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“The Tax bill Trump signed into law last year is has a sunset date.”

I agree, sort of.

I actually meant only laws for which people can be prosecuted, and certain special budget items, written into law, that have some immediate “project” kind of purpose - like many Obama era “stimulus” programs that was ONLY supposedly set to temporarily stimulate the economy, but under Pelosi et al became fixed in the budgets of the departments the “temporary” items were to be funded under. The TIGER grant that helped fund the bridge that just collapsed is one grant program that should have expired when the recession following the 2008 financial crisis officially ended. Instead that grant program and the funding for it was made a permanent budget item that Congress must proactively end.

I agree, tax “law” should not have sunset provisions. Why do they? Because of stupid “law” Congress imposed on itself which demands tax changes, as far as their effects on revenue, MUST appeal to a multiyear projection. Well that “must” works both ways. Congress uses that “must” to mean “can be ‘not increasing the deficit’ when looked at all the way out to the end of that multiyear period”. So the Sunset provision became necessary - in the recent case - because without it the Congressional budget office projected deficits too large. By it not being permanent, the Congressional budget office could project higher deficits in the earlier years being made up in the years after the tax change is set to expire.

Another dumb feature of the legal demands on budgeting, are tax loopholes that are sometimes created, but with sunset provisions predicated on the long term budget projection demands I just outlined. Then, because some of those loopholes are so popular the sunset provision on them is a de facto fiction - it is a given Congress is going to renew them (with a new sunset deadline) because the Congress critters are looking at their reelection as a bigger priority than budget deficits.

Congress should look at the history of the Congressional budget office budget projections and realize they are neither good at knowing the state of the economy ten years out, nor at predicting financial behavior of people and companies in response to tax changes. They should not Sunset tax changes, just take a wait and see attitude from which they can choose to respond at will to actual conditions.

Yes criminal things like drug laws, for example, need to have sunset provisions, so Congress must weigh their effectiveness and continued appropriateness, not just rubber stamp them as “working” when many such laws have intended objectives they do no always achieve. NO, arrests for a law does not mean it’s working. The objectives of laws regarding actual crime must have hoped for deterrence as part of the objective. For instance drug laws related to sale and manufacture could be said to have worked, with a record of arrests that have more or less stabilized since the 1980s (at least not seen dramatic increases). But drugs laws regarding mere possession have NOT been any real deterrent to possession, creating a class of criminals (conviction for mere possession) that has tripled since the 1980s. It can also be said that drug laws regarding possession have not greatly bled into catching more of the suppliers, for while their arrests have been stable since the 1980s, they have also not been drastically reduced. Anyone thinking the drug laws would reduce use of abusive drugs has been wrong. Had those laws had sunset provisions Congress would had to evaluate their effectiveness on a more rigorous basis.