A bit of the piece I wrote before got my mind going..... I hadn't actually sat down to think about this much (other than when Bill Still was running for the Libertarian ticket), and I bet you haven't either.

But we should.

I'm going to take just our Federal budget and break it down into the following general categories for Fiscal 2013, a year for which we have the Federal Treasury Statement:

Social Security: $870 billion

Medicare and Medicaid (All): $1,113 billion

Children and Families (TANF, Energy, Children and Family Services, Adoption, etc): $50 billion

HUD (Rent, projects, operating funds, etc) + "Community Planning": $45 billion

SNAP/WIC/Etc (Food Stamps & "Free" School Lunches): $109 billion

Veterans Affairs: $143 billion, of which about $52 billion is medically-related.  The rest is (mostly) pensions and readjustment benefits.

Ok, now let's add all this up, with one exception -- Military Pensions.

I get $2,239 billion, or $2.2 trillion dollars, out of a total as spent of $4.058 trillion -- roughly 54%.

Note that the deficit was $680 billion, or one third of that spending.

So let's just take our $2,239 billion and see what we could do with it, assuming we didn't have these programs at all. In other words, let's make a few assumptions:

• Families in the lowest quintile of income (under $27,794) pay an effective tax rate of zero.  That is, their income (all sources, including benefit checks from the government) is all theirs to spend.
  
  
• Families in the second quintile of income ($49,788) pay few taxes, with an effective rate under 20%. That is, if we remove the taxes the gross amount they'd have to "make" would rise by about $10,000 (what they pay in taxes.)
  
  
• There are an average of 3.12 persons per family.  Since the US population is approximately 330 million, there are approximately 100 million family units ranging from a single person to five (where the bell curve flattens to near-zero) persons.  As these are quintiles this happens to divide out nicely; there are approximately 20 million families in each quintile.

Ok, so we're going to do this instead of the programs we have now:

• We're going to enforce the Sherman and Clayton Acts vigorously against all in the medical field.  This will result in the cost of medical care plummeting by approximately 80%.  Doubt me?  Go price procedures and drugs in Japan, India and other nations where you can get first world, cash care.  Or, for that matter, price a procedure at The Surgery Center of Oklahoma.
  
  
• We're going to delete all of these programs and benefits outlined above.
  
  
• For the 20 million family units in the second quintile, we're going to give each a tax credit amounting to the 1/5th of the ratable difference between their family income and the $49,788 threshold.  There is an approximately $22,000 range in this quintile so the average household will receive $2,000. That will cost $40 billion a year.
   
• For the 40 million family units in the first and second quintile we're going to give each a further refundable tax credit amounting to 100% of the funds necessary to reach the 1st quintile threshold (average for the first quintile is $14,000 @ 20 million people) plus, for those under $40,000, another $5,000.  This will cost (20 million * 14,000) + (35 million * 5,000) or $455 billion more a year.

Note that these two direct refundable tax credit disbursements result in nobody having a family income of less than approximately $32,000 after tax.  We spent $495 billion doing it.

Bluntly: If we do this there are no more poor citizens in America unless you care to argue that a $32,000 household income is "poor."  If you do then I'll preempt your statement by telling you that you're stupid and ought to go find a high building and jump, you ****er.

End of discussion.

We started with $2,239 billion that we whacked out of the budget and have spent $495 billion of that eliminating, on a permanent basis, poverty in America.

We have left $1,744 billion each and every year.  We will not run a deficit ($680 billion) any more, and in fact will run a $400 billion surplus on purpose to start paying down the debt.  We now have $764 billion left each and every year.

That $764 billion is roughly 40% of the remaining federal budget.  We therefore will cut all taxes, income FICA, Medicare, everything -- by 30% so as to bring receipts in line with actual spending.

The result of this is:

• A balanced Federal Budget right now and, over the space of a few decades, a zeroed Federal debt.
   
• I did not touch the military budget, nor any of the other departments.
   
• Those who are in the lowest quintile of American life suddenly and permanently have a reasonably middle-class lifestyle.  There is no longer any argument over whether someone will starve irrespective of their economic circumstance, other than by choice.  There are no more poor citizens in America.
   
• I have permanently stopped all fiscally-driven inflation, and thus destruction of purchasing power, since there are no longer deficits being run.  In fact we now see purchasing power increases over time of about 2.3% annually.
  
  
• Those who are in the second quintile will see their after tax income effectively rise to their pre-tax income.
  
  
• And everyone, from poor on up, will see a 30% reduction in all federal taxes and fees.

Note that I left a hell of a lot of Socialism in the Federal Government due to handing out money to the lowest two quintiles.  However, I got rid of all of the government waste and corruption at once in social programs by doing it this way, and as a result what has happened is that the people in the lower economic strata got all the money instead of a quarter of it with the various scam artists in and around the government stealing the rest.

I also broke the Medical Monopolies -- everyone can now afford to pay cash for their medical care.

And, I did it while cutting taxes across-the-board by 30% while not only balancing the budget immediately, not in 10 or 20 years in some phantasm of lies and fraud, but also while putting $400 billion a year toward retiring the debt.

We're not short on money in this country, nor on taxation.

We're short on integrity and people who argue otherwise are liars.

Argue with my math; if I missed something or made an error, show me where.

PS: Before the criticism commences, let me point out that I'm well-aware of adverse selection and the arguments that can be raised in support of it, including the fact that were we to do this we might end up with a lot of people in that first quintile by choice!  After all, $32,000 as a guaranteed household income is pretty good for doing nothing!

There is one certain way to make sure everyone knows you're an idiot -- get out your keyboard.

I absolutely boil over when I see yet another fool blame gun violence on black people. It is almost as bad as blaming it on the guns themselves. The latest story being linked to by the “alternative media” is by Karl Denninger, for his The Market Ticker website entitled “The Real Gun Violence Issue.” After poking fun at a couple anecdotal stories meant to expose the complete disregard for human life by inner city black people

Poking fun?  Murder is FUN?  Since when?

You know who the worst racist *******s are?  The ones who invent racism that doesn't exist in an attempt to label someone.

Of course you have dance around the accusation.  Like Paul did:

Then, after noting that our current President is in fact black (actually only ½), Mr. Denninger meanders into a vague conclusion that if somehow we didn’t allow the criminalization of drugs with “racist” propaganda, somehow all of these problems wouldn’t exist. He also wanders into blaming the ills of gun violence on alcohol and prescription opiates…I think.

Oh, so reading comprehension wasn't your strong suit in school?  Let me help you out.

Black people are overwhelmingly the victims and perpetrators of gun violence. Black people shoot each other at a rate of five to six times that of any other ethnic group.  I didn't make this up, it's a fact. And it is also a fact that most of these homicides are black-on-black.  This isn't some grand revelation, it's a statistical reality.  Paul goes ape**** about my not linking the DOJ's statistics -- is that because he didn't want to look himself?  Oh darn, they really are there.

If there is a point to the article, and you have to look pretty hard to find one, I guess his point would be that if we just give black people easy access to what are now illegal drugs, and make our black President admit that black people are shooting each other in disproportionate numbers, they wouldn’t shoot each other anymore? Could this somehow be the magic bullet to end gun violence?

This is exactly the kind of thinking that brands gun rights activists as racist.

Oh really?  So let me see if I get this right -- we prohibited alcohol and got gun-toting violent gangs across our country as a result.  This taught us exactly...... nothing.

You see, guns are expensive never mind the penalties for misusing them -- like shooting a competing dealer on the street corner.  Therefore, given a choice most people with a dispute would rather sue or ask the government to prosecute.  

However, you can't sue someone for doing an illegal thing.  So when we make a "crime" out of an act that is a voluntary, consensual adult thing, such as drug use, then when there is a dispute exactly what method of resolving that dispute do you think people will use?

It gets worse.  Irrespective of whether you think duels are a suitable way to resolve disputes what's not in dispute is that ****ty marksmanship gets innocent people killed. Those who are doing illegal things are not generally interested in openly displaying their acts; therefore said people don't go to the range and practice.  As a result the first time they fire said gun may well be when trying to settle said dispute, and they often miss and hit unintended people instead of their targets.  Sometimes they even shoot their own friends by accident while trying to shoot someone else.

One of the big issues here is that for everyone shot and killed somewhere between 5-10 more people are shot and don't die, which means that the problem is actually much worse than it appears.  And I mean, it's not like 71.4% of those doing the dying aren't Black in places like Chicago, right?  Oh wait.... damn, there's twice that ****head Denninger actually cited a source and statistic.

Mr. Denninger makes a completely undocumented statement about gun violence:

“Indeed, if you take out black-on-black homicide in the major cities from our so-called “blood-red streets” that Bloomberg and others claim as our emblem of “endemic gun violence” you find that something like three quarters of all gun murders disappear.”

Completely undocumented eh?  Uh, nope.

You do have to have a brain.  You also have to take a few seconds to look.  And you can choose your source of data; reports in the media (which often omit the race of the offender; the victim is harder since bleeding people sell newspapers and TV ad time; how do you show the blood without showing the person?) work just fine or, if you prefer, just go to the DOJ.

And then the shibboleths come out:

“The War on Drugs,” the ever expanding militarized police state, and our broken legal system are indeed problems. Most gun crime is generated by recidivist felons who have been let out. But those are symptoms. The problem itself is about opportunity, or a lack thereof, and if you want to boil it down to black people, like Mr. Denninger, since before the Civil Rights movement of the 60s, black people have been cheated out of the American Dream by a margin of 2 to 1. Measuring unemployment data , which is consistently 2 to 1 blacks against whites, food stamp data, also showing 2 to 1. And disproportionately, again, 2 to 1, the percentage of blacks trapped in the inner cities it becomes clear that just pointing a finger at black gun crime just isn’t fair. None of these trends have changed in the last 50 years, regardless of the color of the president.

Really?  We still have plantations, complete with gun-toting patrols and chain-link fences keeping those black people trapped in the inner cities?  Really?

So who's cheated out of what, exactly, and more to the point who's doing it to them?  Every human infant is born trying to learn something, even if it's just how to grab at some food.  It takes real talent and effort to block that, or worse, redirect it into criminal violence.  And how does that happen again in a nation where there are no restrictions on where you choose to live and public libraries dot the landscape?

No, we can't talk about how we enable people to sit on their ass and collect a check, instead of demanding that they get off their ass.  You see, if we enable people to sit on their ass and collect a check we can steal more than half of the check for ourselves and claim we're "helping" people.  (More on that later, complete with the math.)  We also can't talk about how we establish a system of unlawful acts that are illegal just because we say so, not because anyone else (other than the participants) is possibly harmed.  If we make all those acts illegal some people can make billions of dollars by caging others, destroying their economic opportunity with permanent felony records when the "offense" is simply doing something in the privacy of their own home that some "moral majority" believes merits caging them like a wild animal.  Oh, and then for good measure we can have branches of our government involved in providing and making available those very same things, you know, like the CIA has done for the last 50 or so years when it comes to the drug trade and our own DOJ has been doing here and now with drug gangs in Mexico, never mind the money laundering for same our banks have committed?

We didn't do that same sort of thing with gays, right?  We didn't criminalize being gay, did we?  Oh wait, we did. Now there are risks if you happen to be a gay man and like it in the back, but who's risks are they?  Yours.  Why is my business whether you choose to accept said risks in exchange for what you find to be a fulfilling adult choice?

We didn't criminalize black and white people intermarrying, right?  Oh wait, we did that too.  Exactly what harm came of black and white people deciding they loved one another?  Apparently plenty, because the entire purpose of marriage laws in the US originally was to prevent that from happening.

And then we criminalized people drinking alcohol.  Now certainly the overuse of alcohol is bad.  But who gets hurt if it's overused?  The person doing the over-using, right?  But gee, after we did that and removed disputes over alcohol distribution and production from the courts, and it instead went to the streets to be settled with guns, did we learn anything about how dumb that was?

OH HELL NO.

And you read correctly by the way. I said EVERY law abiding American should own and carry a gun. Those who need guns the most are black people in our inner cities, but unfortunately they have the ones that the anti-gunners have fought the hardest to disarm.

Ah, Paul thinks I'm an anti-gunner.  Boy, he doesn't read me much, does he?  Indeed, it's my position that everyone has a right to be armed, all the time.  Yes, even those who did bad things previously, provided they've served their time.  Why?  Because our justice system claims that once one has "paid their debt to society", well, it's paid!  We have a desperate need in this country to stop being hypocrites in damn near everything we do.

If we have a problem with recidivism it's not found in continuing restrictions on a lifetime basis.  It's that we don't lock people up until they're not dangerous any more!  In some cases that means locking them up forever, especially when you lock someone up for a crime, let them go and they do it again.  Like, for instance, the case I wrote about a few years ago where a jackass shot and killed a Marshal that came to serve him some papers in Florida.  He blasted said Marshal with a shotgun.

The problem is that he had done felony time twice before, not just once.  The first time for carjacking, an apparently fine way to earn a living.  We let him out after a few years (!) and he decided that sexual assault was a better idea than carjacking, got arrested and was convicted of that offense.

But we didn't learn a damn thing about dangerous people in that instance, did we?  Obviously not or we wouldn't have let him out again, and he wouldn't have been shooting a Marshal.

At the same time we imprison huge numbers of black people, destroying their civil rights and job prospects with a permanent felony record when their "offense" is nothing more than consensual adult conduct!

This, Paul thinks, is just fine and not really part of the problem.  Riiiiiight.

Most Americans, of all colors and creeds, are law abiding and only want a good life with a good job and opportunity.

Define "good job" please.  And while you're at it, please tell me how you're going to redefine the common law of business balance.  You know, the one that says you have to produce more than you cost, or you have no job in the first place.

Now square that with all the taxes, fees and assessments that our current government programs produce.  Tell me how the so-called "inner city trap" is real, other than by one's own decision to be a sponge off society.  And what does taking that welfare, EBT, Section 8 and other things do?  Why it makes the cost of employing people much higher, especially in those same cities, which means that it depresses employment prospects for the people who live there while raising their cost of living.  Ever price a gallon of milk or a pound of meat in those areas .vs. in the suburbs?  Try it sometime -- if you have the balls to visit the south side of Chicago.

It's simple economics, really.  What do the so-called "progressives" want to do?  Why they're interested in raising the minimum wage, further ratcheting up the price and removing people from the labor market on a competitive basis.

Nobody ever dreams of drug slinging on the streets one bullet away from either the grave or the jailhouse. But for the many of the most ambitious and promising of inner city black people, that is where they end up.

Oh, we agree on something.  Now let's talk about why, as soon as I get done with the list of points on which we do agree.

If you have to nail the inner city violence problem on one thing, it has to be the export of our manufacturing jobs to China. Nearly every industrial city in America has been decimated by a mass exodus of manufacturing from here to overseas, or more accurately, to China. 

Ah, we agree on something else.  Paul doesn't read me often, because if he did (or if he bothered to read Leverage) he'd know that one of the positions I advocate strongly for is wage and environmental parity tariffs (p164, if you're too damned lazy to read the whole book.)

Oh no, Denninger actually believes we ought not to provide incentives to exploit people!

Wait a second...... 

How come this only applies to international trade and not government handouts Paul?

It is the ignorance of writers like Denninger (and the idiots who say they are smart ALEX JONES) that portray 2nd Amendment supports as a bunch of narrow minded racist fools. Yes, black-on-black crime does account for a great deal of gun violence in America. But legalizing drugs to sedate ourselves with isn’t the answer (though legalizing some drugs does have many other benefits in taking the wind out of the overall police state). People with no legitimate opportunity will seek illegitimate opportunity, whether it be selling crack or selling fake Beanie Babies. And because black people find themselves disproportionately in inner cities, unemployed and poorly educated, the import culture of American manufacturing has hit them especially hard, and this is reflected in violent crime rates, including firearm violent crime rates.

So let me see if I get this right.  We provide a system of "free, public education" and spend well beyond $10,000 per kid per year attempting to prosecute that.  By the way, if there are 20 kids in a class (that's low by the way) and a decent teacher costs $50,000 a year in salary can someone explain where the other $150,000 went?  This system fails while at the same time districts spending about half that much manage to succeed.  Paul claims that we didn't "provide opportunity."  I instead allege that what we did was provide $150,000 of graft and the entire true purpose of said system has exactly zero to do with opportunity -- or education.

Paul also appears to think that I may be some sort of person who doesn't support the 2nd Amendment.  He obviously hasn't read much of my writing.  If there's a man or woman who needs a gun, it's that person who is most likely to get shot with one -- so they can attempt to defend themselves.  That would be the black person who lives in a big city, by the way.  But don't tell Bloomberg or Rahm that because both have done everything in their power to prevent said people from exercising their right to lawful self-defense.

But heh, intentionally claiming that someone has a position they don't actually hold is nothing new.  Bloomberg does it all the time.  So does Paul.  Paul could read what I wrote right here and apologize, but he won't.  That would require actually looking at the facts -- and my seven year history of public exposition on these very topics.  When it comes to real solutions to our economic issues, including those that fall disparately on people of color, he could have read Leverage, or just read my column.  

But he didn't do that either.

Instead he piles on the shibboleths and outright lies, such as the claim that public education will "save" us, while ignoring the fact that before there was free public education in this country the literacy rate was higher than it is now.  Educational spending and cost has advanced much faster than inflation and yet we get poorer and poorer results.  Quite clearly and objectively it's not working.

But you know someone has lost their mind when they take your positions and try to claim them as their own, along with claiming that you don't hold them.  For example:

And let law abiding Americans in our inner cities, regardless of how much melanin they have in their skin, have open access to inexpensive firearms. 

That, incidentally, has been a centerpiece of my writing on the 2nd Amendment and the issues facing our cities.

The fact is that big government doesn't work.  It doesn't work because it's laced with corruption, grift and fraud.  We can't educate kids in government schools because education is not what we do any more; as I've written repeatedly where did the shop classes go?  How do you hire someone to weld for $30+/hour who doesn't know how?  I learned how in Junior High School in the 1970s and so did every other kid in shop class!  Am I good at it?  Not really; I can do it well enough to re-attach the suspension to a car that's falling apart but it's not pretty.  However, some kids in that class were both competent and skilled.  How do you know if you're one of them if you never get to try?

How is it that we have a medical system that sucks one dollar in five out of our economy?  Who do you think pays for that?  The poor person who allegedly gets "free" medical care gets nothing of the sort; that "free" medical care costs them a job because the tax rates (or purchasing power dilution) that it forces results in the cost of employing them ratcheting beyond their value to the enterprise.  Nobody gets a job when they cost more than they benefit the enterprise -- period.  We have a four trillion dollar Federal Budget of which almost 60% is comprised of welfare, "pensions" and "free" medical care.  That's more than two trillion dollars a year that is sucked out of the economy and handed to someone.

Now let me point something out.  Let's take the 50 million lowest-earning (on a per-capita basis) Americans of working age.  That's the bottom 20%, approximately (there are about 247 million working-age Americans as of last count.)

Let's stop all of the Welfare, Pension and "free" Medical spending.  

All of it.  Right now, today.

That would be $2.3 trillion dollars this fiscal year we would not spend at the Federal level.

What are we going to do with the $2.3 trillion dollars?

We could simply leave it in the economy, but if we did that some of those 50 million (and their children) would starve.  Not very many of them and not for very long, because economic opportunity would blossom if left alone, but some would undoubtedly starve.  Some of those who did would be little old Grandmothers, and that would look very bad on the evening news.

But -- you say -- those people need these programs.

Ok, how much are they getting?  Put a different way, what if we got rid of the programs but not the money?

Well let's do the math:

$2,300,000,000,000 / 50,000,000 = $46,000.

Each.

Economic "opportunity" eh?  Can you explain to me exactly what we get for our $46,000 per working-age adult in the bottom 20%, an amount that were we to have married couples among that bottom 20% of the adult earning population would have each of those couples (households) gifted $92,000 a year tax free?

How many inner city people have $46,000 to spend -- say much less $92,000 per household?  Zero!

Naw, we can't have that discussion when it comes to whether we should do moar public spending, can we?  Why not?  Maybe because if we did the inexorable conclusion would be that we should do zero public spending of this sort and shut down all of these programs!

Instead Paul and others continue to run the shibboleths about "public education" (which has never worked as a public enterprise as demonstrated by literacy rates before and after it came into effect), medical care being a "right" (while ignoring the monopolies that can only exist because of government force) and so-called "public safety nets" that in fact have available, on a combined basis, forty-six thousand dollars per person in the lowest 20% of earning capacity among adults of working age and yet we have people who are alleged to be "trapped" in inner cities when we are quite-capable on a fiscal basis of simply giving them that same $46,000.

It is the willful and intentional refusal to face facts as demonstrated by Paul and millions of others that has both created and continues to place the boot of government thugs on the necks of minorities.

Exactly who is the racist ******* here, eh and why is it that people like Paul won't pull out the paper and pencil or -- if that's asking too much of his government school education -- a calculator?

An open letter to the FCC, transmitted to openinternet@fcc.gov, the FCC's comment address for their "Open Internet" rulemaking process.

Dear Mr. Wheeler;

The recent debate on Open Internet has been entered by stakeholders on all sides.  Unfortunately, in my opinion, many of those presenting positions are failing to disclose their true intentions and bias, and in fact are attempting to use the government to force cost-shifting from their firms to others.

I am a former CEO of an Internet concern, MCSNet, which operated in the greater Chicago area during the early days of the public Internet (1993 - 1998.)  The company was sold to Winstar Communications in 1998.

The issues being discussed today are not new.  As the Internet transitioned from a government-funded (primarily National Science Foundation) interconnection for research and education into a privately-funded network accessible to the public, technological change brought many points of friction that served to place competing interests into conflict.

Internet providers, then and now, sell service to consumers and business interests.  These providers either purchase the service they resell or they build private networks and interconnect them at public "meet points" operated by various entities.  Many have a hybrid structure where both private network construction and the purchase of transport takes place.

All providers of Internet service, for cost reasons, oversell.  That is, a service provider who has 100 Mbps of aggregate capacity in and out of his or her network will sell far more than 100 1Mbps connections to the public.  This is very similar to how roads, water, telephone and electrical systems work.  There were approximately 7 million people in the Chicago metropolitan area in the 1990s when I was operating my ISP, but all 7 million of them could not possibly travel on the freeways in the area at one time.  My home has 200 amp electrical service but there is not sufficient electrical power available from my power company for myself and all of the other people in my neighborhood to each consume all 200 amps of electrical power at once.  I have a connection to the water main at the street and nominally there is 40psi of pressure at my tap, but if myself and all of my neighbors open all of our taps at once the pressure will drop to nearly zero, because the main cannot serve every house in my neighborhood using its full capacity to deliver water at one time. And while we all have cell phones in our pocket these days, and used to have a phone on the wall or a desk in our homes, if everyone tried to make a call at the same time the majority of them would not go through as there is insufficient capacity for everyone to make a phone call at once.

The same is true for the gas station on the corner.  The owner has purchased enough storage to hold a reasonable amount of gasoline, but if I and everyone in my neighborhood tries to buy gas all at once not only will we wait for hours in line to get to a pump he will run out and be unable to serve all of us.

Please take note a few points in the above examples, however.  My electrical use, water use and purchase of gasoline are usage sensitive.  That is, there is a natural process by which I am disabused from consuming an unlimited amount of water -- the size of my water bill.  Likewise, I do not waste electrical power, because I am charged by the kilowatt-hour for it.

Most Internet access at the consumer level, with the exception today of cellular phone delivery, is unmetered.  That is, I pay a flat price no matter how much I use.  This model, with minor changes (e.g. a cap on use) is what has evolved in the marketplace as the pricing model preferred by consumers.  MCSNet sold service we called "PackRAT" during the era of dial-up modems which was nominally unmetered but had a 200 hour per month cap on it, with a fee per-hour beyond that.  This amounted to about 6.6 hours/day of actual use.  Since you must eat, sleep and do things other than stare at a computer the cap was not intended to prevent you from using the Internet as you choose but rather to prevent you from abusing the service by locking up a limited (and expensive) resource on our end (in this case, the line and modem you were connected to) when you were not actively using the connection.

As the Internet has developed there have been people who have sought to try to shift their cost of innovation and content delivery to others.  These people often couch their "innovation" in lofty terms, as if they are somehow providing a public service.  What they are actually doing is attempting to run a business at a profit.  Today's pet example is Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) but they are hardly the first.  Youtube, back in its early days, created somewhat-similar if less-severe issues of the same character we face today.

Let's take the Internet "neutrality" position out of cyber-space and into the physical world.  We'll assume that I develop a really innovative movie theater that immerses the viewer in some new way in the film they are seeing.  We'll also assume that this theater only works financially if I can manage to get 10,000 people into it for each showing; the cost of building and operating it is large enough that unless I can amortize those costs over that many people I will lose money and eventually go bankrupt.

Whose responsibility should it be to construct the roads, infrastructure and parking lots so as to be able to fill that theater every two hours during the business day, efficiently directing traffic into and out of the complex so that I can attempt to make a profit?  Should that cost fall on the persons who watch the movies (whether directly via fees on their use of the infrastructure or indirectly via my ticket prices, with the city assessing me for the necessary improvements) or should I be able to force everyone in the Chicago area to pay those expenses, whether they want to watch movies in my theater or not, by convincing the City Government to increase property and gasoline taxes?

This is the essence of the problem we face today with the Internet.  Netflix has developed what many view as a "disruptive technology" through on-demand delivery of movies to the consumer.  In order to perform that function they must deliver a multi-megabit/second uninterrupted stream of data to your computer that meets certain specifications.  Any failure to deliver this stream, even momentarily, results in your display "stuttering" or stopping entirely.

But this requirement is dramatically more-stringent than it is for you to watch short video clips on Youtube or to view a web page.  There a short interruption in transmission or slowing of the transport results in you waiting a few tenths of a second before your page refreshes or is displayed in full.  The same delay while watching Netflix makes their service unusable.

There are other firms that would like to develop and deliver other services over the Internet with similarly-stringent requirements.  Most of these attempts will fail commercially, but some will not -- and eventually another "great new thing" will burst onto the scene.

The problem Netflix and similar services produce is that the technical requirement to deliver their service on an acceptable performance basis to the end customer is dramatically more-stringent than existing requirements for other Internet services.  Netflix purports to sell their service to the end customer for $8 per month.

But this premise, and thus the entire business model Netflix is promoting, is a chimera and unfortunately the common law of business balance (which states that you cannot get something for nothing) has caught up with them.

When Netflix was first starting the available margin between the engineering for a typical customer connection and what the customer actually used had some slop in it.  This is good engineering practice, and what most ISPs do.  That is, the ISP models all of their user behavior and says "We sell 20 Mbps service" while knowing full well that the customer bursts to 20Mbps of performance but on average uses a tiny fraction of that -- typically less than 10%.  The reason is simple: You browse to a web page -- even a very graphically-intensive web page -- and then read it; during the time you're reading the usage is zero.

Enter two new paradigms that break this model: Embedded audio/video advertising and streaming video content.

Let's assume that I am a site such as Facebook, and I want to sell video ads to companies.  Now when you browse to a Facebook page Facebook "pushes", without user request, video advertising content to the user's screen.  This dramatically increases the amount of data that the consumer is using and requires that the data be delivered on a highly-stringent technical basis, lest the video "stutter" or fail to play at all.  Note carefully that the consumer did not request or benefit from this "video advertising" yet they paid an ISP for the connection to deliver it.  Facebook sold the advertising and benefited from it but did not compensate the consumer or their ISP for the higher load on his connection despite imposing that load on him or her.

The question becomes this: If Facebook delivers a sufficiently-large number of video ads such that it begins to impact network performance and thus forces upgrades of the ISP's infrastructure who should get the bill for that upgrade?

If the bill falls only on those who use Facebook and thus view their ads consumers may (rightfully) reject Facebook since the additional cost imposed on them is not present so they can look at a picture of their friend's cat, but so companies can advertise to them!  It is thus strongly in the interest of Facebook to hide this cost from those users by trying to impose it on everyone across the Internet so it cannot be traced specifically to their commercial, for-profit activity.

The same applies to Netflix.  If a sufficient number of people subscribe to Netflix the stringent demands for delivery of Netflix bits to the consumer will force the ISP to upgrade their infrastructure.  Who should get the bill for that upgrade?  

If the bill falls only on Netflix customers then their bill will likely more than double; suddenly that "$8/month all you can eat" video streaming service might cost $25 or even $50.

What is before the FCC today is the fact that the cost increment to deliver what Netflix and Facebook are pushing to the consumer is real; the only point of debate is who pays for it and how.

Those arguing for "strict" Net Neutrality argue that the ISP should be barred as a matter of law from telling Netflix or Facebook that if they wish to have this level of performance available to them, since it is outside of the engineered and normal realm for all customers, that they should pay for that enhanced delivery -- and if they refuse, there is no guarantee their content will display as desired.

If the "Net Neutrality" argument wins the day it will force ISPs to bill all customers at a higher rate to provision that level of service to them whether they want it or not.

Why should a customer who has no interest in having high-bandwidth advertising shoved down his throat pay a higher bill because Facebook has decided to force him to watch those ads in order to use their service?

Why should a customer who doesn't want to watch Netflix pay a higher connection charge to an ISP because 20 of his neighbors do want to watch Netflix?

This is the question before the FCC, in short.

When you boil this down the question before the FCC is whether it is about to implement Communism when it comes to the Internet.  Does the FCC, in short, use the government's ability to forcibly compel the purchase of a service by a customer who doesn't want it and won't use it, leaving the consumer with only one option to evade a forced and undesired purchase: Buying no Internet service at all!

There is a legitimate issue with the Internet today when it comes to "last mile" services.  Unlike ISPs who typically can purchase long-haul services from many different providers and enjoy a competitive marketplace for those services consumers do not typically have free and open choice between multiple providers. When I ran MCSNet there were roughly one hundred dial-up and several dozen ISDN provides selling service in the greater Chicago area.  We all competed on price and service, and some of us were more successful than others.   For business leased-line services in the Chicago Loop we had three competitors available to us; MFS Datanet, TCG and Ameritech.  This competition kept prices low and service levels high; during a five year period I enjoyed a roughly 60% decrease in the cost of leased line services to customers where multiple options were available.  This resulted in "all-in" monthly recurring cost for T-1 service to business customers falling from approximately $2,000 a month to about $850 over the space of a few years.

Sadly, that same competition was not available to the average consumer; they had exactly one choice, Ameritech, for their "last-mile" phone service.  Thier phone bill over the same time period did not decrease.

But even in the "business service" area we had occasional problems; the only "neutral" meet point available in the area was the Chicago NAP, run by Ameritech.  To get to the NAP since it was on Ameritech's property you had to buy a circuit from them.  I was able to buy circuits of the same speed and character that spanned much larger distances from competitors going to other places at a dramatically lower price, yet I could not use those competitors to reach the NAP.  It was Ameritech's government-granted monopoly position along with its effective monopoly on the so-called "public meet point" that enabled this distortion to exist in the market.  Attempts to appeal to the State Regulatory apparatus in this regard (the ICC) were unsuccessful.

Today the promise of competition for high-speed Internet access is essentially non-existent for most consumers.  Most households can only obtain like kind and character high-speed Internet access from one, or perhaps two, companies.  In my local area we have a cable company and a phone company but they are not equivalent -- DSL service is not of "like kind and quality" to Cable Internet with the disparity being as much as 10:1 in terms of available speed.  Virtually all Americans today have an insufficient set of options available to promote effective competition, and as a result we have relatively high costs and relatively poor service compared against other developed nations.

We should not, however, and indeed must not conflate these two distinct issues.  The problem with last-mile access and discriminatory conduct is real, as are the issues with previously-granted monopoly access to rights-of-way that exist across our nation.  Not only do those effective monopolies exist but many states and localities have passed ordinances and laws prohibiting municipally-funded or other third-party alternatives from being established, with carrier lobbying groups typically spending large amounts of money to influence that process.  That activity facially appears to be a rank violation of The Sherman and Clayton Acts and should be met with investigation and, where appropriate, prosecution.

Resolving the last-mile monopoly issue is separate and distinct from creating a government mandate that effectively allows established businesses to shift their cost onto others who do not wish to consume their service.

At the end of the day what those arguing for "Net Neutrality" in the context of today's submissions are demanding is the ability to use government force to compel the subsidization of a private, for-profit business service.

The FCC not only has the right, it has the obligation under the Constitution's demand for Equal Protection as found in the 14th Amendment to reject such entreaties and expose them as a sham argument and blatantly improper attempt to force consumer subsidization of their businesses interests.

PS: On 5/21 I got back a letter from Chairman Wheeler (presumably a form letter) thanking me for my submission -- and including what appears to be a unique response number.  I presume this means it was "accepted" into the public record.  Good.

As we head toward the weekend here's something to contemplate.

You've recently seen my essay on all of us having an hourglass full of sand with the top mostly-painted over, so we can't see how much sand is in there until it is about to run out.  That is, it is almost-always true that one doesn't learn about their impending death until, well, it's impending.  When was the last time you heard a doctor tell someone "you have 20 years left."  No, they always tell you "you have six months", don't they?

Time is a funny thing.  It's the one commodity you can't buy more of no matter how rich you are.  Money does enable the compression of everyday tasks at varying rates, but that doesn't actually get you more time -- it just removes your expenditure of it on certain everyday tasks, should you so choose.  For instance you can fly commercial and spend six hours door-to-door to go from A -> B, or for a (lot) more money you can hop in your LearJet and make the same trip, again door-to-door, in four hours or less.  Much of that two hour difference is purely wasted with government-mandated bull**** such as the TSA.

Huge percentages of the population, however, fail at various tasks or barely eek by not because they're stupid, not because they're not capable, but because they refuse to master and accept responsibility for time management.

Indeed I would argue that a plurality if not the majority of failures at various tasks, whether it be work or school related, are in fact failures of time management.

That night out drinking, or the 20 minutes (or hour!) you spend on Facebook or Youtube can have a profound impact on success, and it frequently is a ripple effect too.  You stay out late on a Friday and sleep all day Saturday as a result instead of studying for a final.  Then on Sunday you cram in a panic, realizing that at 7:00 AM Monday you need to have your ass in the chair ready to go.  The result is that you get 4 hours of sleep before the test and score a screaming "F" because you were both half-asleep and unprepared.

You didn't fail because you were stupid, you failed because you decided to blow off steam on Friday night and get puke-drunk, then needed all day Saturday in bed to be able to move.  Had you instead spent Friday studying, slept a normal schedule that evening, studied for a few hours Saturday and Sunday and went to bed at 8:00 Sunday evening you would have gotten a "B" or "C" on the final instead of an "F" -- and passed.

Note that absolutely nothing changed in terms of your absorption of the original material, or your time in class.  All that changed was your decision to allocate time first to the task that had to be done and rather than wait until the last minute, dedicating the time toward studying a couple of days in advance so you had a cushion if something went wrong.  The difference in outcome is enormous.

It gets worse if you rely on something other than your brainpower (e.g. a computer, etc.)  If you wait until the last minute to begin what happens if your computer crashes while you're writing that term paper?  You don't turn it in -- and get an "F."  

You are owed exactly zero forbearance from the professor in that case, since while the computer failure was not foreseeable your decision to wait was, and had you not jacked off for the previous two weeks you could have used someone else's computer or had yours repaired in plenty of time to complete the assignment.

Over the space of your life managing time efficiently and not can literally be and frequently is the difference between success and failure.  A "death spiral" of missed deadlines that lead you to being evicted or having your power and water turned off and hundreds of dollars (which you don't have!) for reconnect fees and penalties imposed can quite-easily come from a simple night out on the town or a few hours blown playing "Farmville"!

Kids and young adults, I know you won't listen to your parents on this and neither will the adults, young or otherwise, who are guilty of the same thing -- but if you're reading this piece you know I'm right. You've probably made this mistake and hopefully it didn't have catastrophic consequences.  You probably blew it off too, especially if you managed to talk your way out of the box you created or just "took the F" but it didn't kill your scholarship or otherwise imperil your lifestyle in some other serious way.

Trust me -- this is something you cannot afford to allow in your life, especially in a world where competition for resources is stiff and the forward economic picture cloudy at best.

Take away the astroturf games like the so-called grassroots organization(s) that sprung up (by magic!) out of Newtown and you wind up with a truly ugly truth when it comes to gun violence in this country: Most of it is gang-related, most of the gangs are in our inner cities, and our President, along with the rest of the so-called "mainstream media", simply refuses to address any of it.

Take a recent shooting in Chicago.  The media pictures of both shooter and victim are radically inaccurate measured against their own social media postings.

The truth about that particular shooting?  The gun, originally claimed to be stolen, wasn't.  It instead passed through a number of hands, at least one of them on probation and a second person who allegedly took the weapon to the shooter knowing it was going to be used to commit violence, a 30ish old aunt who allegedly went for the show (seriously!) someone who unjammed the gun after it malfunctioned and gave it back to the girl who had just tried to murder the victim but the weapon failed to fire.

Nor is that all.  We have another case where a "cute little charter-school graduate" (as presented by the family and the media) appears to have a bunch of social-media postings of her bearing weapons of all sorts, including a rather-large revolver that looks right out of a Clint Eastwood movie and a pump-action shotgun.  Oh, and this angel apparently capped at least two people before being killed herself.  She was 17.

Are we ever going to address this instead of playing Astroturf games with kids who are drugged up on various psychotropic meds and then go insane -- a rare but obviously far-too-common event? 

Probably not.

Why not?

Because our Black President won't talk about it.  Our liberal media won't talk about it.  And we won't talk about it either, nor will we bring to the forefront the fact that we have essentially invented this problem out of whole cloth by generating a welfare and police state that empowers gangs by giving them the fuel (money) on which they rely.

And how did we do that?  We declared various self-destructive behaviors among and between consenting adults unlawful, generating an entire second economic system under the carpet that was then used to justify a "war" that we ourselves created and then declared. 

The result has not only been a monstrously-high prison population it has also been an explosion of violence, without which we would be far down the list when it comes to the abuse of guns and property crimes.

Instead of admitting our stupidity in this regard just as is the case with the medical industry and its monopolist scams in the general case we have instead grown an entire industry around arresting, prosecuting and imprisoning huge numbers of people, most of them minorities. 

What's worse is that we are also watching them murder each other with wild abandon, while we sit in our chairs and refuse to talk about the statistical facts.

Indeed, if you take out black-on-black homicide in the major cities from our so-called "blood-red streets" that Bloomberg and others claim as our emblem of "endemic gun violence" you find that a number shockingly approaching three quarters (that is, well more than half) of all gun murders disappear.  

There is a basic principle when it comes to solving problems in the general sense, and it applies here as with most issues: 80% of any particular problem is easy to solve, and reasonably cheap.  The last 20% is both expensive and hard.

But we won't talk about the 80% or how it gets generated.  We don't want to talk about the fact that we create these gangs by giving them an underground economy fueled by what appears to be an innate desire of man to addle his own mind, and which we can actually track back to the animal kingdom generally!  

In the early part of the 20th Century we allowed power-brokers who were trying to protect their own industries to play on now-documented racism and false claims when it came to various drugs, with the now-iconic Reefer Madness being one of the poster children for that era.  We banned alcohol sales and created, almost overnight, an entire criminal class that shot up our cities and reaped huge amounts of profit from the desire of people to simply have a drink. The Depression effectively forced the end of Prohibition, but only for booze.

Today we have the worst of both worlds.  On the corner about two miles from my home is a store that has more forms of a popular drug in it than would be necessary to kill platoons of men, yet I can buy and consume as much of it as I desire.  In the gas station and grocery store I can buy still other forms of the same drug, again, limited only by my wallet.

At the same time in the nearest big city (and probably in my "nice" small town) there is a thriving underground economy.  Police officers with whom I'm acquainted tell me of the crack houses they bust with crude labs that threaten to blow up entire buildings -- not through terrorist action but rather because the "chemists" inside don't know what they're doing or don't care because they're too stoned to be concerned with reasonable safety precautions.  The mind-altering substances they produce are addled with God-knows-what, the ingredient list likely driven by whatever is cheapest to get as a diluting agent so as to "stretch" what they're producing for sale.  Some percentage of those drugs, along with mass-produced quantities in Mexico and elsewhere, stream into our major cities where the trade in them generates huge profits and massive amounts of violence, all aimed at "protecting" the highly-profitable trade in same.

Have we ever asked if the people who get hooked on meth and similar monstrously-destructive drugs would use them absent this pipeline of illegal supply and coercive sales capacity?  If those people could walk into any pharmacy and simply buy whatever you wanted, having only to prove they're of adult age, being supplied not only their drug of choice but also a pamphlet describing exactly what was in the package were buying and its expected long and short-term effects, would they? Would they rob and mug people if the price of maintaining their addiction was one tenth of what it costs today via illegal routes of supply?

Or would they choose to try something else -- perhaps a bottle of liquor or a pack of 20 Class A joints?

I don't know and neither does anyone else, but what we do know is that plenty of people were addicted to opiates and other drugs before the "War on Drugs" was launched, and a very significant percentage of them were able to hold down jobs and lead reasonably-productive lives.  Oh sure, they eventually got sick and some died, but what we didn't have was 17 year old kids shooting each other over insults, real or imagined, trumped up by what amounts to a trade war within our own borders.

I understand why Obama, Rahm and Bloomberg don't want to entertain this debate.  If they were to do so with someone like me they'd be in a very tough spot, because I'd put facts and figures in front of them and the audience might conclude that we've created not only a prison industry and siphons off tens of billions of dollars, not only have we destroyed the earnings power of millions, most of them minorities with these same policies, but in addition we have a more than 50-year history that says we cannot win this war nor do we give a good damn about those who die as a consequence of our puerile and outrageous policy pronouncements in this area, most-especially the young people of color who are overwhelmingly both victim and perpetrator.

Indeed, some people might conclude that our President and the rest of the drug-warriors are in fact racists of the highest order in that they're complicit in the murder of far more black people in a single year than the KKK ever hung from trees through its entire sordid history.

This much I'm absolutely certain of -- our black community organizer-cum-President surely doesn't want to face his rank hypocrisy on this issue.

Nor, for that matter, do the rest of the so-called Progressives.