Comment by Glyptodon
5 days ago
$100 million or more rule seems silly when that's the cost of ~10 stoplights and there are like 33 million businesses in the US.
But it also seems ridiculous to skip since four people doing nothing but having a discussion about a new rule for 30 minutes across a good portion of those businesses is easily $100mil w/o them even having to lift a pinky besides.
>$100 million or more rule seems silly when that's the cost of ~10 stoplights and there are like 33 million businesses in the US.
A minute of internet research suggests that specific $100m figure is from a 45-year-old law[1]. I don't know why every government law and regulation that references specific monetary values like this aren't pegged to inflation. That equivalent value today is almost $400m.
EDIT: Actually the number might come from a 29-year-old amendment[2]. It is disappointing how hard it is to track these things down.
[1] - https://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/regulatory/rulemaking/flexibil...
[2] - https://www.congress.gov/bill/104th-congress/senate-bill/942
Seems that the hard coded fixed dollar amount argument can apply everywhere, see small claims court maximums.
Not to mention > $10K financial transaction disclosures
> I don't know why every government law and regulation that references specific monetary values like this aren't pegged to inflation.
It's an utter mess. This job falls primarily to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who compiles the basket of goods that make up the Consumer Price Index - but this doesn't include food or fuel, for example.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis also maintains several indices which are used as inflation proxies when it's convenient (and which are most often used by the various working groups within the federal reserve system to, eg, determine interest rates). But these are somewhat more volatile and more subject to fluctuations due to international political affairs, etc.
The most obvious metric - the literal inflation in the money supply - is also tricky because the process by which money is created is so baroque.
The ability to have more coherent laws which reference amounts of money is a good reason to adopt sounder and more transparent practices in monetary policy.
I don't understand the point in raising these specific practical objections like my simple comment was intended to be the text of the legislation. There are all sorts of ways these issues can be addressed like pegging it to a specific index of inflation and have it run on a long delay to allow full transparency and predictability.
Wait, a stoplight costs $10 million?
No they don't. I'm not sure where they got that number from, but it's either wrong or being misrepresented (costs of entire infrastructure project confused with cost of lights). $10M is off by 1-3 orders of magnitude, depending on if you're counting installation of just one signal or a complete intersection.
It's conceivable for the installation of traffic lights in a remote place to be an expensive project if there's no power available there, but that's a much larger project than just a single traffic light.
I was thinking of a project that redid a four way intersection.
maybe that includes the software and hardware to run the stoplight, the salaries of the operators and maintenance etc and their admin staff, and the all the analysis to figure out when it should be red/green, all that stuff.
I had in mind a project in my area a few years back where redoing a four way major intersection was quoted like that, not actually one literal stoplight just purchased and delivered.
Depends where it is. On a military base they can be $100M.
No, it absolutely does not.