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Comment by jws | Hacker News Reader

The arrow thing is popular with pork pokers, but what it is doing is correcting an accidentally applied tax.

In 2004 there was a small $0.39 excise tax levied on weapons. Unfortunately, $0.30 target arrows are considered weapons under the law so they got a 130% tax accidentally levied on them.

Any politician or journalist that grouses about arrow makers getting special handouts is either uninformed or attempting to deceive you. I recommend you ignore them as a source of future information.

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I don't know the details of the bill, but wouldn't it have been better to reclassify the target arrows as non-weapons then? This way, the accidental tax would no longer apply.

i wish there were wikipedia style discuss pages for legislation. especially for things like this.

That's my 'when I get distracted from real work' side project :)

http://publicmarkup.org/bill/emergency-economic-stabilizatio...

thank you, Sunlight Foundation.

Good link, but the commentary there is just as bad as on this site.

I registered politwiki.com for something like this. If someone wants to do something with the domain, let me know.

In Brazil, there is a e-legislative solution based in Zope called SAPL (Sistema de Apoio ao Processo Legislativo or Legislative Process Support System). It's quite functional and it's installed in a lot of different legislatures across the country. I have met the team and briefly worked on some possible extensions for it.

And, BTW, it's open source, so, if you want to play with it, you can.

It may be correcting an accidentally applied tax, but do you _really_ want to start talking about how the tax code is broken. I mean gee, that conversation could go on for a long time.

They are not attempting to deceive anybody. The issue is the bank bailout, not arrows, not AMT, not anything else stuck in there to sweeten the pot. The fact that people are pointing out how much CRAP has to go into a bill to get it passed into law is germane and important to know.

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