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Archive for November, 2017
November 27th, 2017 at 2:20 pm
This Week’s “Your Turn” Radio Show Lineup
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Join CFIF Corporate Counsel and Senior Vice President Renee Giachino today from 4:00 p.m. CDT to 6:00 p.m. CDT (that’s 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. EDT) on Northwest Florida’s 1330 AM WEBY, as she hosts her radio show, “Your Turn: Meeting Nonsense with Commonsense.” Today’s guest lineup includes:

4:00 CDT/5:00 pm EDT: Former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, Spokesman for Right on Crime: Criminal Justice Reform;

4:15 CDT/5:15 pm EDT: Jessica Melugin, Adjunct Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute: Net Neutrality and the FCC;

4:30 CDT/5:30 pm EDT: Quin Hillyer, Contributing Editor of National Review Magazine, a Senior Editor for The American Spectator magazine and Author: “Mad Jones, Heretic”;

4:45 CDT/5:45 pm EDT: Andrew Moylan, Executive Vice President of National Taxpayers Union Foundation: Tax Reform;

5:00 CDT/6:00 pm EDT: Phil Kerpen, President of American Commitment: Senator Bob Melendez Corruption Trial Update;

5:15 CDT/6:15 pm EDT: Travis Korson, Director of Communications at the Frontiers of Freedom: EPA Reforms; and

5:30 CDT/6:30 pm EDT: Timothy Lee, CFIF’s Senior Vice President of Legal and Public Affairs: Donor Privacy.

Listen live on the Internet here. Call in to share your comments or ask questions of today’s guests at (850) 623-1330.

November 16th, 2017 at 11:21 am
FCC Should Preempt Individual State Attempts to Regulate the Internet
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Among the many positive changes within the federal government since the end of the Obama Administration and the arrival of the Trump Administration, perhaps none surpass those brought by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) under new Chairman Ajit Pai.

And the most welcome and beneficial change undertaken by the new FCC is its action to rescind Obama FCC decisions to begin regulating the internet as a “public utility” under statutes passed in the 1930s for old-fashioned, copper-wire telephone service.  The Obama FCC’s action instantly began to stifle new broadband investment, and was subject to legal reversal.  The internet thrived for two decades under both the Clinton and Bush administrations precisely due to the federal government’s “light touch” regulatory policy, and there was simply no rational justification for reversing twenty years of success in the name of even more federal government regulation and crony capitalism.

As the new FCC approaches completion on restoring regulatory sanity to internet service, it’s important that it include a preemption against future state efforts to regulate the internet in the same way that the Obama FCC hoped to make permanent.  We at CFIF take a backseat to no one in terms of valuing America’s federalist system, and the ability of individual states to serve as “laboratories of democracy.”  But there’s an important limit, one that is specifically included in the text of the Constitution.  Namely, matters of interstate commerce.  Our Founding Fathers recognized, based upon  economic warfare that they’d witnessed under the Articles of Confederation, that individual states cannot act in ways that disrupt truly interstate commerce in ways that contravene federal policy.  Accordingly, the Constitution specifically and rightfully empowers the federal government to protect interstate commerce against destructive state interference.

And there are few, if any, sectors of our economy more “interstate” than the internet.  Indeed, the internet is interstate by its very nature.  Doug Brake of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation summarized the logic well in a commentary this month:

National and regional networks should be subject to uniform rules to keep compliance costs low and reduce complexity.  To the extent the upcoming changes to net neutrality regulation see any changes in business practices, which would be more minor than many expect, a uniform policy that allows for broad scale would be an important benefit…   Network applications now depend on economies of scale independent of the individual state in which they are consumed.  Technological advances are simply erasing the importance of state and local boundaries.  It is in the national interest to give these technologies room to grow unimpeded by artificial borders.

As such, beyond simply declaring broadband an information service, the FCC should make clear that broadband policy is made at the national, not state, level.  Former Chairman Kennard put it well in a 1999 speech titled ‘The Unregulation of the Internet:  Laying a Competitive Course for the Future.’   There he laid out why it was ‘in the national interest that we have a national broadband policy … a de-regulatory approach, an approach that will let this nascent industry flourish.'”

That’s exactly right, and it’s no less true today than it was in 1999.  The internet needed room to grow then, and it needs room and regulatory predictability to continue growing as it plays a progressively important role in  our lives and globally competitive economy.

We cannot allow a spaghetti bowl of individual state regulations to inhibit future internet expansion and innovation, and the FCC should act to preempt that destructive possibility.

November 13th, 2017 at 4:04 pm
This Week’s “Your Turn” Radio Show LineUp
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Join CFIF Corporate Counsel and Senior Vice President Renee Giachino today from 4:00 p.m. CDT to 6:00 p.m. CDT (that’s 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. EDT) on Northwest Florida’s 1330 AM WEBY, as she hosts her radio show, “Your Turn: Meeting Nonsense with Commonsense.” Today’s guest lineup includes:

4:00 CDT/5:00 pm EDT: John Berlau, Senior Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute: Mortgage Bailouts;

4:15 CDT/5:15 pm EDT: Edward Whalen, President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center: The Constitution, The Courts and The Culture;

4:30 CDT/5:30 pm EDT: Emily Ekins, Research Fellow and Direct of Polling at the Cato Institute: Cato’s 2017 Free Speech & Tolerance Survey;

4:45 CDT/5:45 pm EDT: Karlyn Bowman, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute: The American Family in the Age of Trump;

5:00 CDT/6:00 pm EDT: Quin Hillyer, Contributing Editor of National Review Magazine, a Senior Editor for The American Spectator magazine and Political Analyst: Fallout from Roy Moore Controversy;

5:15 CDT/6:15 pm EDT: Robert B. Bluey, Senior Vice President Communications and Editor in Chief, The Daily Signal at The Heritage Foundation: Government Regulation and Social Media; and

5:30 CDT/6:30 pm EDT: William J. Conti, Partner at Baker & Hostetler: Recent Elections and Implications for 2018 and 2020.

Listen live on the Internet here. Call in to share your comments or ask questions of today’s guests at (850) 623-1330.
November 8th, 2017 at 4:44 pm
The Highest State Income Tax In The Nation
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Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.