Comment by kelnos
1 year ago
Without agreeing or disagreeing with you, that's irrelevant. The law is the law. If it specifies that a particular agency must exist, and how it should function, then that's what the executive is required to implement.
In theory, at least. If Trump and his minions decide to do something else, there isn't really anyone with the power to stop him, absent impeachment.
I was replying to someone who said "You could argue all you want about that, but stability is a desire feature of the state. It not only helps citizens to be able to have long term planning, but also saves the resources by not needing to figure out how things work constantly."
Legal questions aside, I think that's an overly simplistic take; a certain amount of stability is desirable, but it's possible to be too stable as well as too unstable.
The stability here comes from not having to wonder what the next guy is going to do wrt taxes, etc. because those need to pass a process that would be public in congress. Stability doesn't mean staleness. It means that things don't change willy nilly.
Right, and that level of process allows a certain amount of capture and exploitation. E.g. companies will game the tax code in the confidence that they'll get plenty of warning before any loopholes are closed. It's hard to imagine the 2017 change to how corporate repatriated income is taxed happening under any other president, and that rule change not only collected a bunch of revenue from companies that had been engaging in tax avoidance schemes, but also burned them enough to deter that kind of gamesmanship, at least for a couple of years.