Right now none of the costs incurred in maintaining employment are deductible.
You know what? This is a stupid argument; partially because you're right: Trump took away the personal exemption, which in 2017 is $4,050, so right now you're not deductible.
You don't get to deduct that $5,000 suit; you could have gotten a $150 suit at Express. Dry cleaning is bad for suits; you should be using a $25 brush, which will last over a century if cared for properly. You could save water by giving yourself a sponge bath, so those 15-minute hot showers are luxury consumption and not necessary to your job. Food should cost under $2,000/year.
The very first response discussed the activities and incomes in the course of making productive output. This isn't a revision; it's me repeating the same argument to your face again, and again, and again.
In this case, the "product" is my labour to my employer
Actually, you engage in labor and leisure to produce an output. Your employer deducts your labor because that part of the revenue--the part that pays your wages--isn't going into production effort by the employer, but rather into production effort by you. The output of that effort is the product your employer sells.
As a Candidate for office, I am not legally allowed to use campaign funds to purchase my suit, my tie, my briefcase, and so forth. That would be personal use, and personal use is egregiously-illegal. Funding my travel requires that I show the main purpose of travel was campaigning; note that Congressmen routinely abuse leadership PACs by taking leisure trips and identifying a minor, possibly-political activity as "the political expense" when really they're just taking their whole family on holiday to Scotland, because the rules are severely-broken.
As employees we don't get to deduct the cost of maintaining employment
To do so, you would need to deduct only the proportion of costs invested in your employment, and nothing more. That means you'd have to have special not-for-personal-use work clothes, deduct only the miles used for travel to and from work, and so forth. We actually allow this, but we don't consider time not required at work as "work-related": the drive to and from work (and to the gym, the spa, the grocery store, and everything else you did along the way) isn't tax-deductible.
If you're temporarily stationed at another office instead of your main office, that drive from home to work is actually deductible. If you have a second or temporary job and you commute from one place of work to another (instead of home to work and back), that drive is also deductible.
Moving expenses are also deductible if you move more than 50 miles for a new job. Apparently, we just consider normal commuting as basic consumption.
We don't consider driving to be "performing work for your employer" unless it is incurred by a fact of employment or interactions between employment (rather than as a fact of where you decided to live, in as much as one decides precisely where to live): the conditions of your employment must dictate some deviation at an endpoint (your office is somewhere else today, modifying your commute by a temporary measure put forth by your employer; or you must be at employer A and then at employer B and so your employment fully determines the length of your commute). If your endpoint is fixed--you have a permanent office location--then you determine the commute by renting an apartment closer or farther away.
More-correctly, your employer has about zero determination over your commute in those conditions, and is affecting your capacity to determine your commute in the others.
Your initial premise--and the manner in which you frame your function as an employee--seem to aim for a dialogue that suggests everything you do supports your existence, and your existence is wholly impactful on what you produce, and therefor you have zero income and should not pay taxes. It's one that's been tried by tax protesters now and then.
Profit is revenue minus the total operating expense involved in producing a product. Businesses are producing products with labor and materials, and providing the operating environment in which people work; what exceeds that is profit.
Individuals aren't producing a product. They're consuming. You're not creating a productive output, and so you don't get to count anything as an "expense" toward the creation of an output. Even if you renovate your house, you use that house--you're the consumer!
Here's the fun part: if you buy a house, live in it for at least 2 years, and then sell it, the difference in purchase versus sale is capital gains. If you do any home improvement, then the cost you expend on that home improvement is actually deductible as part of the cost basis of your home.
That is to say: you paid contractors, you bought material, and you otherwise expended to produce something that you then sold (you improved the house). Those expenses are not part of your income, and so you take the $200,000 you paid for the house and the $50,000 you paid to redo the kitchen out of the equation when you sell it for $350,000--only paying taxes on $100,000 of capital gains.
So here's the thing: if you repair your house, you're bringing it up to its original condition. You're not producing; you bought the house, you lived in the house, and the house needs maintenance--you are consuming the house by using its useful lifespan. Repairs are just consumption, and not tax-deductible. When the house requires $1,000 of repairs over the course of you living in it, you spend $1,000 to cover what you have consumed. Had you sold (and not consumed) the house, there would be no demand from you for those $1,000 of repairs. Yes it's weird to think about, since the house is going to need repairs over time.
If you're a farmer, you grow food, thus producing. When you eat food, you consume it. Your farm, as a business, has expenses for that food production; and if you use your own food, then the sale value of that food (not paid to your farm!) is essentially paid to you as personal income. This means that if you grow your own food using farm resources, you pay personal income taxes on that food as income; if you use your personal money to buy materials and grow a garden, you pay income taxes on the money you spend for all that, but the food you're growing is not income (it's not originally an asset of the farm, grown by an expense made by the farm, which has been transferred to you as a product of the farm for your consumption).
Chew on that for a bit. Yes, the IRS really taxes farmers on food they grow for themselves.
I understand all that perfectly well. It doesn't explain why corporates get taxed on profit while individuals get taxed on revenue.
So, I stated that taxing corprations on profit taxes actual production, while taxing people on income also taxes actual production, and you don't understand why this is done?
All individual income is profit. Corporate net profits are the same thing as individual gross wage income.
How is me selling my labour different from a company selling their collective labour?
A company's "labor" is its net operating profits. The rest of the "labor" being sold by that company is your labor. The revenue essentially floats through the company to the producer--the worker.
I'm curious why my cost of existence is not exempt from taxes the way a corporate's cost of existence is exempt from taxes.
Because your "existence" is only consuming resources and doing nothing productive. When you go out and work, you produce. Your labor, thus, is productive. This is also why we categorize things like dividends as unearned income (Dividends are taxed at the corporate profit rate, then distributed to the wealthy shareholders and taxed again at the capital gains rate, so that 15% personal income tax some big executives get is actually taxed at around 50%--businesses don't pay income taxes on wages, so it's 0%+individual on wages versus 35%+15% on dividends).
A business's profits are a sort of declaration by the business that it, by its existence, also "produces" through the mechanism of organizing labor in a more-efficient manner than labor would otherwise self-organize. Its expenses aren't its consumption; rather, the act of expending is productive, as it expends for business purposes to transform inputs into outputs through the organization of labor. Part of that expending is wage; part of it is that some other business does some of the work, thus incurring some of the expense, and transfers the intermediate product to the business.
Again: taxation in this manner makes the income tax roughly reflect a slice of GDP--of actual production--instead of some imaginary ideal that you can keep picking pockets all over the place because money is magical.
(By the by, businesses actually pay a payroll tax on wages, which current analysis suggests they backshift into lowering wages; the debate is whether they lower wages or raise prices, either of which just makes the employee or consumer pay for it. Payroll taxes suck.)
No, he's right. If you have an organization that passes a million dollars's worth of steel through a bunch of intermediate suppliers--mine, refine, distribute, shape, etc.--you tax the cost of that steel and all profits made and taxes paid on that steel at every supplier. That first labor and profit get taxed again, and again, and again, each time being paid by different hands, until it finally gets to the consumer.
That means long supply chains geometrically increase the cost of a product, and so vertical integration cuts down your product's costs. The same sort of thing happens with profit margins, really, offset by the fact that profits and taxes paid upstream in the supply chain are deducted off your corporate income tax by way of deducting supply costs as expenses.
Why is it that companies get to subtract their costs and pay tax on the result while individuals are taxed on revenue, not profit?
Because a business purchases productive output from other businesses, pays wages to workers who produce, and keeps the remaining revenue as profit. Thus the worker produces, and his wage represents the productive output; the suppliers also produce, and so the cost to the business to purchase that input is their productive output; and, of course, the business's profits are tied to nothing except the productive output of the business (which is the same productive output as the business's employees).
That means taxing corporate net profits and not their expenses taxes production: if a table is made, taxing the worker's wages and the corporate profits both of the table manfuacturer and all involved suppliers (including the truckers shipping those supplies) at a rate of 10% gets you 10% of the market price of a table. By taxing strictly and effectively in this manner, an average effective tax rate of 10% collects 10% of GDP and represents 10% of all goods and services produced and sold, in the long run.
Taxing corporate revenues ("gross profits"), on the other hand, double-taxes wages at the end of the pipeline; and far more than double-taxes supply everywhere else. This means the more suppliers you have in a chain, the heavier your taxes, and the higher the effective tax rate applied to a product.
Corporate revenue taxation heavily-favors monopolies, notably vertically-integrated monopolies as per Andrew Carnegie.
Well, they're not selling the data in this suggestion. They can tell restaurants that people go to restaurants after movies, as a general trend, and that they should try to attract such customers with coupons in the app. They do the analytics and reach a conclusion, and can show impact without demographics: your area has at X times Y thousands of customers potentially coming to your restaurant.
When they get to selling demographics data, they're selling data. Everything beyond that also counts, obviously. "Restaurants in your town are highly-popular at these times, on the order of 80,000 customers per hour in this 5-mile radius, due to peak floods of exiting moviegoers" is just a conclusion.
I don't have a problem with them keeping this data to themselves; I have a problem with them not telling anyone they were gathering it. If they wanted to distribute the data, that would raise some serious issues: we don't have protections for consumers in this area, so you can easily click through a blind contract and sign your rights away.
It's faster. With a high minimum wage, the point at which the relative risk considerations and the ROI trigger a change in operations--and the rate of that change--for each individual business is sooner and faster.
This discussion is an economics one: will the high minimum wage damage our economy by creating unemployment? I argue for social safety nets because the economics argument is inherently non-humanitarian: if we shove too many poor people onto the street at once, the proles will make a lot of noise; if we do so slowly, we can avoid such criticism even as those same people each eventually face such suffering in turn. We need to take responsibility for each individual who is affected in the path of progress, not just for the economic metrics that generate overall sentiment.
That means we can push a higher minimum wage (or some other approach), but we need to also take steps for those who are impacted negatively by this policy.
I always just tell people that we're expanding the output of human labor, thus decreasing the cost (a big part of that machine's cost is labor, although for low-demand goods as such they might be taking a huge 30% profit margin). You gave a more-complete answer.
If anyone but the fringe UBI folks actually thought automation would kill jobs, I might need people like you on my campaign team.
When 20 - 30% of the human population is unemployable 10 - 20 years from now due to automation, there will be a considerable disruption to global economies.
This won't happen. We automated farming, we automated manufacture, we automated IT. Everything you use today used to take hundreds or thousands of times as many human labor hours to provide. That's right: we've eliminated 99.999% of all jobs in the past two centuries.
What we did, we started buying 10,000 times as much stuff, where "stuff" is quantified as "what used to take so much labor". We only need 1 in 10,000 workers to supply X now, so we buy 10,000 X, where X is the generic output unit.
Let's say your wage increased arbitrarily. At what point would you cease being able to spend money due to not being able to imagine anything you want to buy? Think about a good, high-quality, home-cooked meal with steak and real red sweet potatoes, fish, crabs, lobster, the expensive stuff. Now imagine eating that every day, every meal, and you pretty much just drive up to a McDonalds-alike and order it, and it's no more expensive than what you pay now for food. Would you slave away at home for hours eating cheap, or would you spend your limitless wealth on this new stuff?
The new stuff still costs $5 because it takes $5 worth of labor (jobs) to make it.
Scaling up your spending like that multiplies the meager labor requirements into something supported by... well, your spending. The diversion of wage into consumption creates revenue and thus profit. Seriously. Corporations don't create money when they pay you; they use the money people spend buying from them to pay wages.
The only problem is progress causes transitional unemployment. Too much at once--too fast for your economy to shift demand and drive new supply, thus reallocating labor to new jobs--causes a pile-up of unemployment. If it's paced correctly, progress is limitless in the sense that it never results in permanent increases in unemployment.
They're all examples of "demand side" subsidy. Where you give people money to buy something. This is known to increase costs. Its basic supply and demand.
Medicare for All advocates say we'll dictate the prices, essentially.
My strategy is to expand the ACA, meaning consumers buy goods from employers, and employers want the lowest prices (really:
most profitable prices) because consumers will go to another seller to get things cheaper (competition impacts profitable price). Employers thus want the lowest costs, which means lower-priced insurance. We mandate what insurance they must supply, so there's a bound; otherwise, it goes down from there: consumer, employer, insurer, provider, supplier.
From there, we can look at remittance rates at every individual provider and do some simple statistics: go down 3 standards (lowest 2.5%, discarding outliers) and negotiate within that price per-provider. The Government isn't trying to figure out the cost of healthcare; it's using the private market to compute that cost. We supply a Public Option based on that, instead of being the only insurer in town and trying to magically guess the smallest price we can pay without collapsing the market.
We can also use the data to identify the fair-market average range in the local market. That is: Tier 1 providers (providers whose primary service is X will supply X cheaper than the guy who mainly does Y and also does X) become our reference group for the fair market price. We publish these so as to enable fair negotiation in the private insurer market.
So I'm basically proposing we enable the market by increasing demand in a highly-competitive market, and by ensuring private interests are managing that demand and are impacted by the price. The insurer has to face big groups (employers, unions) who will want low prices and can just shop for the next insurer. We can cash-subsidize some (e.g. small businesses), but only partially: they still need to feel the sting of higher prices and be thus motivated to avoid them.
What you do is build hospitals, build medical schools, build pharma factories... increase supply. Directly. And that lowers COST because the amount on the market relative to demand will increase thus lowering the bargaining power of the supplier because the market will be flooded with competition.
The supply is unsustainable without the demand; however, you're not wrong: this is why we treat small businesses specially and help them to thrive. We don't want more supply; we want more competition. A giant monopoly is more supply; a bunch of other suppliers who will undercut your 40% profit margin to try and become the multi-billion-dollar gorilla in the room is a nightmare requiring you to engage in the ancient art of price war.
What we want, mainly, is universal access to healthcare. I can supply that while making the Government demand-side cash subsidy--the Federal dollars paid in--a minority of the overall market, and one not prone to become a successful business by way of price competition (because the ACA mandates your employer provide healthcare). There will thus always be this vacuum if we remove profitable entities, and so they'll keep fighting to get the lowest costs, the best prices, and the most customers to maximize their profits.
So I would caution and say the answer is not to cut off social welfare and give the hand-outs to businesses--the price at which they can make profit will be the minimum price, and not everyone will be able to afford any price--but rather to take the mixed economy approach and use well-designed government services alongside well-implemented government regulation to keep the free market healthy and functioning in the interests of the people, while also participating in that market as another payer instead of the single payer (another payer with advanced, unfair knowledge, but not competing with business interests).
Perhaps. People are pushing for universal single payer and claiming something something corporate profits out of healthcare etc. I worry that the private providers will get soaked by private suppliers, and then the sampling of the market to adjust will show that, yes, it actually does cost...wow when did healthcare get this expensive? Giant hand-out to suppliers on the taxpayer dime.
I want universal access to healthcare, and I want it at the lowest risk possible, with minimal costs, and with comprehensive coverage. Those are my parameters. Things like the moral ideals surrounding for-profit healthcare or the political ideology of a single-payer system are irrelevant; what matters is the service provided to those in need, and the cost of that service to the taxpayer.
Pretty much, yeah. I'm a free-enterprise market capitalist through and through: I think legislative solutions are rigid and stifle innovation, whereas broad regulatory power is flexible and sensitive to unpredicted facts of economy and emergent situations. When the regulatory bodies discover a basic form from which we want to build, however, I favor a move to regulate that body by codifying the control into the foundational mission of the administration.
That's also why I push for a stronger ACA requiring an individual employee's healthcare insurance and responsible portion of premium to fit to their income (or wage), and a healthcare public option following the same rules and providing no-premium insurance from a Federally-operated fund to all Americans not covered by affordable care for any reason: the Government can push regulations and take other moves to control the market, but has to accept the economic fact that a certain amount of labor (represented by costs and prices) goes into providing all of that. You have the insured, the insurer, the provider, and the supply chain; unless you take full control of all of it, something's exploitable.
Instead of all of that, we can just use the insurer-negotiated rates per provider to discover the lowest rates (e.g. 3 standards down, bottom 2.5%) at each provider and negotiate our rates within that range. We'll tier providers based on their grouping of rates for each service, and use that to determine who we send people to first. Providers generally have a primary service (cheap) and secondary services ("we also $THING, but we're really $OTHERTHING, so $THING costs 5x as much here than it does at $THINGPROVIDER across the street"), so we're trying to identify those Tier 1 providers who do this as their main, low-cost, high-quality service.
By doing further analysis, we can publish standards of fairness in local markets which show the usual and customary rates for services. We should lean on bundled services to reduce BIR overhead and minimize risk. This allows certain insurers to negotiate better: some insurers negotiate e.g. $180 for a service that's generally a $250 service, whereas CareFirst is negotiating $43 for the same service from the same provider, and the median Tier-1 market rate is around $48-$57. Those insurers should see this published fact sheet that tells them they're getting screwed, giving them negotiating power to drive rates down and hold providers and their suppliers accountable for pricing within the range of reasonable profits.
A number of health insurers are incorporated as non-profit or not-for-profit, and have to pay taxes and keep under profit limits. Some health insurers are required to return excess profits by cutting premiums to sub-market rates in the following year. They also generally have a 501(c)(4) or other non-profit fund for their premiums and claims, as well as operational expenses. Regulating how insurers operate--not necessarily giving them such broad tax exemptions--would be an attractive proposition, as many today operate as full for-profit entities.
You can see the pattern there, all the way from how I want to manage regulators themselves to how I want to leverage regulators to keep the free-enterprise market working in the interest of the American people. I'm well-aware of why we put rules in place; I'm just careful about how far I trust mine or anyone else's judgment in creating new, comprehensive, and specific rules out of whole cloth. Yes, that means sometimes someone will misbehave or route around the rules, and then we have to come back and specify what precisely we intended; it's a trade-off to avoid implementing bad rules in the first place.
I know: I'm strange for a progressive candidate. I'm still going to end poverty and bring universal healthcare to this nation--somehow. Real healthcare, not the Norway model where you don't get prescriptions, dental, or vision unless you pay for that yourself. We're going to make sure people have health
that is why thinks like universal background checks have 97% approval rating
There are some things we need to clean up in the law.
We also ignore the fragmentation of background check data and the sheer amount of stuff that never gets forwarded to NICS. The NRA brings this up now and then to try and divert the conversation from legislative changes, so it's not a favored Democratic talking point; yet these new laws won't actually work if we don't fix the damned background check system.
We also need to deal with the criminal justice system and focus more-strongly on behavioral health services. This, of course, isn't a favored Democratic talking point either, because the Republicans keep trying to attribute every shooting to mental health (and no, these people aren't all crazy; the ones who are mostly would be tame if they had encountered proper BHS, too).
There's a lot of talk about assault weapons bans now, and I worry Democrats will pass a new ban and do nothing else. Maybe people don't need AR-15s. They certainly don't need 30-round magazines (how about a rifle revolver with 6 shots, no modification?); and bullet design has a huge impact on how deadly a shot from any given firearm really is, but where's our conversation on that? Here's the thing: the data doesn't suggest the 1994 AW ban helped.
Conservatives love that argument; they don't like the argument that we should regulate bullets or patch up a few minor problems in our existing laws, but what do you expect from the GOP and the NRA? Democrats don't like that argument because it sounds too much like agreeing with the GOP.
The problem is I can't ignore well-constructed arguments with FBI data that shows the trend in overall homicides following the same shape as the trend in firearms homicides. That's actually better data than that which raised my original concern: what in the hell is happening post-2004 that wasn't going on pre-1994, and why did approximately nothing change in the number of mass-shooting deaths during the ban in relation to the prior decade?
Of course there's a visible impact, if you look hard enough at the graph. It's there. If you cut it back to just the number of mass shootings, it's less-obvious, while this new trend is just as obvious.
There's other data that suggests the number of homicides is going up, but the homicide rate is going down, while the suicide rate and the number of homicides from mass shootings is going up (i.e. more Virginia Techs, fewer back-alley murders).
So we need:
Legislative tweaks to eliminate e.g. straw man purchases and whatnot
Accountability so that NICS background checks actually catch people disqualified from gun ownership instead of showing up clean for domestic violence convicts and drug traffickers
Criminal justice reform as an ongoing effort so as to strongly focus on behavioral health and the reduction of crime in general, reducing the likelihood anyone will be in a position in which they'll likely commit a homicide
An examination of the ballistics involved in bullets, and a discussion on what we want to do there with regard to public safety (police ammunition), hunting rifles, whatever self-defense firearms people are allowed to carry, and the intersection between these (a hunting rifle might need ammunition in excess of what we want to regulate so as to reduce the potential injury and fatality in a mass shooting)
Limitations on loadable ammunition size (magazines, belt feeds, revolvers) and rapid-fire mechanisms (full-auto and burst-fire weapons in civilian hands, which we already regulate, although we need to ban bump stocks)
They seem to want government control and regulations over the contract an employer can validly-make with a third party, but only for certain types of third parties.
I'm having trouble resolving the hooker thing. I personally dislike prostitution; at the same time, I don't believe things are necessarily-wrong because somebody personally dislikes them. I dislike prostitution because of the visible impact it has on society, although those impacts are consequences of other, more-damaging societal problems, and generally only visible in areas facing widespread and extreme poverty.
So here's the thing: there's a second, more-substantial problem with prostitution that's a matter of facts rather than personal feelings.
92% of female New York hookers state they'd get out of prostitution if they thought they'd have enough money to survive. I don't believe that, of course: they've lived a life of insecurity, and they've developed a level of comfort with this thing that has brought them security. They're going to continue, because that's what they've done for so long, and there's always that sense of need for security that makes you reluctant to break this sort of long-standing behavior.
What I do believe is that they got into it because of the money, or they stayed in it because of the money: they needed money, they had little perceived choice, so they did what they believed they had to so as to survive.
Clearing up those basic societal problems will thus reduce potentially 92% of new prostitution in New York. Many of these prostitutes (around 40%, although I forget the exact number) began before the age of 14.
The existing problem is one of behavioral health.
Our corrections system should help people; it fails at this today. At the very least, prostitutes should end up interfacing with corrections; what happens after that is what's up for debate. Because of problems like sex trafficking and economic desperation (which isn't sex trafficking, but rather a personal decision made when other options would lead to a loss of personal security), people become prostitutes essentially against their will; and they get stuck like that for similar reasons as discussed.
We need to identify these people and shake them up a bit. Find anything that's forcing them into this situation and fix it so they don't have to do this anymore. Make them analyze their lives, determine if they need to be prostitutes, and then make a decision about whether they want to. Then, if they decide not to, we help them change their behavior.
If they decide to continue being prostitutes... well, that's the part that's actually up for debate. Do we fine them? Jail them? Regulate them? Try to change them? At what point are we no longer "helping"?
Somebody else needs to start that conversation; I'm avoiding it at the moment for petty reasons. On the other hand, I haven't been elected to office yet, so I have some time before I really have to take responsibility for these things.
I find it interesting, and somewhat telling, that the Democrats are passing a law to re-instate the Title II network neutrality regulation, instead of a crafting a bill that would allow the FCC to regulate *only* high speed internet as a distinct service from telephone.
This is a good point. I've been looking at Net Neutrality as a bigger issue, and a complex one. People don't want "fast lanes" for sensible reasons; meanwhile I'm looking at services that are good for the consumer and saying, hey, I want that preserved.
Let's look at T-Mobile and AT&T. Also, we'll toss Comcast in the mix for a minute.
On T-Mobile, anyone who operates a "music streaming service" can e-mail T-Mobile with the details, and T-Mobile will identify their streaming service and not account music streaming data itself as high-speed data use for their customers. That's it. No charge to the operator, no additional charge to the customer: this is a universal part of T-Mobile service to all T-Mobile customers. It doesn't change the data at all, either; it just supports free music streaming, and does so in a way that's free and accessible to that entire industry.
T-Mobile also cuts the bitrate to HD for video and does the same, with the option to opt-out and take the regular data charges for unmodified full-rate video streams. Likewise, and similar to the music thing above, Comcast has a "Boost" feature whereby your link is throttled to e.g. 200Mbit/s on a 1,600Mbit/s DOCSIS link, but they'll accelerate large-file downloads by lifting the throttle on those TCP connections, again with no charge.
Take a close look at these features.
Now: AT&T also provides free streaming music. The content provider (Spotify, Pandora, etc.) pays AT&T a fee, and the customer doesn't get charged for the data.
See the difference?
So I'm looking at Net Neutrality thinking I want to allow any sort of "fast lane" or other modification that doesn't impact other traffic, doesn't impact other users, doesn't add an additional charge for the user, and doesn't add a charge for the content provider. If it modifies things, the user has to be able to opt-out.
All of that means your baseline service has to be baseline, and it has to be the #1 priority of your ISP: any special prioritization is sacrificed if there is contention between supplying base network service for any user or content and supplying the prioritization. As well, ISPs can't charge anyone a special additional rate for prioritization: such prioritization is a feature the ISP adds so as to improve user experience in general. Prioritization is one-way: you can eliminate usual and customary charges (data caps) or bandwidth limitations, but you can't add restrictions (throttling) to a specific service.
It's tempting to say no enhancement is "free", but that's not quite true. The rules stated here would allow ISPs to defray non-free enhancements into the cost of service for all customers, rather than charging customers who buy the "special package". They would also allow ISPs to take advantage of slack in their network--opportunities to increase service at no cost to themselves, where they're underutilizing resources for which they pay--while prohibiting them from attaching charges to the use of whatever new thing they provide in the process. If they can convince customers that their service has more value and thus command a higher price, that's fine; no charging $5/month for the "unlimited streaming video and music" package.
I'm still trying to attack this. I haven't found a way to break the Internet by abuse of these rules; that sort of worries me, although it is the end goal. I always feel like I'm missing something if I can't circumvent a complex set of rules.
Slashdot Mirror
Right now none of the costs incurred in maintaining employment are deductible.
You know what? This is a stupid argument; partially because you're right: Trump took away the personal exemption, which in 2017 is $4,050, so right now you're not deductible.
You don't get to deduct that $5,000 suit; you could have gotten a $150 suit at Express. Dry cleaning is bad for suits; you should be using a $25 brush, which will last over a century if cared for properly. You could save water by giving yourself a sponge bath, so those 15-minute hot showers are luxury consumption and not necessary to your job. Food should cost under $2,000/year.
I'm repealing the TCJA anyway.
The very first response discussed the activities and incomes in the course of making productive output. This isn't a revision; it's me repeating the same argument to your face again, and again, and again.
In this case, the "product" is my labour to my employer
Actually, you engage in labor and leisure to produce an output. Your employer deducts your labor because that part of the revenue--the part that pays your wages--isn't going into production effort by the employer, but rather into production effort by you. The output of that effort is the product your employer sells.
As a Candidate for office, I am not legally allowed to use campaign funds to purchase my suit, my tie, my briefcase, and so forth. That would be personal use, and personal use is egregiously-illegal. Funding my travel requires that I show the main purpose of travel was campaigning; note that Congressmen routinely abuse leadership PACs by taking leisure trips and identifying a minor, possibly-political activity as "the political expense" when really they're just taking their whole family on holiday to Scotland, because the rules are severely-broken.
As employees we don't get to deduct the cost of maintaining employment
To do so, you would need to deduct only the proportion of costs invested in your employment, and nothing more. That means you'd have to have special not-for-personal-use work clothes, deduct only the miles used for travel to and from work, and so forth. We actually allow this, but we don't consider time not required at work as "work-related": the drive to and from work (and to the gym, the spa, the grocery store, and everything else you did along the way) isn't tax-deductible.
If you're temporarily stationed at another office instead of your main office, that drive from home to work is actually deductible. If you have a second or temporary job and you commute from one place of work to another (instead of home to work and back), that drive is also deductible.
Moving expenses are also deductible if you move more than 50 miles for a new job. Apparently, we just consider normal commuting as basic consumption.
We don't consider driving to be "performing work for your employer" unless it is incurred by a fact of employment or interactions between employment (rather than as a fact of where you decided to live, in as much as one decides precisely where to live): the conditions of your employment must dictate some deviation at an endpoint (your office is somewhere else today, modifying your commute by a temporary measure put forth by your employer; or you must be at employer A and then at employer B and so your employment fully determines the length of your commute). If your endpoint is fixed--you have a permanent office location--then you determine the commute by renting an apartment closer or farther away.
More-correctly, your employer has about zero determination over your commute in those conditions, and is affecting your capacity to determine your commute in the others.
Your initial premise--and the manner in which you frame your function as an employee--seem to aim for a dialogue that suggests everything you do supports your existence, and your existence is wholly impactful on what you produce, and therefor you have zero income and should not pay taxes. It's one that's been tried by tax protesters now and then.
Profit is revenue minus the total operating expense involved in producing a product. Businesses are producing products with labor and materials, and providing the operating environment in which people work; what exceeds that is profit.
Individuals aren't producing a product. They're consuming. You're not creating a productive output, and so you don't get to count anything as an "expense" toward the creation of an output. Even if you renovate your house, you use that house--you're the consumer!
Here's the fun part: if you buy a house, live in it for at least 2 years, and then sell it, the difference in purchase versus sale is capital gains. If you do any home improvement, then the cost you expend on that home improvement is actually deductible as part of the cost basis of your home.
That is to say: you paid contractors, you bought material, and you otherwise expended to produce something that you then sold (you improved the house). Those expenses are not part of your income, and so you take the $200,000 you paid for the house and the $50,000 you paid to redo the kitchen out of the equation when you sell it for $350,000--only paying taxes on $100,000 of capital gains.
So here's the thing: if you repair your house, you're bringing it up to its original condition. You're not producing; you bought the house, you lived in the house, and the house needs maintenance--you are consuming the house by using its useful lifespan. Repairs are just consumption, and not tax-deductible. When the house requires $1,000 of repairs over the course of you living in it, you spend $1,000 to cover what you have consumed. Had you sold (and not consumed) the house, there would be no demand from you for those $1,000 of repairs. Yes it's weird to think about, since the house is going to need repairs over time.
If you're a farmer, you grow food, thus producing. When you eat food, you consume it. Your farm, as a business, has expenses for that food production; and if you use your own food, then the sale value of that food (not paid to your farm!) is essentially paid to you as personal income. This means that if you grow your own food using farm resources, you pay personal income taxes on that food as income; if you use your personal money to buy materials and grow a garden, you pay income taxes on the money you spend for all that, but the food you're growing is not income (it's not originally an asset of the farm, grown by an expense made by the farm, which has been transferred to you as a product of the farm for your consumption).
Chew on that for a bit. Yes, the IRS really taxes farmers on food they grow for themselves.
I use tab discarding. Certain web sites seem to pile up the JavaScript if left open for a long time.
I understand all that perfectly well. It doesn't explain why corporates get taxed on profit while individuals get taxed on revenue.
So, I stated that taxing corprations on profit taxes actual production, while taxing people on income also taxes actual production, and you don't understand why this is done?
All individual income is profit. Corporate net profits are the same thing as individual gross wage income.
How is me selling my labour different from a company selling their collective labour?
A company's "labor" is its net operating profits. The rest of the "labor" being sold by that company is your labor. The revenue essentially floats through the company to the producer--the worker.
I'm curious why my cost of existence is not exempt from taxes the way a corporate's cost of existence is exempt from taxes.
Because your "existence" is only consuming resources and doing nothing productive. When you go out and work, you produce. Your labor, thus, is productive. This is also why we categorize things like dividends as unearned income (Dividends are taxed at the corporate profit rate, then distributed to the wealthy shareholders and taxed again at the capital gains rate, so that 15% personal income tax some big executives get is actually taxed at around 50%--businesses don't pay income taxes on wages, so it's 0%+individual on wages versus 35%+15% on dividends).
A business's profits are a sort of declaration by the business that it, by its existence, also "produces" through the mechanism of organizing labor in a more-efficient manner than labor would otherwise self-organize. Its expenses aren't its consumption; rather, the act of expending is productive, as it expends for business purposes to transform inputs into outputs through the organization of labor. Part of that expending is wage; part of it is that some other business does some of the work, thus incurring some of the expense, and transfers the intermediate product to the business.
Again: taxation in this manner makes the income tax roughly reflect a slice of GDP--of actual production--instead of some imaginary ideal that you can keep picking pockets all over the place because money is magical.
(By the by, businesses actually pay a payroll tax on wages, which current analysis suggests they backshift into lowering wages; the debate is whether they lower wages or raise prices, either of which just makes the employee or consumer pay for it. Payroll taxes suck.)
You defined the terms of the behavior. That behavior isn't selling data.
I tried that last year and that's how I ended up using Chrome.
No, he's right. If you have an organization that passes a million dollars's worth of steel through a bunch of intermediate suppliers--mine, refine, distribute, shape, etc.--you tax the cost of that steel and all profits made and taxes paid on that steel at every supplier. That first labor and profit get taxed again, and again, and again, each time being paid by different hands, until it finally gets to the consumer.
That means long supply chains geometrically increase the cost of a product, and so vertical integration cuts down your product's costs. The same sort of thing happens with profit margins, really, offset by the fact that profits and taxes paid upstream in the supply chain are deducted off your corporate income tax by way of deducting supply costs as expenses.
Ireland abandoned its revenue tax because it's illegal in the EU.
Why is it that companies get to subtract their costs and pay tax on the result while individuals are taxed on revenue, not profit?
Because a business purchases productive output from other businesses, pays wages to workers who produce, and keeps the remaining revenue as profit. Thus the worker produces, and his wage represents the productive output; the suppliers also produce, and so the cost to the business to purchase that input is their productive output; and, of course, the business's profits are tied to nothing except the productive output of the business (which is the same productive output as the business's employees).
That means taxing corporate net profits and not their expenses taxes production: if a table is made, taxing the worker's wages and the corporate profits both of the table manfuacturer and all involved suppliers (including the truckers shipping those supplies) at a rate of 10% gets you 10% of the market price of a table. By taxing strictly and effectively in this manner, an average effective tax rate of 10% collects 10% of GDP and represents 10% of all goods and services produced and sold, in the long run.
Taxing corporate revenues ("gross profits"), on the other hand, double-taxes wages at the end of the pipeline; and far more than double-taxes supply everywhere else. This means the more suppliers you have in a chain, the heavier your taxes, and the higher the effective tax rate applied to a product.
Corporate revenue taxation heavily-favors monopolies, notably vertically-integrated monopolies as per Andrew Carnegie.
Well, they're not selling the data in this suggestion. They can tell restaurants that people go to restaurants after movies, as a general trend, and that they should try to attract such customers with coupons in the app. They do the analytics and reach a conclusion, and can show impact without demographics: your area has at X times Y thousands of customers potentially coming to your restaurant.
When they get to selling demographics data, they're selling data. Everything beyond that also counts, obviously. "Restaurants in your town are highly-popular at these times, on the order of 80,000 customers per hour in this 5-mile radius, due to peak floods of exiting moviegoers" is just a conclusion.
I don't have a problem with them keeping this data to themselves; I have a problem with them not telling anyone they were gathering it. If they wanted to distribute the data, that would raise some serious issues: we don't have protections for consumers in this area, so you can easily click through a blind contract and sign your rights away.
Marketing sold some fool a bunch of bullshit.
It's faster. With a high minimum wage, the point at which the relative risk considerations and the ROI trigger a change in operations--and the rate of that change--for each individual business is sooner and faster.
This discussion is an economics one: will the high minimum wage damage our economy by creating unemployment? I argue for social safety nets because the economics argument is inherently non-humanitarian: if we shove too many poor people onto the street at once, the proles will make a lot of noise; if we do so slowly, we can avoid such criticism even as those same people each eventually face such suffering in turn. We need to take responsibility for each individual who is affected in the path of progress, not just for the economic metrics that generate overall sentiment.
That means we can push a higher minimum wage (or some other approach), but we need to also take steps for those who are impacted negatively by this policy.
I always just tell people that we're expanding the output of human labor, thus decreasing the cost (a big part of that machine's cost is labor, although for low-demand goods as such they might be taking a huge 30% profit margin). You gave a more-complete answer.
If anyone but the fringe UBI folks actually thought automation would kill jobs, I might need people like you on my campaign team.
When 20 - 30% of the human population is unemployable 10 - 20 years from now due to automation, there will be a considerable disruption to global economies.
This won't happen. We automated farming, we automated manufacture, we automated IT. Everything you use today used to take hundreds or thousands of times as many human labor hours to provide. That's right: we've eliminated 99.999% of all jobs in the past two centuries.
What we did, we started buying 10,000 times as much stuff, where "stuff" is quantified as "what used to take so much labor". We only need 1 in 10,000 workers to supply X now, so we buy 10,000 X, where X is the generic output unit.
Let's say your wage increased arbitrarily. At what point would you cease being able to spend money due to not being able to imagine anything you want to buy? Think about a good, high-quality, home-cooked meal with steak and real red sweet potatoes, fish, crabs, lobster, the expensive stuff. Now imagine eating that every day, every meal, and you pretty much just drive up to a McDonalds-alike and order it, and it's no more expensive than what you pay now for food. Would you slave away at home for hours eating cheap, or would you spend your limitless wealth on this new stuff?
The new stuff still costs $5 because it takes $5 worth of labor (jobs) to make it.
Scaling up your spending like that multiplies the meager labor requirements into something supported by... well, your spending. The diversion of wage into consumption creates revenue and thus profit. Seriously. Corporations don't create money when they pay you; they use the money people spend buying from them to pay wages.
The only problem is progress causes transitional unemployment. Too much at once--too fast for your economy to shift demand and drive new supply, thus reallocating labor to new jobs--causes a pile-up of unemployment. If it's paced correctly, progress is limitless in the sense that it never results in permanent increases in unemployment.
My computer has 16GB of memory and keeps killing Chrome for using most of it. Shrug.
They're all examples of "demand side" subsidy. Where you give people money to buy something. This is known to increase costs. Its basic supply and demand.
Medicare for All advocates say we'll dictate the prices, essentially.
My strategy is to expand the ACA, meaning consumers buy goods from employers, and employers want the lowest prices (really: most profitable prices) because consumers will go to another seller to get things cheaper (competition impacts profitable price). Employers thus want the lowest costs, which means lower-priced insurance. We mandate what insurance they must supply, so there's a bound; otherwise, it goes down from there: consumer, employer, insurer, provider, supplier.
From there, we can look at remittance rates at every individual provider and do some simple statistics: go down 3 standards (lowest 2.5%, discarding outliers) and negotiate within that price per-provider. The Government isn't trying to figure out the cost of healthcare; it's using the private market to compute that cost. We supply a Public Option based on that, instead of being the only insurer in town and trying to magically guess the smallest price we can pay without collapsing the market.
We can also use the data to identify the fair-market average range in the local market. That is: Tier 1 providers (providers whose primary service is X will supply X cheaper than the guy who mainly does Y and also does X) become our reference group for the fair market price. We publish these so as to enable fair negotiation in the private insurer market.
So I'm basically proposing we enable the market by increasing demand in a highly-competitive market, and by ensuring private interests are managing that demand and are impacted by the price. The insurer has to face big groups (employers, unions) who will want low prices and can just shop for the next insurer. We can cash-subsidize some (e.g. small businesses), but only partially: they still need to feel the sting of higher prices and be thus motivated to avoid them.
What you do is build hospitals, build medical schools, build pharma factories... increase supply. Directly. And that lowers COST because the amount on the market relative to demand will increase thus lowering the bargaining power of the supplier because the market will be flooded with competition.
The supply is unsustainable without the demand; however, you're not wrong: this is why we treat small businesses specially and help them to thrive. We don't want more supply; we want more competition. A giant monopoly is more supply; a bunch of other suppliers who will undercut your 40% profit margin to try and become the multi-billion-dollar gorilla in the room is a nightmare requiring you to engage in the ancient art of price war.
What we want, mainly, is universal access to healthcare. I can supply that while making the Government demand-side cash subsidy--the Federal dollars paid in--a minority of the overall market, and one not prone to become a successful business by way of price competition (because the ACA mandates your employer provide healthcare). There will thus always be this vacuum if we remove profitable entities, and so they'll keep fighting to get the lowest costs, the best prices, and the most customers to maximize their profits.
So I would caution and say the answer is not to cut off social welfare and give the hand-outs to businesses--the price at which they can make profit will be the minimum price, and not everyone will be able to afford any price--but rather to take the mixed economy approach and use well-designed government services alongside well-implemented government regulation to keep the free market healthy and functioning in the interests of the people, while also participating in that market as another payer instead of the single payer (another payer with advanced, unfair knowledge, but not competing with business interests).
We often separate solicitation from fulfillment. We also separate attempted murder from murder. It's weird, but okay, that's a thing.
Perhaps. People are pushing for universal single payer and claiming something something corporate profits out of healthcare etc. I worry that the private providers will get soaked by private suppliers, and then the sampling of the market to adjust will show that, yes, it actually does cost ...wow when did healthcare get this expensive? Giant hand-out to suppliers on the taxpayer dime.
I want universal access to healthcare, and I want it at the lowest risk possible, with minimal costs, and with comprehensive coverage. Those are my parameters. Things like the moral ideals surrounding for-profit healthcare or the political ideology of a single-payer system are irrelevant; what matters is the service provided to those in need, and the cost of that service to the taxpayer.
Pretty much, yeah. I'm a free-enterprise market capitalist through and through: I think legislative solutions are rigid and stifle innovation, whereas broad regulatory power is flexible and sensitive to unpredicted facts of economy and emergent situations. When the regulatory bodies discover a basic form from which we want to build, however, I favor a move to regulate that body by codifying the control into the foundational mission of the administration.
That's also why I push for a stronger ACA requiring an individual employee's healthcare insurance and responsible portion of premium to fit to their income (or wage), and a healthcare public option following the same rules and providing no-premium insurance from a Federally-operated fund to all Americans not covered by affordable care for any reason: the Government can push regulations and take other moves to control the market, but has to accept the economic fact that a certain amount of labor (represented by costs and prices) goes into providing all of that. You have the insured, the insurer, the provider, and the supply chain; unless you take full control of all of it, something's exploitable.
Instead of all of that, we can just use the insurer-negotiated rates per provider to discover the lowest rates (e.g. 3 standards down, bottom 2.5%) at each provider and negotiate our rates within that range. We'll tier providers based on their grouping of rates for each service, and use that to determine who we send people to first. Providers generally have a primary service (cheap) and secondary services ("we also $THING, but we're really $OTHERTHING, so $THING costs 5x as much here than it does at $THINGPROVIDER across the street"), so we're trying to identify those Tier 1 providers who do this as their main, low-cost, high-quality service.
By doing further analysis, we can publish standards of fairness in local markets which show the usual and customary rates for services. We should lean on bundled services to reduce BIR overhead and minimize risk. This allows certain insurers to negotiate better: some insurers negotiate e.g. $180 for a service that's generally a $250 service, whereas CareFirst is negotiating $43 for the same service from the same provider, and the median Tier-1 market rate is around $48-$57. Those insurers should see this published fact sheet that tells them they're getting screwed, giving them negotiating power to drive rates down and hold providers and their suppliers accountable for pricing within the range of reasonable profits.
A number of health insurers are incorporated as non-profit or not-for-profit, and have to pay taxes and keep under profit limits. Some health insurers are required to return excess profits by cutting premiums to sub-market rates in the following year. They also generally have a 501(c)(4) or other non-profit fund for their premiums and claims, as well as operational expenses. Regulating how insurers operate--not necessarily giving them such broad tax exemptions--would be an attractive proposition, as many today operate as full for-profit entities.
You can see the pattern there, all the way from how I want to manage regulators themselves to how I want to leverage regulators to keep the free-enterprise market working in the interest of the American people. I'm well-aware of why we put rules in place; I'm just careful about how far I trust mine or anyone else's judgment in creating new, comprehensive, and specific rules out of whole cloth. Yes, that means sometimes someone will misbehave or route around the rules, and then we have to come back and specify what precisely we intended; it's a trade-off to avoid implementing bad rules in the first place.
I know: I'm strange for a progressive candidate. I'm still going to end poverty and bring universal healthcare to this nation--somehow. Real healthcare, not the Norway model where you don't get prescriptions, dental, or vision unless you pay for that yourself. We're going to make sure people have health
that is why thinks like universal background checks have 97% approval rating
There are some things we need to clean up in the law.
We also ignore the fragmentation of background check data and the sheer amount of stuff that never gets forwarded to NICS. The NRA brings this up now and then to try and divert the conversation from legislative changes, so it's not a favored Democratic talking point; yet these new laws won't actually work if we don't fix the damned background check system.
We also need to deal with the criminal justice system and focus more-strongly on behavioral health services. This, of course, isn't a favored Democratic talking point either, because the Republicans keep trying to attribute every shooting to mental health (and no, these people aren't all crazy; the ones who are mostly would be tame if they had encountered proper BHS, too).
There's a lot of talk about assault weapons bans now, and I worry Democrats will pass a new ban and do nothing else. Maybe people don't need AR-15s. They certainly don't need 30-round magazines (how about a rifle revolver with 6 shots, no modification?); and bullet design has a huge impact on how deadly a shot from any given firearm really is, but where's our conversation on that? Here's the thing: the data doesn't suggest the 1994 AW ban helped.
Conservatives love that argument; they don't like the argument that we should regulate bullets or patch up a few minor problems in our existing laws, but what do you expect from the GOP and the NRA? Democrats don't like that argument because it sounds too much like agreeing with the GOP.
The problem is I can't ignore well-constructed arguments with FBI data that shows the trend in overall homicides following the same shape as the trend in firearms homicides. That's actually better data than that which raised my original concern: what in the hell is happening post-2004 that wasn't going on pre-1994, and why did approximately nothing change in the number of mass-shooting deaths during the ban in relation to the prior decade?
Of course there's a visible impact, if you look hard enough at the graph. It's there. If you cut it back to just the number of mass shootings, it's less-obvious, while this new trend is just as obvious.
There's other data that suggests the number of homicides is going up, but the homicide rate is going down, while the suicide rate and the number of homicides from mass shootings is going up (i.e. more Virginia Techs, fewer back-alley murders).
So we need:
Democrats are talking about:
They seem to want government control and regulations over the contract an employer can validly-make with a third party, but only for certain types of third parties.
I'm having trouble resolving the hooker thing. I personally dislike prostitution; at the same time, I don't believe things are necessarily-wrong because somebody personally dislikes them. I dislike prostitution because of the visible impact it has on society, although those impacts are consequences of other, more-damaging societal problems, and generally only visible in areas facing widespread and extreme poverty.
So here's the thing: there's a second, more-substantial problem with prostitution that's a matter of facts rather than personal feelings.
92% of female New York hookers state they'd get out of prostitution if they thought they'd have enough money to survive. I don't believe that, of course: they've lived a life of insecurity, and they've developed a level of comfort with this thing that has brought them security. They're going to continue, because that's what they've done for so long, and there's always that sense of need for security that makes you reluctant to break this sort of long-standing behavior.
What I do believe is that they got into it because of the money, or they stayed in it because of the money: they needed money, they had little perceived choice, so they did what they believed they had to so as to survive.
Clearing up those basic societal problems will thus reduce potentially 92% of new prostitution in New York. Many of these prostitutes (around 40%, although I forget the exact number) began before the age of 14.
The existing problem is one of behavioral health.
Our corrections system should help people; it fails at this today. At the very least, prostitutes should end up interfacing with corrections; what happens after that is what's up for debate. Because of problems like sex trafficking and economic desperation (which isn't sex trafficking, but rather a personal decision made when other options would lead to a loss of personal security), people become prostitutes essentially against their will; and they get stuck like that for similar reasons as discussed.
We need to identify these people and shake them up a bit. Find anything that's forcing them into this situation and fix it so they don't have to do this anymore. Make them analyze their lives, determine if they need to be prostitutes, and then make a decision about whether they want to. Then, if they decide not to, we help them change their behavior.
If they decide to continue being prostitutes... well, that's the part that's actually up for debate. Do we fine them? Jail them? Regulate them? Try to change them? At what point are we no longer "helping"?
Somebody else needs to start that conversation; I'm avoiding it at the moment for petty reasons. On the other hand, I haven't been elected to office yet, so I have some time before I really have to take responsibility for these things.
I find it interesting, and somewhat telling, that the Democrats are passing a law to re-instate the Title II network neutrality regulation, instead of a crafting a bill that would allow the FCC to regulate *only* high speed internet as a distinct service from telephone.
This is a good point. I've been looking at Net Neutrality as a bigger issue, and a complex one. People don't want "fast lanes" for sensible reasons; meanwhile I'm looking at services that are good for the consumer and saying, hey, I want that preserved.
Let's look at T-Mobile and AT&T. Also, we'll toss Comcast in the mix for a minute.
On T-Mobile, anyone who operates a "music streaming service" can e-mail T-Mobile with the details, and T-Mobile will identify their streaming service and not account music streaming data itself as high-speed data use for their customers. That's it. No charge to the operator, no additional charge to the customer: this is a universal part of T-Mobile service to all T-Mobile customers. It doesn't change the data at all, either; it just supports free music streaming, and does so in a way that's free and accessible to that entire industry.
T-Mobile also cuts the bitrate to HD for video and does the same, with the option to opt-out and take the regular data charges for unmodified full-rate video streams. Likewise, and similar to the music thing above, Comcast has a "Boost" feature whereby your link is throttled to e.g. 200Mbit/s on a 1,600Mbit/s DOCSIS link, but they'll accelerate large-file downloads by lifting the throttle on those TCP connections, again with no charge.
Take a close look at these features.
Now: AT&T also provides free streaming music. The content provider (Spotify, Pandora, etc.) pays AT&T a fee, and the customer doesn't get charged for the data.
See the difference?
So I'm looking at Net Neutrality thinking I want to allow any sort of "fast lane" or other modification that doesn't impact other traffic, doesn't impact other users, doesn't add an additional charge for the user, and doesn't add a charge for the content provider. If it modifies things, the user has to be able to opt-out.
All of that means your baseline service has to be baseline, and it has to be the #1 priority of your ISP: any special prioritization is sacrificed if there is contention between supplying base network service for any user or content and supplying the prioritization. As well, ISPs can't charge anyone a special additional rate for prioritization: such prioritization is a feature the ISP adds so as to improve user experience in general. Prioritization is one-way: you can eliminate usual and customary charges (data caps) or bandwidth limitations, but you can't add restrictions (throttling) to a specific service.
It's tempting to say no enhancement is "free", but that's not quite true. The rules stated here would allow ISPs to defray non-free enhancements into the cost of service for all customers, rather than charging customers who buy the "special package". They would also allow ISPs to take advantage of slack in their network--opportunities to increase service at no cost to themselves, where they're underutilizing resources for which they pay--while prohibiting them from attaching charges to the use of whatever new thing they provide in the process. If they can convince customers that their service has more value and thus command a higher price, that's fine; no charging $5/month for the "unlimited streaming video and music" package.
I'm still trying to attack this. I haven't found a way to break the Internet by abuse of these rules; that sort of worries me, although it is the end goal. I always feel like I'm missing something if I can't circumvent a complex set of rules.
Will both of you stop behaving like Congress?