Maybe the tax cuts were necessary in 2003, but that doesn't make them appropriate now.
We agree on much. The problem is that too many conservatives and libertarians argue as if any tax cut will pay for itself or even increase revenues, and too many liberals argue as if any tax increase will increase revenues, some going as far as to predict linear revenue gains.
Neither extreme is true, but it's nearly axiomatic that some form of the Laffer Curve is true. Few would argue that a tax rate increase from 99% to 100% will increase revenues, and a decrease from 1% to 0% will surely lessen them. In between those extremes, there's a valid debate about what the parabola looks like. Presumably, it varies different under different economic conditions. People (and corporations) are probably more prone to try to minimize tax exposure when times are hard, growth is slow, margins are slim or the future looks rocky.
So to have a rational, evidence-based tax policy, we need to start with
What is the purpose and goal of tax policy in the first place,
What does the Laffer Curve currently look like,
Where does today's tax policy put us on that curve (to the best of our knowledge), and
What net impact is this likely to have -- on the economy and on revenues?
Then you have to look at what the proper function of government is, and whether we're currently overstepping or falling short of that. Another point that often gets overlooked is that giving revenues to an overspending government may be like making loans to a gambling addict. If they simply leverage every dollar they actually receive to borrow eight more, then more revenue might not be desirable. Even after all that people will still have irreconcilable ideological differences about taxation (you could favor anything from sharply redistributive policies to a flat amount tax of the budget divided by the tax base), but laying out something like the above would still go a long way towards separating the pragmatic debate from the ideological one.
I think it's disingenuous for today's conservatives to try to distance themselves from Bush when the rallying cry for many of these same people in 2004 was "it doesn't make sense to change horses in mid-stream."
[...and...]
People who thought Kerry was a better candidate in 2004 - hell, even people who thought McCain was a better candidate in 2000 - were excoriated by the vicious rhetoric bandied about by the Republicans who supported Bush.
I was critical of Bush's lack of fiscal restraint while he was in office, but I still thought (and think) that McCain is the kind of political animal who can be counted on for nothing except to promote himself and seek his own career advancement. I like his efforts promoting pork awareness, but I still would never trust him in the long run. Bush at least tried to create an opt-in privatization option for a small fraction of Social Security, and somebody's going to have to touch that third rail again before long. The market has taken some lumps since then, but even in light of that I think that once the entitlement shit really starts hitting the fan, we're going to wish that Bush had succeeded.
First of all, love your sig line, and it's likely prophetic. Also, fair point on the Canadian regulation being from an extra-governmental authority.
My point isn't that net neutrality == the fairness doctrine. The fairness doctrine is just one example of what you get when Washington starts seeing itself as being in charge of "communications." Besides, it's not like you can't find people advocating for some sort of mechanism to "balance" or "improve" (by fiat) the political discourse on the `net. The more real threat, though, is that we'll see policing over IP infringement and obscenity (especially regarding its availability to minors).
When it comes to regulating any industry, once you let that camel's nose into the tent, it tends to work its way further in. "Preserving competition" turns into subtle (or not-so-subtle) price controls, and propping up failing competitors. Hell, the FCC is already considering a price control scheme in the wireless sector (not that it's clear it has the authority to impose this). An item on the linked meeting agenda is:
TITLE: Reexamination of Roaming Obligations
of Commercial Mobile Radio Service Providers
and Other Providers of Mobile Data Services (WT
Docket No. 05-265)
SUMMARY: The Commission will consider a
Second Report and Order that adopts a rule
requiring facilities-based providers of commercial
mobile data services to offer data roaming
arrangements to other such providers on
commercially reasonable terms and conditions,
subject to certain limitations.
Price controls have repeatedly been shown to create scarcity and raise entry barriers for would-be competitors. You mentioned airline regulation earlier, and that's a great example: We used to treat airline routes as a commons, and the Civil Aeronautics Board actually controlled routes, airfares, and even entry into the marketplace by new airlines. Since deregulation, airfare prices have fallen over 40% in real terms. Safety and convenience have increased dramatically as well (ok, except for all the TSA BS on the convenience score). Death risk during air travel has dropped dramatically since 1978, partially because the increased market has caused airlines to turn their fleets over faster, resulting in newer average aircraft ages.
In short, past experience suggests that a rich, unrestrained market with low entry barriers is the best way to foster rising quality and falling prices. If the government really wants to ensure quality service, it could invest in large, common, shared wiring routes (shielded digital pipelines) that could be leased by anyone with no discrimination whatsoever in price or access. Municipalities could connect to them on the condition that there was no grant of monopoly or preferential access to any service provider. Our power grid needs expansion (especially if we expect electric cars to gain market share), the backbones could sure use it, and if sufficiently built out it could do a lot to break up the oligopoly that would let ISPs get away with consumer-hostile forms of throttling in the first place.
I'm no fan of Bush's budget management (or lack thereof), but his tax cuts -- especially those in `03 -- were exactly the right policy.
Bush's eight years began with the dot com bust followed by 9/11. The years from 2000 to 2003 saw declining federal revenues compounded by rising unemployment. Revenue increases from `03 to `06 were among the highest for any three-year period, and unemployment dropped consistently from `03 - `07. The rate of GDP growth more than doubled after `03. Capital gains revenues doubled over the next three years. Before the cuts, the CBO predicted them to increase only ~26% over that period.
It would have been possible to balance the budget after the Bush tax cuts, but neither he nor congress did anything to reign in spending. If we ever want to see black ink again, we have to attack entitlement spending, corporate welfare, and redundant or counter-productive bureaucracies. Defense spending shouldn't be immune to cuts, and we sure as hell have to keep the feds from bailing out sinking states. That all still isn't sufficient to completely eliminate deficits, but it is necessary and it's a start.
The problem is, it will take a benevolent dictator to run Net Neutrality, and I don't know any.
Well put. I frequently hear arguments that start with "Oh yeah? Well if you think the market is so perfect, then...", which is frustrating since I've never argued (nor do I think) that a free market is or ever will be anywhere near perfect. I just don't know of a better mechanism to keep processes from becoming politicized, or sectors from becoming monopolized, or incentives from being rigged to favor bad ideas (e.g. as with ethanol).
Silly me. Of course, I only speak of some hypothetical dystopian future. I'm not saying there's any observed tendency of things like making unelected bureaucrats the arbiters of fairness, or enabling them to collect millions for indecency violations. And of course this is America, not some dictatorship like Canada where they might ban a song from the airwaves for sarcastically quoting a politically incorrect statement as a way of criticizing it. And the American government would never try to extend its broadcast control into paid content mediums like XM radio or cable tv either. I guess I'm just being paranoid. People who seek and attain authority are usually content with it; at least they don't continually try to expand it. I mean, when a government starts out just establishing official weights and measures, it is nice that they stick with just that, and they don't go expanding their purview to include food labeling, cigarette packaging (and even what can and can't be used as a brand name) or fat content. I'm also glad nobody tries to enact outright bans on fast food.
If only more people analyzed issues from that angle. From Supreme Court judges down to regulatory bureaucrats, too many people are more interested in figuring out whether they're "for the little guy" than in whether they will carry out their functions according to the laws society has put in place. The rule of law is foundational to our freedoms -- it's based on the notion that no official is above the rules, and it's erosion isn't doing the little guy any favors in the long run.
In whatever forms they eventually take, regulations will be adjusted periodically to allow prioritization of 'pretty packets' (meaning "Important" packets, and packets belonging to large campaign contributors). Latency problems will oscillate every few years from NPR to Fox News and from GE to Walmart.
Indecent, incendiary and potentially infringing packets will be inexorably deprioritized to make room for more of the prettier packets. Everyone's traffic experience will get better and better over time under benevolent, centralized, adult supervision of everyone's traffic management practices. You won't have to think about it personally.
Oh come on, it's not that bad. If we just cut the federal budget by 35% off the top* for the next 10 years, we could get the national debt back to where Bush left it. (And wow... I never thought of that amount as a goal before.)
* - not a 35% reduction in the rate of growth, a 35% reduction in the budget coupled with a 10-year spending freeze.
No. Just convince Glen Beck that patents are the spawn of the Devil. Congress will fix this inside of a week.
He shouldn't be far from that position already. Beck is a Libertarian who has advocated a non-interventionist foreign policy and large scale cuts in military spending (which distinguishes him from many on the right), and he seems to favor the Austrian school of economics, which is probably where you'll find the greatest concentration of hostility to the idea of intellectual property.
If you want to measure the full cost of production of a petroleum sourced PET bottle, you need to take into account the initial production of biomass and then at least a couple of hundred thousand years of high pressure cellaring.
We do account for that; the scarcity and non-renewability of the raw materials are pricing factors, just as the extraction and refining costs are. The impact isn't fixed, and it probably isn't linear either. It's probably asymptotic relative to the current demand, the remaining supply, and any increased production costs caused by needing to excavate less accessible supply sources as more convenient ones are exhausted.
Because you are a moron. Really that is the answer. This will reduce demand for petroleum as it will take more energy to make the bottles, but that energy is not coming from petroleum.
I hope you're right (about the reduced demand, not about me being a moron). But these things are notoriously hard to predict; corn-based ethanol is a good example of a bad idea that a lot of people thought was good.
A large scale move towards bio-plastics could plausibly remove some of the manufacturing sector's demand from the petro market, but if it does indeed take more energy to produce (a claim I haven't investigated, so I'm not saying it does), then the total impact on petro prices is unclear. The market repercussions of increased energy demands aren't necessarily limited to the immediate supply source. A rise in energy demand could affect a rise electric prices, which in turn could push consumers away from electric cars, or add financial stress to electricity-driven transit systems, making driving more attractive to cost-conscious commuters.
Also the previous products often did not consider the end to end cycles at all. Like coal as a good example dumps all its waste into the air or into toxic ponds which later leak. Yet, people complain about the dangerous and waste from nuclear power since the nuclear power plant is not allowed to just dump its garbage into the air.
I'm all for including all elements in the cycle when comparing energy alternatives in terms of pollution, cost or efficiency.
Largely because of naysayers who distort facts as necessary to reach that conclusion, or simply assume it to be the case with or without any evidence, such as the post you replied to. ("Order of magnitude" does have an actual definition.)
Yeah, I'm reflexively skeptical about extravagant energy-saving claims when I hear them, but I agree, the article you referenced reads more like a press release than a study from the beginning. It gets really clear when you get to this part:
In a study by CNW Marketing called "Dust to Dust", researchers discovered that the Prius costs and average of $3.25 per mile driven over a lifetime of 100,000 miles (the expected lifespan of a hybrid). On the other hand the Hummer costs $1.95 per mile over an expected 300,000 miles.
Ok, some glaring red flags there: 1) "a study by CNW Marketing" (nuff said), and 2) expected Prius lifespan of 100k miles vs. 300k for a Hummer... really? Hummers come with a 5/100,000 powertrain warranty. Priuses come with a 5/60,000 powertrain and a 96/100k hybrid system warranty, so I can't imagine a plausible justification for that stat; it's evident that the hybrid system isn't the limiting factor, and the powertrain mileage delta only gives the Hummer 66% more miles, not 200%. So no argument from me... that's clearly a bullshit study.
Darn, and I was hoping that taking plastics out of the buyers' market for petroleum would reduce demand and lower prices. Why do so many green solutions seem to reduce efficiency and increase energy usage when the end-to-end cycle is considered?
Well this wouldn't be Slashdot if making laissez faire arguments & generally going against net-neutrality groupthink didn't get me suspected of astroturfing. I don't see the obfuscation in pointing out that we're talking about introducing new laws to prevent a hypothetical. Perhaps I just think net neutrality is a trap (or, itsatrap). History should teach us that the inevitable crony capitalism that bureaucratic control leads to will be harder to fix than the hypothetical paid prioritization situation.
We should be going after the deals and quid-pro-quos that prop up these artificial monopolies and oligopolies, not each abuse of consumers the companies engage in (or might someday engage in). Competition is the most effective remedy against consumer-hostile behavior by companies. Going after individual undesirable practices ends up reducing competition and raising costs. It does nothing to give consumers more value or better choices.
What's more, giving politicians authority over any aspect of the internet will invite some serious scope creep once that camel's nose is in the tent. Once they've fixed the hypothetical paid-prioritization problem, they can and will start working to save us from other things, like patent infringement, non-DRMed music streaming, indecent content, infringing content, lawless P2P traffic, hard-to-manage encrypted traffic and anonymous bullying. We have five RIAA lawyers appointed to the US Justice Department, no? They and the the Solicitor General (also former RIAA) are already making a priority of finding new ways to combat piracy. How much precedent for political or bureaucratic authority over internet traffic do you want when the ACTA or something like it becomes law and they set their sites on mandating technological enforcement (however impossible that is)?
PS: I'm a software engineer. I don't work for or benefit from Big Telecom other than through what their products do for me as a consumer.
They do seem to treat Google-referred impressions differently, maybe because Google knocks you down for having users see something different from what's in their search index. But yeah, Experts Exchange used to be somewhat usable way back in the day, but now they're just a blight, although their content is at least first-hand. Worse yet are scrapers like osdir and nabble, who I finally can block once & have it apply everywhere. Hurrah!
(Besides, with all of the content on the StackExchange sites like Superuser.com and StackOverflow.com, who needs to search in the wild for technical answers anymore?)
Have to disagree; relevance 63.2 if I were a betting man.:)
Oh, I wouldn't be quite that generous! I think a comparison to the airlines would only be accurate if broadband was a free market.
Ok, so unless you're arguing that increasing government intervention will yield better offerings faster than if it were a free market (which it doesn't sound like you are), then let's brainstorm about how to make broadband into more of a free market.
And the one and only reason why I can choose an alternate carrier here? Government order -- AT&T, while kicking and screaming, was forced to open their lines to other DSL ISPs. And that's the way it should be -- bad things happen when the ISP also owns and controls the lines. You get BS like the broadband companies' tiered pricing plans.
There's something we can agree on. But that's not what happens when you let politicians and bureaucrats start regulating the details of their offerings and operations. They start helping to guard the safety of the monopoly/duopoly, in turn for continual donations and occasional new concessions from the one or two providers.
The billions those companies have gotten for infrastructure and investment from the government should come with some strings attached after all.
Yes! No company should be given exclusivity over common resources (or resources built with taxpayer money), but that's what happens when politicians decide this stuff. How about if, instead of creating a new patchwork of regulations, the government just bought back the common infrastructure (i.e. the lines and the towers and trenches that carry them), and maintained it separately with an open-access policy to any provider willing to pay the lease, same price for all, and with competitive bidding mandated for the maintenance every 36 months at the longest? IMO, that's a more legitimate function of the government, and when resources must be shared by all, forcing the ruling class to obey that mandate would go a long way towards keeping companies and politicians from conspiring against consumers & limiting competition, as you so aptly described above.
We can definitely agree that there are deficiencies in the menu of current offerings; the market isn't perfect and never will be. At the end of the day we both want the fastest service possible with the most choice for the least cost. I just think that prior experience in most other industries suggests that less regulatory intervention brings that about faster than political micro-managing does. Our differences of opinion aside, thanks for a thoughtful conversation on the topic.
They should follow those and try to be competitive against others to fulfill those needs instead of spending their money on bribing officials to lock down the market and waging war against new businesses.
I wholeheartedly agree, and that's probably my biggest argument against putting the decision in politicians' hands. Governments should ideally just do things like building big 3ft square commonly-maintained wire channels (or similarly high-capacity towers, as suits the terrain and climate) that any provider could lease by the cross-section and linear distance. Consumers have a few different lines from the house to the junction, and for each they can decide which spigot to attach to. If governments were constrained to simply maintaining the levelness of the playing field and lowering barriers to new entrants -- instead of micro-managing the industry -- tempted businesses would have much less opportunity to conspire and collude with politicians against consumers.
So is your issue more with having only one choice, or is it more with people and corporations being able to enter willy nilly into contracts you think are less mutually beneficial than they do? For example, would you withhold the regulation mandate for WiMax providers?
The funny thing is, the sort of thinking that says "companies must be forced to provide x because they are the only choice" is exactly what delays people from actually having another one. It helps keep competition to a minimum. People considering investing in ISP expansions and upgrades look for the most upside potential with the least risk, and the more power regulators wield over their operations, the greater risk that projected ROIs from an expanded service won't materialize. And incidentally, I have at least 5 choices for broadband; 3+ for DSL over the phone line, and another 2+ for cable broadband, so the 1-line-per-house phenomenon doesn't preclude competition if the area is inviting to providers.
Also, if wired providers are making inordinate profits, how much motivation is there for non-wired providers to move in? But if the margins are already slim and the non-wired providers get subsumed under the same regulatory net, then how much motivation is there? 20 years ago, there was no broadband in my area. I first had it available 10 -11 years ago, and it was barely a megabit. I pay less now than I did then, and I get about 15 megabits down on the 2nd cheapest plan. I watch the majority of my TV on Hulu and Netflix without stutter or buffering problems, and without exceeding the 250GB/month I'm supposed to limit myself to. WiMax in my area is relatively new, and it's regulated about like the wild wild west. Nobody has to offer me unmetered 4G WiMax service. Until recently, nobody did. Most carriers still don't, but one started to, so I switched. And already, the price has dropped, and it's pretty competitive with other providers' metered services. Now other providers are talking about offering unmetered plans. This all happened without lawmakers intervening on my behalf.
IMO, the evidence says we're best off in the long run when regulations only exist to discourage monopolies and outlaw artificial ones (like when municipalities get a kick-back for exclusively permitting one cable provider in).
Lastly, if a company ran the broadband cable to your house and that's all they did, then the "width of the pipe" argument would hold. But there is marginal cost to an ISP for additional units of bandwidth consumption, and a small percentage of users is usually responsible for making them upgrade their routing capacity when, for 80% of their customers with the same sized pipes, the current equipment would be fine for another 5 years. I can't see how it's fair to make 80% of normal users subsidize network upgrades necessitated only by the heavy usage patterns of the other 20%. Essentially, the more-well-off are telling the less-well-off, "I don't care if you want a less expensive plan. You can't have it. I want my torrents running 24/7, I want legislators to guarantee it like a civil right, and I don't want to pay extra for it. You having a minimalist option would threaten all that, and besides you're not smart enough to decide what you need anyway, so shut up and pony up for what I say the minimum service should be."
In the context of the discussion, which is Anti-government, that seemed to me to be what this was saying.
All I meant by that is that consumers generally get their goods and services directly or indirectly through corporations, so consumers are really the ones paying for costly regulations (companies don't just say "okay, we'll lower our profit targets from here forward").
I also don't buy it for a second. Plenty of things are pro-corp and anti-consumer: collusion, monopolies, price-fixing, abhorrent contractual terms...
Okay, yes, over-generalization on my part, and I'll agree with you on those points. I meant something more like: pro-corporation and pro-consumer not mutually exclusive, and quite often are synergistic. Basically, I think it's generally pro-consumer to oppose regulations that go beyond prohibiting force, fraud, theft, or destruction of other property (which pollution would fall under, incidentally).
We see "big companies" and we reflexively envy the big sums of cash they control, since they're so much bigger than the sums of cash we control.
The persecution complex: It seemed to me that that boiled down to "We [aggregate] don't like 'big companies' because we envy them for all their money, not because we take issue with the illegal/immoral [at least for us lowly plebs] things they do to get that much more money than we have."
Ok, I wasn't entirely clear what you were saying, but if it was that I'm saying others are arguing from a persecution complex, you're right. I do think that much of the the anti-corporate sentiment that accompanies calls for new regulation is driven by a sense of entitlement and/or envy.
I'm not just theorizing in a vacuum on that point, I get it from the language of the debate -- especially on Net Neutrality. I'm not talking about arguments taking issue with something illegal or dishonest a company has done. If one says, "BP sidestepped their legal safety obligations, and in doing so destroyed many livelihoods along with vast amounts of public and private property, and they should have to make restitution for it," that's valid. So is "Comcast's service agreement says I will have a minimum of 5 megabit source-agnostic download speeds at all times with no caps, but the service they're providing me does not live up to that."
But those aren't the majority of the arguments I see on this issue. One is clearly arguing from an entitlement standpoint when their argument takes the form of "product x should have qualities y and z, period" (whether it was advertised to have them or not), or "I have a right to a product without limitation j or k." The truth is we don't have a right to have any products offered to us at all, since products are the result of others' voluntary efforts. We don't even have the right to force a corporation to exist and offer us products in the first place, so all the less to make them offer us an ideal product -- according to our definition of ideal -- and make their other customers subsidize the costs of features they don't care about but we do.
On the envy side, people talk about corporations in general as if they're the Legion of Doom, in the absence of any specific charge of dishonest or unlawful behavior. Arguments relying on a bunch of synonyms for "fat," "rich," "undeserving" or "greedy" (e.g. "fat cats" with "obscene profits" who "only care about money") don't really say anything about the merits of the regulation being proposed. They just draw on a negative perception of the relative means of the company compared to the individual (who is "paying through the nose" with "hard-earned money"). That, to me, is a valid thing to call a persecution complex.
Truth be told, I don't feel persecuted in the slightest. I'm grateful and amazed, actually. I'm vastly richer
What does it matter why? Maybe he wonders why anyone would need 800MB in a month, ever. Maybe he likes to get his 10MB attachments quickly. I have a 50MB connection st work, and it's fantastic, noticeably better even for the frequent small downloads I do there. I would love if they had the same speeds available for less money given a usage cap.
The point is, why does anyone need to impose a universal system that takes this sort of freedom away from others?
If we set the establishment letting politicians decide, we'll eventually get "priority tiers" with things like "crucial news" and "infotainment" and "incendiary soapbox," and Fox News and NPR will keep switching buckets with each swing of the pendulum. ~
First off, it seems like the title of this/. article is a bit misleading; they seem to be agreeing to traffic-shaping transparency, not necessarily neutrality.
But let's say there was a neutrality provision put in place prohibiting traffic shaping. Under those rules, how would providers ration service if total usage was regularly exceeding their capacity? If they beef up their networks enough to accommodate the consumers eating bandwidth at >= 80% of their downstream speed (a group that may well grow in numbers if throttling and shaping were verboten), should the rest of the customer base have to subsidize it? What about the low-income users who just need access to email and interwebz at the minimum cost possible, and in exchange would gladly have speeds limited for traffic matching the most strenuous of usage patterns? Do they get an option?
US users constantly shout that "unlimited means unlimited" (and I agree, it does, though few service agreements actually contain such a phrase), so a user with a connection averaging 2.5Mb downstream could eat up ~800GB/month. But another user might like to have 10Mb downstream speeds available, though he rarely exceeds 3GB in monthly usage. Shouldn't that guy be able to buy a plan that limited Hulu, Netflix and torrent speeds but gave him his 10Mb speeds for nearly everything else?
For me, this comes down to the right to contract. Why shouldn't people have the right to enter into any contract they wish to, with any terms they wish to, for any product or service that's legal under other terms, provided those terms are fully disclosed and agreeable to all parties to the contract? That seems like a pretty basic right.
If it adds $5/user/month central overhead, e.g. they need a better class of router hardware for the whole network in order to support having a commonly exploited port open for anyone, then the economics break down differently.
In that case, if 3% of users wanted port 25 open, then the 3% should pay roughly $170, unless you're saying the company should make the other 97% of general users subsidize the 3% who have a more demanding usage pattern.
ISPs are government granted monopolies in most places, and thus need to be regulated to protect the consumer.
How about if those regulations only pertained to the government-granted monopoly, not to providers in the absence of a monopoly?
I get your point, and it's perfectly valid, but I think we need a framework for deciding what and when to regulate, and under what conditions regulations automatically become inapplicable.
Regulations tend to beget decisions that are in the interest of the next election cycle... which means securing donations from power groups on low-profile issues, and securing votes from large voting blocks on high-profile issues. I don't necessarily want those decisions interfering with the market outside the artificial monopoly, e.g. when Wi-Max brings three new providers to an area that used to have just one cable broadband provider. If they can e.g. throttle torrents or Netflix to best ration their capacity, they're going to be more likely to build a network wider, instead of having to invest n% more for each individual node, making them pre-allocate resources to the top 1% of bandwidth hogs instead of serving more people with service the majority would find more than adequate.
Eventually, with three Wi-Max providers in town, one of them will offer minimally throttled or completely unthrottled service to gain a competitive advantage -- or maybe just offer a premium service fast enough that throttling wouldn't be a practical concern. But either way, if they can't discriminate at all, they may never even build out to the little towns that are heavy on bandwidth-hogs. That's the manner in which regulations tend to hurt the lower-end consumers the most.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe the tax cuts were necessary in 2003, but that doesn't make them appropriate now.
We agree on much. The problem is that too many conservatives and libertarians argue as if any tax cut will pay for itself or even increase revenues, and too many liberals argue as if any tax increase will increase revenues, some going as far as to predict linear revenue gains.
Neither extreme is true, but it's nearly axiomatic that some form of the Laffer Curve is true. Few would argue that a tax rate increase from 99% to 100% will increase revenues, and a decrease from 1% to 0% will surely lessen them. In between those extremes, there's a valid debate about what the parabola looks like. Presumably, it varies different under different economic conditions. People (and corporations) are probably more prone to try to minimize tax exposure when times are hard, growth is slow, margins are slim or the future looks rocky.
So to have a rational, evidence-based tax policy, we need to start with
Then you have to look at what the proper function of government is, and whether we're currently overstepping or falling short of that. Another point that often gets overlooked is that giving revenues to an overspending government may be like making loans to a gambling addict. If they simply leverage every dollar they actually receive to borrow eight more, then more revenue might not be desirable. Even after all that people will still have irreconcilable ideological differences about taxation (you could favor anything from sharply redistributive policies to a flat amount tax of the budget divided by the tax base), but laying out something like the above would still go a long way towards separating the pragmatic debate from the ideological one.
I think it's disingenuous for today's conservatives to try to distance themselves from Bush when the rallying cry for many of these same people in 2004 was "it doesn't make sense to change horses in mid-stream."
[...and...]
People who thought Kerry was a better candidate in 2004 - hell, even people who thought McCain was a better candidate in 2000 - were excoriated by the vicious rhetoric bandied about by the Republicans who supported Bush.
I was critical of Bush's lack of fiscal restraint while he was in office, but I still thought (and think) that McCain is the kind of political animal who can be counted on for nothing except to promote himself and seek his own career advancement. I like his efforts promoting pork awareness, but I still would never trust him in the long run. Bush at least tried to create an opt-in privatization option for a small fraction of Social Security, and somebody's going to have to touch that third rail again before long. The market has taken some lumps since then, but even in light of that I think that once the entitlement shit really starts hitting the fan, we're going to wish that Bush had succeeded.
First of all, love your sig line, and it's likely prophetic. Also, fair point on the Canadian regulation being from an extra-governmental authority.
My point isn't that net neutrality == the fairness doctrine. The fairness doctrine is just one example of what you get when Washington starts seeing itself as being in charge of "communications." Besides, it's not like you can't find people advocating for some sort of mechanism to "balance" or "improve" (by fiat) the political discourse on the `net. The more real threat, though, is that we'll see policing over IP infringement and obscenity (especially regarding its availability to minors).
When it comes to regulating any industry, once you let that camel's nose into the tent, it tends to work its way further in. "Preserving competition" turns into subtle (or not-so-subtle) price controls, and propping up failing competitors. Hell, the FCC is already considering a price control scheme in the wireless sector (not that it's clear it has the authority to impose this). An item on the linked meeting agenda is:
TITLE: Reexamination of Roaming Obligations of Commercial Mobile Radio Service Providers and Other Providers of Mobile Data Services (WT Docket No. 05-265) SUMMARY: The Commission will consider a Second Report and Order that adopts a rule requiring facilities-based providers of commercial mobile data services to offer data roaming arrangements to other such providers on commercially reasonable terms and conditions, subject to certain limitations.
Price controls have repeatedly been shown to create scarcity and raise entry barriers for would-be competitors. You mentioned airline regulation earlier, and that's a great example: We used to treat airline routes as a commons, and the Civil Aeronautics Board actually controlled routes, airfares, and even entry into the marketplace by new airlines. Since deregulation, airfare prices have fallen over 40% in real terms. Safety and convenience have increased dramatically as well (ok, except for all the TSA BS on the convenience score). Death risk during air travel has dropped dramatically since 1978, partially because the increased market has caused airlines to turn their fleets over faster, resulting in newer average aircraft ages.
In short, past experience suggests that a rich, unrestrained market with low entry barriers is the best way to foster rising quality and falling prices. If the government really wants to ensure quality service, it could invest in large, common, shared wiring routes (shielded digital pipelines) that could be leased by anyone with no discrimination whatsoever in price or access. Municipalities could connect to them on the condition that there was no grant of monopoly or preferential access to any service provider. Our power grid needs expansion (especially if we expect electric cars to gain market share), the backbones could sure use it, and if sufficiently built out it could do a lot to break up the oligopoly that would let ISPs get away with consumer-hostile forms of throttling in the first place.
I'm no fan of Bush's budget management (or lack thereof), but his tax cuts -- especially those in `03 -- were exactly the right policy.
Bush's eight years began with the dot com bust followed by 9/11. The years from 2000 to 2003 saw declining federal revenues compounded by rising unemployment. Revenue increases from `03 to `06 were among the highest for any three-year period, and unemployment dropped consistently from `03 - `07. The rate of GDP growth more than doubled after `03. Capital gains revenues doubled over the next three years. Before the cuts, the CBO predicted them to increase only ~26% over that period.
It would have been possible to balance the budget after the Bush tax cuts, but neither he nor congress did anything to reign in spending. If we ever want to see black ink again, we have to attack entitlement spending, corporate welfare, and redundant or counter-productive bureaucracies. Defense spending shouldn't be immune to cuts, and we sure as hell have to keep the feds from bailing out sinking states. That all still isn't sufficient to completely eliminate deficits, but it is necessary and it's a start.
The problem is, it will take a benevolent dictator to run Net Neutrality, and I don't know any.
Well put. I frequently hear arguments that start with "Oh yeah? Well if you think the market is so perfect, then...", which is frustrating since I've never argued (nor do I think) that a free market is or ever will be anywhere near perfect. I just don't know of a better mechanism to keep processes from becoming politicized, or sectors from becoming monopolized, or incentives from being rigged to favor bad ideas (e.g. as with ethanol).
Silly me. Of course, I only speak of some hypothetical dystopian future. I'm not saying there's any observed tendency of things like making unelected bureaucrats the arbiters of fairness, or enabling them to collect millions for indecency violations. And of course this is America, not some dictatorship like Canada where they might ban a song from the airwaves for sarcastically quoting a politically incorrect statement as a way of criticizing it. And the American government would never try to extend its broadcast control into paid content mediums like XM radio or cable tv either. I guess I'm just being paranoid. People who seek and attain authority are usually content with it; at least they don't continually try to expand it. I mean, when a government starts out just establishing official weights and measures, it is nice that they stick with just that, and they don't go expanding their purview to include food labeling, cigarette packaging (and even what can and can't be used as a brand name) or fat content. I'm also glad nobody tries to enact outright bans on fast food.
I'm sure someday excessive regulatory authority could lead to officials engaging in crony capitalism and abusing their authority in ways that happen to favor political allies, exempt favored groups from the more onerous requirements of their regulations, and/or handicap their friends' competitors, but you're right, that's not the kind of thing that regulatory authority has been known to open the door to in the past.
Sorry for bringing my tinfoil hattery into this.
If only more people analyzed issues from that angle. From Supreme Court judges down to regulatory bureaucrats, too many people are more interested in figuring out whether they're "for the little guy" than in whether they will carry out their functions according to the laws society has put in place. The rule of law is foundational to our freedoms -- it's based on the notion that no official is above the rules, and it's erosion isn't doing the little guy any favors in the long run.
In whatever forms they eventually take, regulations will be adjusted periodically to allow prioritization of 'pretty packets' (meaning "Important" packets, and packets belonging to large campaign contributors). Latency problems will oscillate every few years from NPR to Fox News and from GE to Walmart.
Indecent, incendiary and potentially infringing packets will be inexorably deprioritized to make room for more of the prettier packets. Everyone's traffic experience will get better and better over time under benevolent, centralized, adult supervision of everyone's traffic management practices. You won't have to think about it personally.
Oh come on, it's not that bad. If we just cut the federal budget by 35% off the top* for the next 10 years, we could get the national debt back to where Bush left it. (And wow... I never thought of that amount as a goal before.)
* - not a 35% reduction in the rate of growth, a 35% reduction in the budget coupled with a 10-year spending freeze.
No. Just convince Glen Beck that patents are the spawn of the Devil. Congress will fix this inside of a week.
He shouldn't be far from that position already. Beck is a Libertarian who has advocated a non-interventionist foreign policy and large scale cuts in military spending (which distinguishes him from many on the right), and he seems to favor the Austrian school of economics, which is probably where you'll find the greatest concentration of hostility to the idea of intellectual property.
The anti-IP position isn't universal among Austrians by any means, but see, e.g., Rethinking Intellectual Property: History, Theory, and Economics by Stephan Kinsella for a defense of that position.
If you want to measure the full cost of production of a petroleum sourced PET bottle, you need to take into account the initial production of biomass and then at least a couple of hundred thousand years of high pressure cellaring.
We do account for that; the scarcity and non-renewability of the raw materials are pricing factors, just as the extraction and refining costs are. The impact isn't fixed, and it probably isn't linear either. It's probably asymptotic relative to the current demand, the remaining supply, and any increased production costs caused by needing to excavate less accessible supply sources as more convenient ones are exhausted.
Because you are a moron. Really that is the answer. This will reduce demand for petroleum as it will take more energy to make the bottles, but that energy is not coming from petroleum.
I hope you're right (about the reduced demand, not about me being a moron). But these things are notoriously hard to predict; corn-based ethanol is a good example of a bad idea that a lot of people thought was good.
A large scale move towards bio-plastics could plausibly remove some of the manufacturing sector's demand from the petro market, but if it does indeed take more energy to produce (a claim I haven't investigated, so I'm not saying it does), then the total impact on petro prices is unclear. The market repercussions of increased energy demands aren't necessarily limited to the immediate supply source. A rise in energy demand could affect a rise electric prices, which in turn could push consumers away from electric cars, or add financial stress to electricity-driven transit systems, making driving more attractive to cost-conscious commuters.
Also the previous products often did not consider the end to end cycles at all. Like coal as a good example dumps all its waste into the air or into toxic ponds which later leak. Yet, people complain about the dangerous and waste from nuclear power since the nuclear power plant is not allowed to just dump its garbage into the air.
I'm all for including all elements in the cycle when comparing energy alternatives in terms of pollution, cost or efficiency.
Largely because of naysayers who distort facts as necessary to reach that conclusion, or simply assume it to be the case with or without any evidence, such as the post you replied to. ("Order of magnitude" does have an actual definition.)
Yeah, I'm reflexively skeptical about extravagant energy-saving claims when I hear them, but I agree, the article you referenced reads more like a press release than a study from the beginning. It gets really clear when you get to this part:
In a study by CNW Marketing called "Dust to Dust", researchers discovered that the Prius costs and average of $3.25 per mile driven over a lifetime of 100,000 miles (the expected lifespan of a hybrid). On the other hand the Hummer costs $1.95 per mile over an expected 300,000 miles.
Ok, some glaring red flags there: 1) "a study by CNW Marketing" (nuff said), and 2) expected Prius lifespan of 100k miles vs. 300k for a Hummer... really? Hummers come with a 5/100,000 powertrain warranty. Priuses come with a 5/60,000 powertrain and a 96/100k hybrid system warranty, so I can't imagine a plausible justification for that stat; it's evident that the hybrid system isn't the limiting factor, and the powertrain mileage delta only gives the Hummer 66% more miles, not 200%. So no argument from me... that's clearly a bullshit study.
Darn, and I was hoping that taking plastics out of the buyers' market for petroleum would reduce demand and lower prices. Why do so many green solutions seem to reduce efficiency and increase energy usage when the end-to-end cycle is considered?
Well this wouldn't be Slashdot if making laissez faire arguments & generally going against net-neutrality groupthink didn't get me suspected of astroturfing. I don't see the obfuscation in pointing out that we're talking about introducing new laws to prevent a hypothetical. Perhaps I just think net neutrality is a trap (or, itsatrap). History should teach us that the inevitable crony capitalism that bureaucratic control leads to will be harder to fix than the hypothetical paid prioritization situation.
We should be going after the deals and quid-pro-quos that prop up these artificial monopolies and oligopolies, not each abuse of consumers the companies engage in (or might someday engage in). Competition is the most effective remedy against consumer-hostile behavior by companies. Going after individual undesirable practices ends up reducing competition and raising costs. It does nothing to give consumers more value or better choices.
What's more, giving politicians authority over any aspect of the internet will invite some serious scope creep once that camel's nose is in the tent. Once they've fixed the hypothetical paid-prioritization problem, they can and will start working to save us from other things, like patent infringement, non-DRMed music streaming, indecent content, infringing content, lawless P2P traffic, hard-to-manage encrypted traffic and anonymous bullying. We have five RIAA lawyers appointed to the US Justice Department, no? They and the the Solicitor General (also former RIAA) are already making a priority of finding new ways to combat piracy. How much precedent for political or bureaucratic authority over internet traffic do you want when the ACTA or something like it becomes law and they set their sites on mandating technological enforcement (however impossible that is)?
PS: I'm a software engineer. I don't work for or benefit from Big Telecom other than through what their products do for me as a consumer.
There's a spidey-sense joke in there somewhere.
They do seem to treat Google-referred impressions differently, maybe because Google knocks you down for having users see something different from what's in their search index. But yeah, Experts Exchange used to be somewhat usable way back in the day, but now they're just a blight, although their content is at least first-hand. Worse yet are scrapers like osdir and nabble, who I finally can block once & have it apply everywhere. Hurrah!
(Besides, with all of the content on the StackExchange sites like Superuser.com and StackOverflow.com, who needs to search in the wild for technical answers anymore?)
Relevance = zero.
Have to disagree; relevance 63.2 if I were a betting man. :)
Oh, I wouldn't be quite that generous! I think a comparison to the airlines would only be accurate if broadband was a free market.
Ok, so unless you're arguing that increasing government intervention will yield better offerings faster than if it were a free market (which it doesn't sound like you are), then let's brainstorm about how to make broadband into more of a free market.
And the one and only reason why I can choose an alternate carrier here? Government order -- AT&T, while kicking and screaming, was forced to open their lines to other DSL ISPs. And that's the way it should be -- bad things happen when the ISP also owns and controls the lines. You get BS like the broadband companies' tiered pricing plans.
There's something we can agree on. But that's not what happens when you let politicians and bureaucrats start regulating the details of their offerings and operations. They start helping to guard the safety of the monopoly/duopoly, in turn for continual donations and occasional new concessions from the one or two providers.
The billions those companies have gotten for infrastructure and investment from the government should come with some strings attached after all.
Yes! No company should be given exclusivity over common resources (or resources built with taxpayer money), but that's what happens when politicians decide this stuff. How about if, instead of creating a new patchwork of regulations, the government just bought back the common infrastructure (i.e. the lines and the towers and trenches that carry them), and maintained it separately with an open-access policy to any provider willing to pay the lease, same price for all, and with competitive bidding mandated for the maintenance every 36 months at the longest? IMO, that's a more legitimate function of the government, and when resources must be shared by all, forcing the ruling class to obey that mandate would go a long way towards keeping companies and politicians from conspiring against consumers & limiting competition, as you so aptly described above.
They should follow those and try to be competitive against others to fulfill those needs instead of spending their money on bribing officials to lock down the market and waging war against new businesses.
I wholeheartedly agree, and that's probably my biggest argument against putting the decision in politicians' hands. Governments should ideally just do things like building big 3ft square commonly-maintained wire channels (or similarly high-capacity towers, as suits the terrain and climate) that any provider could lease by the cross-section and linear distance. Consumers have a few different lines from the house to the junction, and for each they can decide which spigot to attach to. If governments were constrained to simply maintaining the levelness of the playing field and lowering barriers to new entrants -- instead of micro-managing the industry -- tempted businesses would have much less opportunity to conspire and collude with politicians against consumers.
So is your issue more with having only one choice, or is it more with people and corporations being able to enter willy nilly into contracts you think are less mutually beneficial than they do? For example, would you withhold the regulation mandate for WiMax providers?
The funny thing is, the sort of thinking that says "companies must be forced to provide x because they are the only choice" is exactly what delays people from actually having another one. It helps keep competition to a minimum. People considering investing in ISP expansions and upgrades look for the most upside potential with the least risk, and the more power regulators wield over their operations, the greater risk that projected ROIs from an expanded service won't materialize. And incidentally, I have at least 5 choices for broadband; 3+ for DSL over the phone line, and another 2+ for cable broadband, so the 1-line-per-house phenomenon doesn't preclude competition if the area is inviting to providers.
Also, if wired providers are making inordinate profits, how much motivation is there for non-wired providers to move in? But if the margins are already slim and the non-wired providers get subsumed under the same regulatory net, then how much motivation is there? 20 years ago, there was no broadband in my area. I first had it available 10 -11 years ago, and it was barely a megabit. I pay less now than I did then, and I get about 15 megabits down on the 2nd cheapest plan. I watch the majority of my TV on Hulu and Netflix without stutter or buffering problems, and without exceeding the 250GB/month I'm supposed to limit myself to. WiMax in my area is relatively new, and it's regulated about like the wild wild west. Nobody has to offer me unmetered 4G WiMax service. Until recently, nobody did. Most carriers still don't, but one started to, so I switched. And already, the price has dropped, and it's pretty competitive with other providers' metered services. Now other providers are talking about offering unmetered plans. This all happened without lawmakers intervening on my behalf.
IMO, the evidence says we're best off in the long run when regulations only exist to discourage monopolies and outlaw artificial ones (like when municipalities get a kick-back for exclusively permitting one cable provider in).
Lastly, if a company ran the broadband cable to your house and that's all they did, then the "width of the pipe" argument would hold. But there is marginal cost to an ISP for additional units of bandwidth consumption, and a small percentage of users is usually responsible for making them upgrade their routing capacity when, for 80% of their customers with the same sized pipes, the current equipment would be fine for another 5 years. I can't see how it's fair to make 80% of normal users subsidize network upgrades necessitated only by the heavy usage patterns of the other 20%. Essentially, the more-well-off are telling the less-well-off, "I don't care if you want a less expensive plan. You can't have it. I want my torrents running 24/7, I want legislators to guarantee it like a civil right, and I don't want to pay extra for it. You having a minimalist option would threaten all that, and besides you're not smart enough to decide what you need anyway, so shut up and pony up for what I say the minimum service should be."
TEoMEiMF:
Pro-corp is the same as pro-consumer
In the context of the discussion, which is Anti-government, that seemed to me to be what this was saying.
All I meant by that is that consumers generally get their goods and services directly or indirectly through corporations, so consumers are really the ones paying for costly regulations (companies don't just say "okay, we'll lower our profit targets from here forward").
I also don't buy it for a second. Plenty of things are pro-corp and anti-consumer: collusion, monopolies, price-fixing, abhorrent contractual terms...
Okay, yes, over-generalization on my part, and I'll agree with you on those points. I meant something more like: pro-corporation and pro-consumer not mutually exclusive, and quite often are synergistic. Basically, I think it's generally pro-consumer to oppose regulations that go beyond prohibiting force, fraud, theft, or destruction of other property (which pollution would fall under, incidentally).
We see "big companies" and we reflexively envy the big sums of cash they control, since they're so much bigger than the sums of cash we control.
The persecution complex: It seemed to me that that boiled down to "We [aggregate] don't like 'big companies' because we envy them for all their money, not because we take issue with the illegal/immoral [at least for us lowly plebs] things they do to get that much more money than we have."
Ok, I wasn't entirely clear what you were saying, but if it was that I'm saying others are arguing from a persecution complex, you're right. I do think that much of the the anti-corporate sentiment that accompanies calls for new regulation is driven by a sense of entitlement and/or envy.
I'm not just theorizing in a vacuum on that point, I get it from the language of the debate -- especially on Net Neutrality. I'm not talking about arguments taking issue with something illegal or dishonest a company has done. If one says, "BP sidestepped their legal safety obligations, and in doing so destroyed many livelihoods along with vast amounts of public and private property, and they should have to make restitution for it," that's valid. So is "Comcast's service agreement says I will have a minimum of 5 megabit source-agnostic download speeds at all times with no caps, but the service they're providing me does not live up to that."
But those aren't the majority of the arguments I see on this issue. One is clearly arguing from an entitlement standpoint when their argument takes the form of "product x should have qualities y and z, period" (whether it was advertised to have them or not), or "I have a right to a product without limitation j or k." The truth is we don't have a right to have any products offered to us at all, since products are the result of others' voluntary efforts. We don't even have the right to force a corporation to exist and offer us products in the first place, so all the less to make them offer us an ideal product -- according to our definition of ideal -- and make their other customers subsidize the costs of features they don't care about but we do.
On the envy side, people talk about corporations in general as if they're the Legion of Doom, in the absence of any specific charge of dishonest or unlawful behavior. Arguments relying on a bunch of synonyms for "fat," "rich," "undeserving" or "greedy" (e.g. "fat cats" with "obscene profits" who "only care about money") don't really say anything about the merits of the regulation being proposed. They just draw on a negative perception of the relative means of the company compared to the individual (who is "paying through the nose" with "hard-earned money"). That, to me, is a valid thing to call a persecution complex.
Truth be told, I don't feel persecuted in the slightest. I'm grateful and amazed, actually. I'm vastly richer
What does it matter why? Maybe he wonders why anyone would need 800MB in a month, ever. Maybe he likes to get his 10MB attachments quickly. I have a 50MB connection st work, and it's fantastic, noticeably better even for the frequent small downloads I do there. I would love if they had the same speeds available for less money given a usage cap.
The point is, why does anyone need to impose a universal system that takes this sort of freedom away from others?
If we set the establishment letting politicians decide, we'll eventually get "priority tiers" with things like "crucial news" and "infotainment" and "incendiary soapbox," and Fox News and NPR will keep switching buckets with each swing of the pendulum. ~
First off, it seems like the title of this /. article is a bit misleading; they seem to be agreeing to traffic-shaping transparency, not necessarily neutrality.
But let's say there was a neutrality provision put in place prohibiting traffic shaping. Under those rules, how would providers ration service if total usage was regularly exceeding their capacity? If they beef up their networks enough to accommodate the consumers eating bandwidth at >= 80% of their downstream speed (a group that may well grow in numbers if throttling and shaping were verboten), should the rest of the customer base have to subsidize it? What about the low-income users who just need access to email and interwebz at the minimum cost possible, and in exchange would gladly have speeds limited for traffic matching the most strenuous of usage patterns? Do they get an option?
US users constantly shout that "unlimited means unlimited" (and I agree, it does, though few service agreements actually contain such a phrase), so a user with a connection averaging 2.5Mb downstream could eat up ~800GB/month. But another user might like to have 10Mb downstream speeds available, though he rarely exceeds 3GB in monthly usage. Shouldn't that guy be able to buy a plan that limited Hulu, Netflix and torrent speeds but gave him his 10Mb speeds for nearly everything else?
For me, this comes down to the right to contract. Why shouldn't people have the right to enter into any contract they wish to, with any terms they wish to, for any product or service that's legal under other terms, provided those terms are fully disclosed and agreeable to all parties to the contract? That seems like a pretty basic right.
If it adds $5/user/month central overhead, e.g. they need a better class of router hardware for the whole network in order to support having a commonly exploited port open for anyone, then the economics break down differently.
In that case, if 3% of users wanted port 25 open, then the 3% should pay roughly $170, unless you're saying the company should make the other 97% of general users subsidize the 3% who have a more demanding usage pattern.
ISPs are government granted monopolies in most places, and thus need to be regulated to protect the consumer.
How about if those regulations only pertained to the government-granted monopoly, not to providers in the absence of a monopoly?
I get your point, and it's perfectly valid, but I think we need a framework for deciding what and when to regulate, and under what conditions regulations automatically become inapplicable.
Regulations tend to beget decisions that are in the interest of the next election cycle... which means securing donations from power groups on low-profile issues, and securing votes from large voting blocks on high-profile issues. I don't necessarily want those decisions interfering with the market outside the artificial monopoly, e.g. when Wi-Max brings three new providers to an area that used to have just one cable broadband provider. If they can e.g. throttle torrents or Netflix to best ration their capacity, they're going to be more likely to build a network wider, instead of having to invest n% more for each individual node, making them pre-allocate resources to the top 1% of bandwidth hogs instead of serving more people with service the majority would find more than adequate.
Eventually, with three Wi-Max providers in town, one of them will offer minimally throttled or completely unthrottled service to gain a competitive advantage -- or maybe just offer a premium service fast enough that throttling wouldn't be a practical concern. But either way, if they can't discriminate at all, they may never even build out to the little towns that are heavy on bandwidth-hogs. That's the manner in which regulations tend to hurt the lower-end consumers the most.