IIRC, the standard deduction this year was $6900 for single payers. Pretty easy to top that via mortgage interest.

Fellow MD resident?

Looks like the rest of your comment was truncated. Let me help:

"Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. "

"Then candidate Bush referred to this as what? Something d-o-o economics. Anyone? Anyone?"

It was actually wishful thinking rather than faith. I've seen the same things you describe. I've also seen where things like this are swept under the rug forever. Then, the root cause analysis comes back and people flip shit because nothing was done about it in the past. Well, nothing other than ignore the recomendations of us morlocks...

Most of the developed world gets more for less.

The US bandwidth situation is largely due to longer local loops on average. I personally believe this is a historical issue due to CO centralization in the 1970's-1980's. But it may be other issues.

And the next day, he finds a pink slip waiting for him.

Sure, it's a wikipedia link, but it's trivial to verify.

The underlying offense is the same. The law is written to play legalistic games.

... and since you said teleportation, your future prediction would be completely ruined by the sudden realization that you can safely establish stable wormholes with stuff that's already in most homes.

I don't trust any forward looking statement. Business people throw those around all the time, which always equates to "I hope we stay in business". They never make the forward looking statement of "In the next 6 to 9 months, I hope we go bankrupt, and the shareholders murder us."

I'm going to make our programmers code everything in machine language so they can learn to be gods.

Actually, forget machine language, they have to assemble the computer from discrete logic gates!

I'd say it is more like: Coase theorem.

What you "pay for" is "internet access UP TO X speed".

And the key is that there is oversubscription at the end user cable modem. If everyone was doing time multiplexed operations (like web browsing), each burst of your transmission would likely be near full speed. But when you and all your neighbors are watching Netflix at night at the same time, the network becomes oversubscribed and speeds drop.