Obama was left with no other choice than to embrace this steaming pile of failure. He knew that there was absolutely no chance of any other bill relating in the least to health care ever making it to his desk again.
Obama could simply not have signed it.
Perhaps you at least are aware of the contribution to writing that was made by the republicans,
So? What matters is the law in its entirety. You could turn perfectly reasonable legislation into a corrupt turd with the addition of a single sentence.
who subsequently protested against it only out of their
No, they voted against it because it is, as you said, a "steaming pile of shit".
desire to do everything possible to tarnish the legacy of the democrat at 1600 Pennsylvania?
Yes, because, of course, the job of the president isn't to serve the American people, it is to leave a shining legacy for himself!
In any case, they don't need to worry about that, the president is doing an excellent job at that himself. I used to be a Democrat and am ashamed to say that I actually voted for Obama.
You really should read into how the federal government budget works before you go and shove your foot in your mouth like that.
You fail to understand that money is fungible: increases in earmarked funding are simply offset by decreases in general funding.
Then I suggest you go try living in Somalia or Afghanistan
I'd settle for Switzerland, Hong Kong, or Singapore, all of which have substantially lower government spending than the US. Even just balancing our budget, like Germany, would be a good start.
The grown ups here would like to see America get better for the future.
Yes, we do. That's why infantile views like yours, namely that money is handed out like pocket money from an all powerful paternalistic government, need to stop.
The reality that slashdot couldn't be bothered to share is that the money would go to infrastructure
The reality is that money is fungible and that statements are meaningless: the money goes into a big pot, and infrastructure spending won't substantially increase as a result of this. Even if it did, that "infrastructure spending" would largely be wasted on pork spending and political favors.
We need to get our infrastructure up to snuff to keep our country relevant in the modern era.
Infrastructure spending is being crowded out by entitlement spending; if you don't fix entitlement spending, there simply won't be any money left for anything else.
The conservatives deny this, which makes it a liberal matter - just like climate change, health care, education, space exploration, scientific research, and diplomacy.
You're absolutely right, and I want the federal government to do next to nothing in any of those areas.
Obama did not propose this law. Congress wrote it and he signed it, but he did not propose it.
Are you kidding? "Passing the ACA" is considered one of the great accomplishments of this administration by its proponents. Trying to split hairs over whether he "proposed it" is irrelevant.
Actually, it's worse than that. It is the largest corporate handout in the history of government.
Yes, and it was endorsed, passed, signed, and implemented by President Obama and the Democrats, who evidently are in the pocket of big corporations.
If all of the large corporations are driven out of the US, that will leave room in the marketplace for small companies to get founded, and the US will end up with lots of small companies, with lots of CEO's, instead of a handful of CEO's with all of the money. Why is driving corporations out a bad thing?
It's not at all a bad thing if you don't mind paying much more for stuff as you do now (the equivalent to a reduction in income for everybody).
Obama keeps complaining about the stagnating middle class; the kinds of policies he advocates are the cause.
Right because things such as interstate highways, NIH, NSF, defense. medicare are all "corruption",
Medicare is a system by which wealthy seniors screw of young people and pharmaceutical companies and doctors get a big cut. Defense, are you kidding? You are defending the military-industrial complex? I could go on, but frankly, the more worthwhile a cause is, the less likely it is going to see a dime of this. Almost any windfall like this will be eaten up simply by "entitlements", the ultimate in corruption.
Things like the internet, and the web browser were funded by federal money, but we are busy making a partisan argument so lets wrap all of it under "corruption", facts be damned.
Well, the Internet was largely developed by corporate monopolies favored by the US government, mostly the DOD. The web browser was developed at CERN on top of NeXT, the result of mixing contributions from a highly political European-funded organization and a private company.
Sigh, American really has no hope when (1) that is the level of discussion and (2) it is considered "insightful".
True: people like you really need to get a f*cking clue.
but corporation that profit from shipping jobs overseas, hiding assets overseas, etc., are nothing if not "un-American"
You ain't seen nothing yet: if tax proposals like this go through and US corporate taxes increase even further, companies will move more and more of their operations overseas, or simply become uncompetitive with foreign companies.
a label the hypocrites of the far right are very fond a throwing about. So yeah, another populist idea that is going to go nowhere.
Actually, your views pretty much perfectly represent "they hypocrites on the far right"; your views are usually referred to as "right wing populism".
If they were investing it then it wouldn't be profit and people would care less. They're sitting on massive cash reserves, which ties up the money needlessly
If a company was foolish enough to stuff money into a mattress, the money would effectively simply cease to exist; that is, the buying power of everybody else's money would simply adjust to make up for what they aren't spending.
What companies actually do when they don't invest money in the market (which is productive) is buy T-bills and similar instruments; they do that whenever the government promises them a higher rate of return on government debt than they think they can get from productive investment after taxes. That is, they finance government debt with it. And, of course, government debt is a highly unproductive investment vehicle because most government spending is wasted for unproductive purposes.
You want to encourage productive investments? Strongly reduce government spending (and reduce corporate taxes). Ironically, it's usually the same people who spew this bullshit about companies not making productive investments who favor the government policies that cause companies not to make productive investments in the first place!
Wake up. That is what government is: highway bandits.
FTFY. Government is the highway bandits.
You imagine that you can pay for "protection from highway bandits" and that this is somehow different from government.
People can easily privately pay for physical protection and it works; in fact, most companies already have to do that because police is utterly ineffective in protecting them. The main "highway bandits" people have to worry about these days is patent trolls, bogus lawsuits, and power-hungry regulators; far from being protected from those by government, government is the instrument by which those operate.
Do you even know what foreign earnings are? Do you get that U.S. companies are setting up foreign shell corporations to hold all their patents, so that they can make royalty payments to those foreign companies, thereby avoiding profits that were, in reality, made on inventions conceived and developed here in the U.S.?
And in what sense are they "conceived and developed here in the US"? A large part of US R&D staff is immigrants to begin with.
Furthermore, if you think that this entitled the US to grab large amounts of taxes on foreign income, companies will do the economically rational thing and make sure that those inventions are "conceived and developed" elsewhere. Is that what you want? Discourage companies from doing R&D in the US?
So property rights is a government concern, just not a centralized government concern? I can see that logic. But then how do we deal with a citizen of town A owning land and things in town B? And how does the justice system handle the case of someone in town C coming to town B to steal things from the citizen from town A?
There are several possible answers to that. You can find some of them in Rothbard's "For a New Liberty".
But at the end of the day, I feel that all of that is relatively minor compared to truly horrible dictatorships where the people have no rights, no freedoms, poor health and are daily in fear for their lives and for the lives of those they care about. We should fight to make sure our society doesn't degenerate in that direction, but its useless to throw it all away just because it's not perfect.
That's a false dichotomy. Far from facing the choice between the imperfect government we have and "truly horrible dictatorships", in fact, our imperfect government is inching gradually closer to those "truly horrible dictatorships".
There are other ways. You do not need a big, powerful, centralized government to ensure property rights, freedom from violence, or economic growth. Quite the opposite: the government we have is a big impediment to all three objectives.
The problem is that this money is not exclusively earned abroad.
Well, if Obamas's proposals get enacted, you can be sure that this money will be exclusively earned abroad, as companies move research, development, IP, and headquarters overseas. If you try to keep them from doing that, they'll simply be outcompeted by overseas companies.
US corporate taxes are some of the highest in the world, and that's the reason why non-US companies are becoming increasingly more competitive and attractive. Obama is wrecking America.
beginning to wonder what happened to slashdot, used to be libertarian now liberal..sad
It's probably that Europeans have come on-line and started participating in larger numbers. They want government action on everything, and the want us to wreck our country in the same way they have wrecked theirs. I bet if you took the American subset of Slashdot users, attitudes probably wouldn't have changed that much; younger Americans tend to be more libertarian.
(Since "liberal" is somewhat ambiguous, I'd just refer to them as "progressive".)
If you look at the poll, people strongly oppose all the programs that explicitly increase taxes.
What they support is programs they presume to be of no cost to them. If you phrase those programs to reflect what they actually mean, I doubt you'd get much support for them:
As you may have heard, greenhouse gases are thought to cause global warming. Should the federal government pass laws that substantially increase the prices of rent, homes, cars, gasoline, electricity, and other goods and services in order to limit greenhouse gas emissions?
Do you support raising the income tax so that the government can subsidize selected energy companies?
Do you support raising the income tax so that the government can subsidize companies that burn coal if they reduce air pollution?
Salaries historically have grown about 2% per year.
And if you want to point out that they haven't done so recently, I say: I agree. That is exactly what happens as government programs grow. And pointing fingers at "the rich" and "corporations" isn't going to help because that's not where the money is going. The rich are getting richer relative to the rest of us for the simple reason that the government programs that hurt growth of the poor and middle classes happen to be regressive. But hurting the rich more won't help the poor and middle classes.
Each of these measures has a cost, and that cost ultimately and invariably comes out of the pockets of working Americans, either through lower salaries, or higher taxes, or higher prices. The "stagnating incomes" that Obama likes to complain about are a direct consequence of his policies.
Having cars that either get really excellent fuel economy or run on battery power?
You don't just "have" them, you pay extra for them, either at the dealer or in subsidies that come out of higher taxes.
Forcing electrical utilities to switch to separate billing for grid-tie and power consumption, so that customers that want to put solar panels on their roofs aren't shafted in order to have overnight electrical service from base-load power?
That's a wonderful boondoggle for well-off folks, people who own homes and have the money to put solar panels on it. Who gets "shafted" is lower income folks who live in apartments and condos and can't put solar panels on their homes; they subsidize the effectively lower rates for the more wealthy.
Most of these things don't have all that much cost, and for some of them, they're a cost that the individual should have borne anyway.
Salaries historically have grown about 2% per year. That tells you that it doesn't take a lot of money to make people worse off. Progressives suffer from the delusion that they can just create costly government programs and finance them by "taxing the rich" and "taxing corporations". But the only thing you can actually tax is the work individuals do, and that's who all of these costs, mandates, and programs are eventually paid by. And usually this works out in a regressive way, hurting low income folks the most.
The Pew poll compares what AAAS members believe with what the general public believes. For each of the questions, only a small number of AAAS members is actually qualified to have an informed opinion, for the rest, you are simply asking a member of a particular social class with no particular qualifications.
Furthermore, many of the questions are either ambiguous or value judgment.
For example, the question "is it safe to eat geneticallly modified foods" is quite ambiguous. Does that mean that genetic modifications are always safe, no matter what? Or does it mean that all currently approved genetically modified foods are safe? Or does it mean that genetic modification by itself doesn't cause foods to be dangerous? (If you think it means the last of these statements, try to figure out what that would mean.)
Favoring the use of animals in research is a value judgment, not a scientific one. So is the question of whether childhood vaccines should be required. Etc.
Note that Pew gets it right when they entitle the article "Public and Scientists’ Views on Science and Society". These are differences in views, not differences in facts. And the differences in view are rooted not just in different kind of knowledge and expertise, but also different value systems and different economic self-interests.
For many of the responses, it's easy to figure out the scientific reasoning behind why scientists on average believe what they do. For some of them, I would prefer if the general public move more in the directions of the scientists (e.g., evolution, astronauts, nuclear power plants). For others, I'd prefer if the scientists moved more in the direction of the general public (e.g., population growth, offshore drilling, fracking). For several of them, I wish everybody refused to answer because the question is the wrong question or even rooted in incorrect assumptions to begin with (e.g., climate change, GMO).
Mostly, what the poll really shows is that, while science doesn't have a liberal bias, scientists most certainly do. And Slashdot should stop treating statements by scientists as gospel truth. Even experts in a field often get it wrong, and scientists on average are no more qualified to comment on scientific matters outside their (usually) narrow field than anybody else.
I'd agree with you almost entirely except for your subtle compassion for Bell. Telecoms love to claim that the infrastructure is theirs because they built it. The only problem is, in the majority of situations, the tax payers have actually subsidized the infrastructure cost.
They have. That's wrong. But you aren't going to fix that by stacking more arbitrary rules on top of already exiting arbitrary rules.
Our system of government, flawed as it may be, is completely broken by monopolized industry. This is why industries like banking and telecoms are so heavily regulated.
No, sorry, you got that backwards. Telecoms and banks are "monopolized industries" only because they are so heavily regulated; it's government regulation that causes these monopolies. The more you regulate, the more monopolies, the more crony capitalism, and the more rent seeking you are going to get.
Note that Bell's history is that it start off as a private company (granted monopolies through patents), then was effectively nationalized, and then was privatized again. The dysfunctions you see today are largely due to that history, and that history is largely a history of government regulation and government-created monopolies.
How nice that you are such a wealthy and privileged person that you can afford to have a home Internet connection plus a mobile connection. However, for many people, $5/month TV streaming over their mobile means that they can seriously consider dropping their $60/month wired Internet connection altogether.
This sort of thing is more easily prevented by prohibiting the provider of the pipes from also selling what's sent through the pipes, and vice versa.
Yes, it's easily prevented, but there is a cost. Let's say I have enough money to buy a car while you don't. As a result, there are lots of business and job opportunities open to me that aren't open to you. Your solution to this "unfair" situation is to prohibit individual car ownership altogether and force everybody to use government-regulated taxi services, available to everybody under the same conditions. Sure that accomplishes what you want. It also makes most people's lives a lot more cumbersome and expensive.
Unfortunately, we're in a funny in-between state right now because phone service is moving from point-to-point to packet-based.
And one side effect of this kind of ruling is that moving to packet-based systems will be slowed down: Bell can't discriminate against IP-based services, but if they use proprietary internal protocols for VoIP, video conferencing, and TV delivery, the net neutrality rulings don't apply.
There is no distinction between pipes and the content in the pipes in this model.
It certainly makes a huge difference to Bell whether IP traffic travels between machines completely within their network and completely under their control, or whether it is piped into their system from a peer. The fact that as an end user or programmer, that difference doesn't concern you doesn't change the fact that it potentially has a huge economic impact. Yes, IP packets aren't all the same, even if to you they look that way.
The wireless provider is no longer allowed to treat their own subscription offering as being different from, say, Netflix by pretending data which they're sending you is magically different than any other data
But it is different, and there is no magic about it either: their own data only flows over their own wires, they can cache that data close to the customer that wants it, and they don't have to pay peering costs for it.
Do you think people are well served when a company can undercut competition by rigging the system?
They are no more "rigging the system" than when people use any other private property. I have a right to drive my car, you don't have a right to drive my car even if you don't own a car.
I don't see what is "fair" about this. Bell built and owns the infrastructure that those packets run over, Netflix does not. Forcing Bell to do things with that infrastructure against their will is no more "fair" than forcing you by law to let my dog defecate in your yard.
Now, you may counter that Bell got their ownership of the hardware through lobbying and other unfair means, and I would agree. But you can't fix the fact that infrastructure is unfairly regulated and uncompetitive by piling even more unfair regulation on top of it.
In fact, that's how these things spiral out of control: regulators screw up with some regulation, and then rather than fix the original regulation, they pile more regulation on top of it, which causes more problems, and yet more regulation, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Obama could simply not have signed it.
So? What matters is the law in its entirety. You could turn perfectly reasonable legislation into a corrupt turd with the addition of a single sentence.
No, they voted against it because it is, as you said, a "steaming pile of shit".
Yes, because, of course, the job of the president isn't to serve the American people, it is to leave a shining legacy for himself!
In any case, they don't need to worry about that, the president is doing an excellent job at that himself. I used to be a Democrat and am ashamed to say that I actually voted for Obama.
You fail to understand that money is fungible: increases in earmarked funding are simply offset by decreases in general funding.
I'd settle for Switzerland, Hong Kong, or Singapore, all of which have substantially lower government spending than the US. Even just balancing our budget, like Germany, would be a good start.
Yes, we do. That's why infantile views like yours, namely that money is handed out like pocket money from an all powerful paternalistic government, need to stop.
The reality is that money is fungible and that statements are meaningless: the money goes into a big pot, and infrastructure spending won't substantially increase as a result of this. Even if it did, that "infrastructure spending" would largely be wasted on pork spending and political favors.
Infrastructure spending is being crowded out by entitlement spending; if you don't fix entitlement spending, there simply won't be any money left for anything else.
You're absolutely right, and I want the federal government to do next to nothing in any of those areas.
Are you kidding? "Passing the ACA" is considered one of the great accomplishments of this administration by its proponents. Trying to split hairs over whether he "proposed it" is irrelevant.
Yes, and it was endorsed, passed, signed, and implemented by President Obama and the Democrats, who evidently are in the pocket of big corporations.
It's not at all a bad thing if you don't mind paying much more for stuff as you do now (the equivalent to a reduction in income for everybody).
Obama keeps complaining about the stagnating middle class; the kinds of policies he advocates are the cause.
Medicare is a system by which wealthy seniors screw of young people and pharmaceutical companies and doctors get a big cut. Defense, are you kidding? You are defending the military-industrial complex? I could go on, but frankly, the more worthwhile a cause is, the less likely it is going to see a dime of this. Almost any windfall like this will be eaten up simply by "entitlements", the ultimate in corruption.
Well, the Internet was largely developed by corporate monopolies favored by the US government, mostly the DOD. The web browser was developed at CERN on top of NeXT, the result of mixing contributions from a highly political European-funded organization and a private company.
True: people like you really need to get a f*cking clue.
You ain't seen nothing yet: if tax proposals like this go through and US corporate taxes increase even further, companies will move more and more of their operations overseas, or simply become uncompetitive with foreign companies.
Actually, your views pretty much perfectly represent "they hypocrites on the far right"; your views are usually referred to as "right wing populism".
If a company was foolish enough to stuff money into a mattress, the money would effectively simply cease to exist; that is, the buying power of everybody else's money would simply adjust to make up for what they aren't spending.
What companies actually do when they don't invest money in the market (which is productive) is buy T-bills and similar instruments; they do that whenever the government promises them a higher rate of return on government debt than they think they can get from productive investment after taxes. That is, they finance government debt with it. And, of course, government debt is a highly unproductive investment vehicle because most government spending is wasted for unproductive purposes.
You want to encourage productive investments? Strongly reduce government spending (and reduce corporate taxes). Ironically, it's usually the same people who spew this bullshit about companies not making productive investments who favor the government policies that cause companies not to make productive investments in the first place!
FTFY. Government is the highway bandits.
People can easily privately pay for physical protection and it works; in fact, most companies already have to do that because police is utterly ineffective in protecting them. The main "highway bandits" people have to worry about these days is patent trolls, bogus lawsuits, and power-hungry regulators; far from being protected from those by government, government is the instrument by which those operate.
And in what sense are they "conceived and developed here in the US"? A large part of US R&D staff is immigrants to begin with.
Furthermore, if you think that this entitled the US to grab large amounts of taxes on foreign income, companies will do the economically rational thing and make sure that those inventions are "conceived and developed" elsewhere. Is that what you want? Discourage companies from doing R&D in the US?
There are several possible answers to that. You can find some of them in Rothbard's "For a New Liberty".
That's a false dichotomy. Far from facing the choice between the imperfect government we have and "truly horrible dictatorships", in fact, our imperfect government is inching gradually closer to those "truly horrible dictatorships".
There are other ways. You do not need a big, powerful, centralized government to ensure property rights, freedom from violence, or economic growth. Quite the opposite: the government we have is a big impediment to all three objectives.
Well, if Obamas's proposals get enacted, you can be sure that this money will be exclusively earned abroad, as companies move research, development, IP, and headquarters overseas. If you try to keep them from doing that, they'll simply be outcompeted by overseas companies.
US corporate taxes are some of the highest in the world, and that's the reason why non-US companies are becoming increasingly more competitive and attractive. Obama is wrecking America.
That isn't the right thing. In fact, the morally right thing for companies to do is to try to find as many loopholes in the US tax system as they can.
It's probably that Europeans have come on-line and started participating in larger numbers. They want government action on everything, and the want us to wreck our country in the same way they have wrecked theirs. I bet if you took the American subset of Slashdot users, attitudes probably wouldn't have changed that much; younger Americans tend to be more libertarian.
(Since "liberal" is somewhat ambiguous, I'd just refer to them as "progressive".)
If you look at the poll, people strongly oppose all the programs that explicitly increase taxes.
What they support is programs they presume to be of no cost to them. If you phrase those programs to reflect what they actually mean, I doubt you'd get much support for them:
As you may have heard, greenhouse gases are thought to cause global warming. Should the federal government pass laws that substantially increase the prices of rent, homes, cars, gasoline, electricity, and other goods and services in order to limit greenhouse gas emissions?
Do you support raising the income tax so that the government can subsidize selected energy companies?
Do you support raising the income tax so that the government can subsidize companies that burn coal if they reduce air pollution?
And if you want to point out that they haven't done so recently, I say: I agree. That is exactly what happens as government programs grow. And pointing fingers at "the rich" and "corporations" isn't going to help because that's not where the money is going. The rich are getting richer relative to the rest of us for the simple reason that the government programs that hurt growth of the poor and middle classes happen to be regressive. But hurting the rich more won't help the poor and middle classes.
Each of these measures has a cost, and that cost ultimately and invariably comes out of the pockets of working Americans, either through lower salaries, or higher taxes, or higher prices. The "stagnating incomes" that Obama likes to complain about are a direct consequence of his policies.
You don't just "have" them, you pay extra for them, either at the dealer or in subsidies that come out of higher taxes.
That's a wonderful boondoggle for well-off folks, people who own homes and have the money to put solar panels on it. Who gets "shafted" is lower income folks who live in apartments and condos and can't put solar panels on their homes; they subsidize the effectively lower rates for the more wealthy.
Salaries historically have grown about 2% per year. That tells you that it doesn't take a lot of money to make people worse off. Progressives suffer from the delusion that they can just create costly government programs and finance them by "taxing the rich" and "taxing corporations". But the only thing you can actually tax is the work individuals do, and that's who all of these costs, mandates, and programs are eventually paid by. And usually this works out in a regressive way, hurting low income folks the most.
The Pew poll compares what AAAS members believe with what the general public believes. For each of the questions, only a small number of AAAS members is actually qualified to have an informed opinion, for the rest, you are simply asking a member of a particular social class with no particular qualifications.
Furthermore, many of the questions are either ambiguous or value judgment.
For example, the question "is it safe to eat geneticallly modified foods" is quite ambiguous. Does that mean that genetic modifications are always safe, no matter what? Or does it mean that all currently approved genetically modified foods are safe? Or does it mean that genetic modification by itself doesn't cause foods to be dangerous? (If you think it means the last of these statements, try to figure out what that would mean.)
Favoring the use of animals in research is a value judgment, not a scientific one. So is the question of whether childhood vaccines should be required. Etc.
Note that Pew gets it right when they entitle the article "Public and Scientists’ Views on Science and Society". These are differences in views, not differences in facts. And the differences in view are rooted not just in different kind of knowledge and expertise, but also different value systems and different economic self-interests.
For many of the responses, it's easy to figure out the scientific reasoning behind why scientists on average believe what they do. For some of them, I would prefer if the general public move more in the directions of the scientists (e.g., evolution, astronauts, nuclear power plants). For others, I'd prefer if the scientists moved more in the direction of the general public (e.g., population growth, offshore drilling, fracking). For several of them, I wish everybody refused to answer because the question is the wrong question or even rooted in incorrect assumptions to begin with (e.g., climate change, GMO).
Mostly, what the poll really shows is that, while science doesn't have a liberal bias, scientists most certainly do. And Slashdot should stop treating statements by scientists as gospel truth. Even experts in a field often get it wrong, and scientists on average are no more qualified to comment on scientific matters outside their (usually) narrow field than anybody else.
They have. That's wrong. But you aren't going to fix that by stacking more arbitrary rules on top of already exiting arbitrary rules.
No, sorry, you got that backwards. Telecoms and banks are "monopolized industries" only because they are so heavily regulated; it's government regulation that causes these monopolies. The more you regulate, the more monopolies, the more crony capitalism, and the more rent seeking you are going to get.
Note that Bell's history is that it start off as a private company (granted monopolies through patents), then was effectively nationalized, and then was privatized again. The dysfunctions you see today are largely due to that history, and that history is largely a history of government regulation and government-created monopolies.
The question presumes facts that haven't been established, and that don't actually hold true.
How nice that you are such a wealthy and privileged person that you can afford to have a home Internet connection plus a mobile connection. However, for many people, $5/month TV streaming over their mobile means that they can seriously consider dropping their $60/month wired Internet connection altogether.
That should have been: "but if they continue to use proprietary internal protocols for voice, video conferencing, and TV delivery" ...
Yes, it's easily prevented, but there is a cost. Let's say I have enough money to buy a car while you don't. As a result, there are lots of business and job opportunities open to me that aren't open to you. Your solution to this "unfair" situation is to prohibit individual car ownership altogether and force everybody to use government-regulated taxi services, available to everybody under the same conditions. Sure that accomplishes what you want. It also makes most people's lives a lot more cumbersome and expensive.
And one side effect of this kind of ruling is that moving to packet-based systems will be slowed down: Bell can't discriminate against IP-based services, but if they use proprietary internal protocols for VoIP, video conferencing, and TV delivery, the net neutrality rulings don't apply.
It certainly makes a huge difference to Bell whether IP traffic travels between machines completely within their network and completely under their control, or whether it is piped into their system from a peer. The fact that as an end user or programmer, that difference doesn't concern you doesn't change the fact that it potentially has a huge economic impact. Yes, IP packets aren't all the same, even if to you they look that way.
But it is different, and there is no magic about it either: their own data only flows over their own wires, they can cache that data close to the customer that wants it, and they don't have to pay peering costs for it.
They are no more "rigging the system" than when people use any other private property. I have a right to drive my car, you don't have a right to drive my car even if you don't own a car.
I don't see what is "fair" about this. Bell built and owns the infrastructure that those packets run over, Netflix does not. Forcing Bell to do things with that infrastructure against their will is no more "fair" than forcing you by law to let my dog defecate in your yard.
Now, you may counter that Bell got their ownership of the hardware through lobbying and other unfair means, and I would agree. But you can't fix the fact that infrastructure is unfairly regulated and uncompetitive by piling even more unfair regulation on top of it.
In fact, that's how these things spiral out of control: regulators screw up with some regulation, and then rather than fix the original regulation, they pile more regulation on top of it, which causes more problems, and yet more regulation, etc.