Sen. Chris Dodd’s bill to fix financial regulations clocks in at 1,336 pages. By contrast, the draft for the 1933 Securities Act fit on one newspaper page. The draft for the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934 took up two (to be fair, the Times used tiny print).
Dodd’s language for the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection alone runs 306 pages – even though the bureau’s goal, in the words of its biggest champion, Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren, is to make it possible for lenders to draw up a “one page-mortgage agreement.”
– Nicole Gelinas, contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, is author of After the Fall.