From Erika Johnson at Hot Air, "Obama’s plan to raise taxes for Internet in schools: A “no-brainer”?":
It’s all too easy to commandeer what looks like the moral high ground with claims of, “it’s just a few dollars, and it’s for a good cause!” — but where does that mightily convenient but intellectually bankrupt reasoning end? Republicans too often allow themselves to be branded as the party of “no,” because Democrats do a pretty good job of making it sound like Republicans just must not care about the children when they oppose this sort of thing, or the hungry when they propose cuts to the food stamp program, or the poor when they oppose tax hikes on the wealthy, blah blah blah.
The problem, however, is not only that those ‘mere’ $5 or so have real opportunity costs out in the real world and real consequences for families, but that these type of initiatives on such a massive scale have too huge a potential for waste, fraud, abuse, and general mega-inefficiency and convolution. This is a perfect example of something that could and should be happening on a much smaller scale: Why not allow the states, even local governments, to determine whether they want to raise taxes to set up high-speed Internet access in their school districts, and spur competition and innovation with more focused programs instead of imposing a top-down bureaucratic nightmare that reliably comes with heavy unintended consequences and is slow to readjust in the event or error?
IMAGE CREDIT: The New York Post, "Obama wants to tack on $5-a-year phone tax to fund high-speed Internet in schools - critics blast 'end run' of Congress and 'endless expansion of program at the expense of rate payers'."
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