look busy: I decided to see how often the Internal Revenue Code and Immigration an ..." [more] (Tracked on July 9, 2008 @ 7:53)
Bloggers
Papers
Posts
Recent Comments
Popular Threads
Search The Glom
The Glom on Twitter
Archives by Topic
Archives by Date
January 2019
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
    1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30 31    
Miscellaneous Links