If you read the actual budget, which I'll link to below, you'll see that they never claim to pay for all spending through tax collections. The budget explicitly says otherwise. It also talks about a deficit neutral--not revenue neutral--tax plan, for what that's worth.
So no, it's not a math error. The budget expects to continue the usual deficit spending, albeit at a lower rate than recent past.
The question is whether these reports amount to fake news. They're making critical claims based on false premises, after all.
Again, when you cite "refusing to provide proper throughput" what you're really saying is that Comcast declined to throw more of its own resources toward other peoples' business models. They didn't "starve the peering partner." Rather, the peering partner didn't have the resources to deliver the traffic it tried to deliver.
Put it this way: I don't subscribe to Netflix streaming. When you insist that Comcast MUST provide extra service to this peering partner so that Netflix can make money, you're really saying that Comcast must divert resources away from investments that would benefit all of it's customers and toward ones that are focused on benefiting those who subscribe to Netflix, and to Netflix itself.
Why should part of what I pay for Comcast internet be required to subsidize Netflix and their subscribers?
That's the big problem with this version of Network Neutrality. It's fundamentally not neutral at all, but about tilting the playingfield toward certain businesses like Netflix.
Plenty of other commenters above have pointed out that the legal wrangling has nothing to do with Network Neutrality.
But to bring up something different, how about the style of this post? It's just positively dripping with commentary, as many adjectives as the submitter seemed able to throw at the story.
Not only was the submitter pretty off base with his premise, but he was really doubling down with his rhetoric.
I'd like to think Slashdot could be a little more fact oriented with this sort of thing if users called it out. Not everything has to be dramatized.
If Comcast could do that they would have, they are ALREADY FREE to do so even under current rules.
And they already have. Part of the big Network Neutrality push came when Comcast slowed speeds to Netflix down and threatened to slow it down more if Netflix didn't pay up.
Comcast didn't slow speed to Netflix; it just didn't spend more of its own resources to make Netflix have an easier time of profiting off of Comcast's customers.
Netflix chose a route to Comcast's network that was unable to handle the traffic well, and then Netflix complained the Comcast wasn't upgrading the route Netflix itself selected.
It wasn't a harm but merely declining to bear the cost of Netflix's business model, and forcing even non-Netflix subscribers to pay for Netflix traffic in the process.
Unfortunately, all too many misconstrued the incident to push for policies that tilt the playingfield in favor of Netflix.
The Netflix incident was traced to a dispute over peering on a transit partner, not an issue of an ISP slowing traffic as so many have claimed.
So yeah, that was fake news.
In the end, the dispute here is over whether the FCC should claim greater authority over internet services or not, on questionable legal grounds and by way of accumulating regulatory powers that are otherwise more spread out among various agencies.
To me THAT's the real danger here. When did we become so comfortable with the US government (headed by Trump, mind you) making those power grabs?
Under Obama (and remember, the FCC is supposed to be independent of the president) the FCC supported NN in general. What actions it decided to take were in favor of the policy, not against it, and they only changed to Title II after courts pointed out that they otherwise lacked authority to make those regulations.
I mean, they probably lacked authority to change to Title II as well, but at least we can say that without Title II they definitely didn't have it.
Regulatory bodies are bound by law, not by public sentiment. The public speaks through their representatives, and the commission is required to abide by the laws passed by those representatives of the people. They're not allowed to go against the people based on numbers of clicks on a web form.
Commissioners are free to cite numbers in their press releases, but in terms of the actual substance and legality of regulations, the notice and comment procedure doesn't have much to do with numbers. The regulator has to address issues whether they be brought be one person or a thousand.
You can see this in action by pulling up final rules as published in the Federal Register, which is what individuals and companies have to adhere to. In such a publication the regulator goes through addressing concerns regardless of the number of people who submitted each concern.
For example, here's the recent final rule on Alaska subsistence hunting. Notice that the regulator broke out eighteen individual issues brought up in comments, regardless of how many people may have provided each. https://www.federalregister.go...
(Yes, I'm belaboring the point to stress it)
It's no weasel word to say that blasting redundant comments at the FCC's webpage doesn't do anything directly. Instead, that captures how US regulatory processes actually work. And heck, it serves as a reminder that Congress, not the regulator, is the place to go to push for change. If regulators were free to make their own laws based on things like website submission counts, that would be a bad thing.
It's more that Mr. Pai is correctly pointing out that DDOSing and astroturfing have nothing to do with the regulatory process.
The FCC has to implement the laws passed by Congress and the president, not make up its own laws based on counts of comments coming in to the agency. The commissioners abide by the law, whether the comments want them to or not.
So yeah, it stinks that people screwed with their comment submission forms, but it's such a minor deal that protection of the private information contained within outweighs any benefit that might come from making public all of their records.
In regulatory processes of the United States, regulatory bodies are charged with implementing the laws passed by Congress and the president. THAT's where the democratic part of the process is, where vote counts matter.
The regulatory process goes on to seek comments not as a way of redoing the legislative process, but just to make sure all the Ts have been crossed. For every issue brought up in comments (NOT for every comment) the agency has to justify its position.
In short, in the regulatory processes of the US, a million comments with the same concern represent one concern. Pushes by special interests and news organizations to have people submit the same perspective over and over again merely waste governmental resources as workers have to remove the duplicate comments.
Slashdot should do a better job of informing readers about how the regulatory process works. It's misleading to present this story as if the numbers of comments matter directly or to talk about "honoring" fake comments.
It's really unfortunate that some interest groups and media outlets have been giving people the impression that regulatory proceedings--and this comment period was even BEFORE the proceedings were kicked off--were democratic processes, with the numbers of comments directly influencing the outcomes.
The FCC is charged with implementing the laws passed by Congress. The democratic portion of the process is there. The rest of the regulatory process is just about making sure the ts are crossed.
First of all, YES, the Network Neutrality policy regulates internet services as a public utility. The FCC's order on NN reclassifies internet service as a common carrier service under Title II of the Communications Act, just like other public utilities. Why try to deny this? If we're going to protect the internet for the public, be proud about doing so.
The article itself contains many similar dodges. Here's a particularly rough one:
First off, this statement refers to the generic “internet,” which could be taken to mean all online content and services, not just internet service providers. The net neutrality rules do not place any restrictions on content companies. In fact, the intention of the rules is to prevent ISPs from restricting access to content.
So they take a polling question about "the internet," assert that the term "could be taken" in a general way, then discuss it by taking it in a specific way, and finally recast the poll question in terms of what private actors should do when it was originally about what government should do.
A similar disconnect appears later on:
The law has nothing to do with choosing what you can access, or how, when, or where you can access it. The law has to do with your provider being required to provide you what you want to access, without blocking, throttling, degrading, or charging extra for it.
Setting aside that this is about a regulation and not a law, we're asked to accept that these qualities of access have nothing to do with how, when, or where we can access? Again, if this is good work then let's own up to it. Why the verbal acrobatics?
There are legitimate criticisms of Network Neutrality proposals, many of which are indicated in the legal and public polling history of the regulation. Articles like these fail to address those criticisms, and instead seem to work awfully hard to paper over them. Instead, if Network Neutrality is on the whole a good thing, we should honestly propose and embrace it, explaining why the downsides are outweighed by the upsides and making our case.
This article will come off as unconvincing and slanted to readers not already in the choir.
It's a live by the sword, die by the sword sort of thing. Any programs that rely on political decision making for their funding will sometimes find themselves on the wrong side of politics.
And then scientific programs are left feeling pressure to influence the political process to keep the politics headed in the programs' preferred directions, thus bringing the politicization of science.
This isn't really about Cruz or the Senate--they're just doing the job of a legislative body. This is about the bigger matter of the link between science and government, and why we should be more suspicious of that closeness.
Of course, let's not forget what Cruz's role in the shutdown was: here's the voting roll where he voted against ending the funding process while the Democrats voted for shutdown.
"I reject the idea that science is logical, purely rational, that it is detached and value-free, and that it is, for all these reasons, morally superior. Spock-ism gives us a false picture of science."
Reject it all you want, but the scientific method IS logical, purely rational, detached, and value-free. In fact, that's only THE WHOLE POINT and why it's useful. An irrational science that accounts for values is no longer science; it's just more un- or anti-scientific blathering.
But then, it's exactly for this reason that science is not "morally superior." Since science is value-free it cannot possibly declare itself to have such a value.
In the end it sounds like what this author really wants is for people to consider values in addition to science, but he doesn't realize that there are other, value-considering approaches out there. He's hijacking science unnecessarily.
In my field we'd rather say that verification and reproduction are confirmation that science has taken place, not actually part of science in themselves.
To us, science is only theorizing, hypothesizing, and experimenting. All the rest--from grant writing through publishing--are merely the very human drama that surrounds the drama-free search for knowledge of the scientific method.
We do science to avoid human biases. Verification and reproduction of results tend to be very human processes.
Ah, I see you're bringing in rules used in philosophical debates and legal arguments:)
The thing is, the "one investigator who happens to be right" is still doing science. It doesn't matter what anyone else in the world thinks; so long as that one investigator is abiding by the scientific method, he is behaving scientifically.
Meanwhile, for others to point to the beliefs of groups of people as grounds on which to attack the work of that one investigator is necessarily anti-scientific. It is attempting to put rhetoric and democratic notions of discovery above the actual experimental work of the investigator--above the actual science.
So yes, let's not game the system. The scientific method does not appreciate the injection of rhetoric.
Scientific consensus is an group of scientists agreeing on a proven theory or the proof of a theory.
And therein you've described a political process.
Any group of people seeking agreement is an example of politics, the very human activity of men attempting to convince each other to hold the views that each individual wants others to hold. Whether the rhetoric alludes to observations of the world or appeals to morality is beside the point that it is, in fact, a rhetorical process, not a scientific one.
Reality doesn't care what a group of scientists have agreed to think is true. Our experiments will turn out the same way no matter what we've managed to convince each other to believe.
Science is hard. In some cases scientific investigation might be fundamentally impossible. That's no excuse to water down the meaning of science, though, to make it more convenient.
Crichton had it exactly right. Science is the process of testing theories through hypothesis and experiment. It has nothing to do with consensus, or publishing, or going to school, or getting degrees. All of that may be in the human-created chaos that often occurs around the scientific process, but it is not science.
The entire point of science, as my field uses the word, is to free us from having to rely on these elements of human drama.
So the "tax cuts for the rich" lowered expenses for businesses. Why would the business reinvest that money into employees and tooling? Because it wants to make money! If the business is doing well, it will probably want to expand and improve itself, so it will choose to reinvest. And again, we don't have to guess at that, we have the actual data showing that it happened quite often.
But fine: maybe some didn't want to expand or weren't doing well enough that they'd see a return on that investment. The owner would then keep the money... but not in his mattress, he'd put it in a bank which would then have the money available to loan to other businesses that DID want to expand. Again, no theory here, only fact that it's what banks do.
The economic recovery of the early 2000s was largely, clearly, and explicitly due specifically to the "tax cuts for the rich" that everyone has been all too quick to hang around Bush's neck. Funny, that.
Changes in the law affect law, not economics. Would you say we need to write all new physics every time someone moves a little mass?
So you bring up sub-prime mortgages that "haven't exactly helped out economy out." Even that's not exactly an accurate view of what's going on, though it is the popular view and the view that has benefited politicians to reinforce.
The subprime mortgages actually HAVE worked to help the economy out in various ways ranging from allowing people to have a chance at home ownership when they otherwise wouldn't have had the option to allowing financial institutions to hedge their bets, managing their risk.
In fact, a huge part of what happened wasn't because of sub-prime mortgages and derivatives, but because of the political reaction to them. Politicians hijacked the system, throwing a wrench into it all and crashing it.
You could argue that the system should have been more durable so as to withstand politicians' meddling, but I wouldn't really blame the system itself for that.
Economists know this, but the word doesn't really get out because it's not politically convenient. As you say, the politicians want to increase their power at every turn, and the crash of the market that they caused through their hamhanded meddling is just another example of this.
Don't blame the economists or the financial system for the actions of power hungry politicians.
Studies. Plural. This wasn't some kind of one-off research done halfheatedly by a guy with an ax to grind, but an issue looked into by real researchers who know how to do academic work.
And no, like I said, it was all done and settled years and years ago. I don't exactly have every paper I've ever read sitting next to my desk.
But is it so hard to imagine? That if you lower expenses for businesses in real, lasting ways, that they'd be able to apply that capital into expansion and new hiring?
Bush's "tax cuts for the rich" was obviously not about letting rich people have more money for the hell of it, but about letting them keep more of their own money so that they could put it to use in economy-expanding ways. And it worked exactly as planned.
Slashdot Mirror
If you read the actual budget, which I'll link to below, you'll see that they never claim to pay for all spending through tax collections. The budget explicitly says otherwise. It also talks about a deficit neutral--not revenue neutral--tax plan, for what that's worth.
So no, it's not a math error. The budget expects to continue the usual deficit spending, albeit at a lower rate than recent past.
The question is whether these reports amount to fake news. They're making critical claims based on false premises, after all.
Check out Table S-1 here:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/sit...
Again, when you cite "refusing to provide proper throughput" what you're really saying is that Comcast declined to throw more of its own resources toward other peoples' business models. They didn't "starve the peering partner." Rather, the peering partner didn't have the resources to deliver the traffic it tried to deliver.
Put it this way: I don't subscribe to Netflix streaming. When you insist that Comcast MUST provide extra service to this peering partner so that Netflix can make money, you're really saying that Comcast must divert resources away from investments that would benefit all of it's customers and toward ones that are focused on benefiting those who subscribe to Netflix, and to Netflix itself.
Why should part of what I pay for Comcast internet be required to subsidize Netflix and their subscribers?
That's the big problem with this version of Network Neutrality. It's fundamentally not neutral at all, but about tilting the playingfield toward certain businesses like Netflix.
Plenty of other commenters above have pointed out that the legal wrangling has nothing to do with Network Neutrality.
But to bring up something different, how about the style of this post? It's just positively dripping with commentary, as many adjectives as the submitter seemed able to throw at the story.
Not only was the submitter pretty off base with his premise, but he was really doubling down with his rhetoric.
I'd like to think Slashdot could be a little more fact oriented with this sort of thing if users called it out. Not everything has to be dramatized.
And they already have. Part of the big Network Neutrality push came when Comcast slowed speeds to Netflix down and threatened to slow it down more if Netflix didn't pay up.
Comcast didn't slow speed to Netflix; it just didn't spend more of its own resources to make Netflix have an easier time of profiting off of Comcast's customers.
Netflix chose a route to Comcast's network that was unable to handle the traffic well, and then Netflix complained the Comcast wasn't upgrading the route Netflix itself selected.
It wasn't a harm but merely declining to bear the cost of Netflix's business model, and forcing even non-Netflix subscribers to pay for Netflix traffic in the process.
Unfortunately, all too many misconstrued the incident to push for policies that tilt the playingfield in favor of Netflix.
The Netflix incident was traced to a dispute over peering on a transit partner, not an issue of an ISP slowing traffic as so many have claimed.
So yeah, that was fake news.
In the end, the dispute here is over whether the FCC should claim greater authority over internet services or not, on questionable legal grounds and by way of accumulating regulatory powers that are otherwise more spread out among various agencies.
To me THAT's the real danger here. When did we become so comfortable with the US government (headed by Trump, mind you) making those power grabs?
Under Obama (and remember, the FCC is supposed to be independent of the president) the FCC supported NN in general. What actions it decided to take were in favor of the policy, not against it, and they only changed to Title II after courts pointed out that they otherwise lacked authority to make those regulations.
I mean, they probably lacked authority to change to Title II as well, but at least we can say that without Title II they definitely didn't have it.
Regulatory bodies are bound by law, not by public sentiment. The public speaks through their representatives, and the commission is required to abide by the laws passed by those representatives of the people. They're not allowed to go against the people based on numbers of clicks on a web form.
Commissioners are free to cite numbers in their press releases, but in terms of the actual substance and legality of regulations, the notice and comment procedure doesn't have much to do with numbers. The regulator has to address issues whether they be brought be one person or a thousand.
You can see this in action by pulling up final rules as published in the Federal Register, which is what individuals and companies have to adhere to. In such a publication the regulator goes through addressing concerns regardless of the number of people who submitted each concern.
For example, here's the recent final rule on Alaska subsistence hunting. Notice that the regulator broke out eighteen individual issues brought up in comments, regardless of how many people may have provided each.
https://www.federalregister.go...
(Yes, I'm belaboring the point to stress it)
It's no weasel word to say that blasting redundant comments at the FCC's webpage doesn't do anything directly. Instead, that captures how US regulatory processes actually work. And heck, it serves as a reminder that Congress, not the regulator, is the place to go to push for change. If regulators were free to make their own laws based on things like website submission counts, that would be a bad thing.
It's more that Mr. Pai is correctly pointing out that DDOSing and astroturfing have nothing to do with the regulatory process.
The FCC has to implement the laws passed by Congress and the president, not make up its own laws based on counts of comments coming in to the agency. The commissioners abide by the law, whether the comments want them to or not.
So yeah, it stinks that people screwed with their comment submission forms, but it's such a minor deal that protection of the private information contained within outweighs any benefit that might come from making public all of their records.
In regulatory processes of the United States, regulatory bodies are charged with implementing the laws passed by Congress and the president. THAT's where the democratic part of the process is, where vote counts matter.
The regulatory process goes on to seek comments not as a way of redoing the legislative process, but just to make sure all the Ts have been crossed. For every issue brought up in comments (NOT for every comment) the agency has to justify its position.
In short, in the regulatory processes of the US, a million comments with the same concern represent one concern. Pushes by special interests and news organizations to have people submit the same perspective over and over again merely waste governmental resources as workers have to remove the duplicate comments.
Slashdot should do a better job of informing readers about how the regulatory process works. It's misleading to present this story as if the numbers of comments matter directly or to talk about "honoring" fake comments.
Bingo.
It's really unfortunate that some interest groups and media outlets have been giving people the impression that regulatory proceedings--and this comment period was even BEFORE the proceedings were kicked off--were democratic processes, with the numbers of comments directly influencing the outcomes.
The FCC is charged with implementing the laws passed by Congress. The democratic portion of the process is there. The rest of the regulatory process is just about making sure the ts are crossed.
This article is spinning pretty hard.
First of all, YES, the Network Neutrality policy regulates internet services as a public utility. The FCC's order on NN reclassifies internet service as a common carrier service under Title II of the Communications Act, just like other public utilities. Why try to deny this? If we're going to protect the internet for the public, be proud about doing so.
The article itself contains many similar dodges. Here's a particularly rough one:
So they take a polling question about "the internet," assert that the term "could be taken" in a general way, then discuss it by taking it in a specific way, and finally recast the poll question in terms of what private actors should do when it was originally about what government should do.
A similar disconnect appears later on:
Setting aside that this is about a regulation and not a law, we're asked to accept that these qualities of access have nothing to do with how, when, or where we can access? Again, if this is good work then let's own up to it. Why the verbal acrobatics?
There are legitimate criticisms of Network Neutrality proposals, many of which are indicated in the legal and public polling history of the regulation. Articles like these fail to address those criticisms, and instead seem to work awfully hard to paper over them. Instead, if Network Neutrality is on the whole a good thing, we should honestly propose and embrace it, explaining why the downsides are outweighed by the upsides and making our case.
This article will come off as unconvincing and slanted to readers not already in the choir.
Ah, and now you've joined the previous commenter in making up numbers.
That you wear your biases on your sleeve to pronounce your numbers "likely" doesn't really change that.
It's a live by the sword, die by the sword sort of thing. Any programs that rely on political decision making for their funding will sometimes find themselves on the wrong side of politics.
And then scientific programs are left feeling pressure to influence the political process to keep the politics headed in the programs' preferred directions, thus bringing the politicization of science.
This isn't really about Cruz or the Senate--they're just doing the job of a legislative body. This is about the bigger matter of the link between science and government, and why we should be more suspicious of that closeness.
Seriously?
Asking the president to remove a senator? That's an amazingly blatant violation of the fundamental checks and balances of our government.
Of course, let's not forget what Cruz's role in the shutdown was: here's the voting roll where he voted against ending the funding process while the Democrats voted for shutdown.
http://www.senate.gov/legislat...
"I reject the idea that science is logical, purely rational, that it is detached and value-free, and that it is, for all these reasons, morally superior. Spock-ism gives us a false picture of science."
Reject it all you want, but the scientific method IS logical, purely rational, detached, and value-free. In fact, that's only THE WHOLE POINT and why it's useful. An irrational science that accounts for values is no longer science; it's just more un- or anti-scientific blathering.
But then, it's exactly for this reason that science is not "morally superior." Since science is value-free it cannot possibly declare itself to have such a value.
In the end it sounds like what this author really wants is for people to consider values in addition to science, but he doesn't realize that there are other, value-considering approaches out there. He's hijacking science unnecessarily.
In my field we'd rather say that verification and reproduction are confirmation that science has taken place, not actually part of science in themselves.
To us, science is only theorizing, hypothesizing, and experimenting. All the rest--from grant writing through publishing--are merely the very human drama that surrounds the drama-free search for knowledge of the scientific method.
We do science to avoid human biases. Verification and reproduction of results tend to be very human processes.
Ah, I see you're bringing in rules used in philosophical debates and legal arguments :)
The thing is, the "one investigator who happens to be right" is still doing science. It doesn't matter what anyone else in the world thinks; so long as that one investigator is abiding by the scientific method, he is behaving scientifically.
Meanwhile, for others to point to the beliefs of groups of people as grounds on which to attack the work of that one investigator is necessarily anti-scientific. It is attempting to put rhetoric and democratic notions of discovery above the actual experimental work of the investigator--above the actual science.
So yes, let's not game the system. The scientific method does not appreciate the injection of rhetoric.
Scientific consensus is not political consensus.
Scientific consensus is an group of scientists agreeing on a proven theory or the proof of a theory.
And therein you've described a political process.
Any group of people seeking agreement is an example of politics, the very human activity of men attempting to convince each other to hold the views that each individual wants others to hold. Whether the rhetoric alludes to observations of the world or appeals to morality is beside the point that it is, in fact, a rhetorical process, not a scientific one.
Reality doesn't care what a group of scientists have agreed to think is true. Our experiments will turn out the same way no matter what we've managed to convince each other to believe.
Science is hard. In some cases scientific investigation might be fundamentally impossible. That's no excuse to water down the meaning of science, though, to make it more convenient.
Crichton had it exactly right. Science is the process of testing theories through hypothesis and experiment. It has nothing to do with consensus, or publishing, or going to school, or getting degrees. All of that may be in the human-created chaos that often occurs around the scientific process, but it is not science.
The entire point of science, as my field uses the word, is to free us from having to rely on these elements of human drama.
On the other hand, rewarding someone who makes a really nice phone is also a legitimate way to see things get better.
You'd be surprised (and disappointed?) how much of physics is tested in exactly the same way economists test their theories.
Anyway, I think we're done here.
So the "tax cuts for the rich" lowered expenses for businesses. Why would the business reinvest that money into employees and tooling? Because it wants to make money! If the business is doing well, it will probably want to expand and improve itself, so it will choose to reinvest. And again, we don't have to guess at that, we have the actual data showing that it happened quite often.
But fine: maybe some didn't want to expand or weren't doing well enough that they'd see a return on that investment. The owner would then keep the money... but not in his mattress, he'd put it in a bank which would then have the money available to loan to other businesses that DID want to expand. Again, no theory here, only fact that it's what banks do.
The economic recovery of the early 2000s was largely, clearly, and explicitly due specifically to the "tax cuts for the rich" that everyone has been all too quick to hang around Bush's neck. Funny, that.
And now we're rushing to kill that albatross.
Changes in the law affect law, not economics. Would you say we need to write all new physics every time someone moves a little mass?
So you bring up sub-prime mortgages that "haven't exactly helped out economy out." Even that's not exactly an accurate view of what's going on, though it is the popular view and the view that has benefited politicians to reinforce.
The subprime mortgages actually HAVE worked to help the economy out in various ways ranging from allowing people to have a chance at home ownership when they otherwise wouldn't have had the option to allowing financial institutions to hedge their bets, managing their risk.
In fact, a huge part of what happened wasn't because of sub-prime mortgages and derivatives, but because of the political reaction to them. Politicians hijacked the system, throwing a wrench into it all and crashing it.
You could argue that the system should have been more durable so as to withstand politicians' meddling, but I wouldn't really blame the system itself for that.
Economists know this, but the word doesn't really get out because it's not politically convenient. As you say, the politicians want to increase their power at every turn, and the crash of the market that they caused through their hamhanded meddling is just another example of this.
Don't blame the economists or the financial system for the actions of power hungry politicians.
Studies. Plural. This wasn't some kind of one-off research done halfheatedly by a guy with an ax to grind, but an issue looked into by real researchers who know how to do academic work.
And no, like I said, it was all done and settled years and years ago. I don't exactly have every paper I've ever read sitting next to my desk.
But is it so hard to imagine? That if you lower expenses for businesses in real, lasting ways, that they'd be able to apply that capital into expansion and new hiring?
Bush's "tax cuts for the rich" was obviously not about letting rich people have more money for the hell of it, but about letting them keep more of their own money so that they could put it to use in economy-expanding ways. And it worked exactly as planned.