Alas, in the USA, we vote for a candidate, NOT A PARTY!
And the best part about it is that once we're finished voting for those individual candidates, they go off to the legislature and join up with their parties and vote in lockstep anyway. Strict party discipline has kind of made the whole "I'm a trustworthy and wise leader with good ideas" schtick kind of irrelevant.
Why should they? Why should anyone? Telecommunications hardware is not free and does not maintain itself. Whichever companies/individuals use it more should be paying more.
That's fine. Charge more for more bandwidth. But don't charge different amounts for different types of content. I don't think "net neutrality" means "unlimited bits for everybody for $0" in the mind of any sensible preson.
Lobbying involves talking and bribery involves illegal money.
Half of the lobbying transaction is talking. The other half is listening because the person doing the talking is a good source of campaign money.
Also, there are more definitions of bribery than the legal definition used to describe the crime.
Unlike most other taxes, the energy tax does not reduce differences in disposable income, but it merely leaves them constant (when electricity use is equal).
The problem is that the things the rich give up to pay an additional flat tax are different from the things the poor give up. A flat tax of $1000 may cause a rich person to buy $1000 less in nice clothes and electronic toys, an average family to cancel a vacation, and a poor family to drop their health insurance. So the tax is flat in a dollar sense, but a much heavier burden on the poor in a standard of living sense.
They seem to have no real evidence for casaution, and so they just spew out correlations and hope most people wont notice.
A mechanism for causation + correlation is evidence of causation.
Interesting idea though could create situations where a potential licensee may come along and be faced with potentially bolstering a patent that could be free for them to use in a few months if they don't.
That's an issue that exists in all time-limited systems, though. It's currently hard to license a patent that will expire in a few months. The trick is setting the expiration time long enough that there's an incentive for the licensee to license rather than running down the clock but short enough that there's some urgency to get the damn thing to market.
Several related companies could easily license each other's patents in exchange for licensing eachother's patents just to keep them current.
This is a more interesting problem, but the first regulatory question should be, "So, Mr. Licensee, what product are you using that patent you licensed in?" If somebody tries to sue you over a patent they've been sitting on for 15 years, the first thing you ask is if the patent has been exercised enough to still be valid, and you check to see if the licensees have actually brought it to market in a meaningful way. If not, that's a strong argument that the patent should have been invalidated. It doesn't eliminate the need for courts to deal with the issue, but it does create more of a burden on the patent holder to create a track record of getting the ideas to market. If companies cross-license patents and bring real products to market in order to keep their patents active, I'd argue that it's a win as long as the functionality is actually there and not a sham.
System going down in 5 minutes.