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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

If you live in a state that taxes away 100% of your income, what would you do?

(I'm even going to steelman your argument and assume you meant profit and not revenue.)

NY wants to have ISP charge the poor $15, so all pretax revenue over that $15 amount paid by the poor will be taxed at 99% (or 100%), up to NY.

Somehow the total paid by the poor can be prorated to total ISP revenue and taxed based upon that + admin costs. That tax amount will be sent back to the poor as a refund.

Tax is at the revenue level because as we have seen, there are so many deduction they could report 0 income.

It would be great if they stopped doing business in that state. The government could then assert ownership over all their infrastructure, divide it up among smaller local governments, who could then provide competitively-priced municipal broadband service.

That would be amazing.

Wouldn't that lead every other business to stop investing in additional infrastructure in that state ever again?

The infrastructure telecoms were paid billions to develop in the 90s, but pocketed the cash instead?

It would certainly be terrible beyond belief if we all had to rely on municipal internet like Chattanooga.

> The government could then assert ownership over all their infrastructure

That's called "taking", and is unconstitutional unless there is just compensation. And "they're not using it, so the value is 0" is not just compensation.

looks like legitimate salvage to me...

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