To think the government is incapable of raising taxes is just being naive. There is a serious funding problem on the horizon (when SS goes upside down and pension funds start failing) so they are going to try to tax everything in sight. Regulation is another issue. Will they let "bandwidth" be a free market or will they think they need to protect the small players with access requirements as they have done with POTS?
Raising taxes is different than creating new taxes.
The only members of Congress or Senators who can vote for a new tax are those who won't be facing a serious challenger in the next election. With campaign finance reforms slowly being enacted, the advantage of the incumbent is decreasing. There also has been a cultural shift to disfavor the bums that are already in there. So fewer and fewer politicians are in a position from which they can advocate any new taxes no matter how great the need.
And it gets worse as you move down to the state and local levels. But at least on the local level an advocacy group can campaign for public favor of new taxes when there is an obvious enough of a need, and they can articulate a better campaign than the anti-tax advocates.
Now, can we really expect Federal action that will allow the taxation of "bandwidth", and then action to create new taxes? I think anyone who thinks that this can be accomplished without some major cultural paradigm shifts is being naive.
Could there be a major cultural paradigm shift that will result in people being willing to allow additional taxes? Possibly. But I don't believe it will happen until *after* major systematic failures occur. Perhaps not until the baby boomers are dead, and Gen-X realizes that if they don't change, they'll meet the same fate as their parents did, suffering through retirement in poverty.
But I'm widening the scope too much.
I believe that if anyone wants to bet against me, I can become a rich man betting that there will *not* be any taxes on "bandwidth" in the next decade regardless of any needs for those taxes.
Just to add one more point; a *lot* of the regulations are to protect the consumer, not the small business players. Many more are to require, and pay for, items which our society has deemed necessary and important to the functioning of civilization (such as universal 9-1-1 access; being able to locate someone's cell phone signal, phone service for even the poorest people, etc.). It's not always about business, nor is it always about government keeping itself going, sometimes it really is about people.
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