The Daily Kos is providing you with a web page to Urge President Obama: Honor your pledge to preserve an open internet.  Below is the content of the message I sent.  The first two paragraphs are boilerplate suggested by The Daily Kos.  The rest the message are my own thoughts.

It was a grassroots, people-powered campaign that first elected you President—thanks in large part to online organizing. This happened because of the incredible equality of the Internet, where no website gets favored with a “fast lane” based on ability to pay.

But your F.C.C.—with its Chairman, Tom Wheeler—threatens to undermine all of that, and we are pleading you to take decisive action. Please demand real net neutrality standards.

Don’t let the FCC try to hide behind tricky definition of words.  Analyze the consequences of their actions on constraining the voices of ordinary citizens by giving wealthy corporations and citizens greater access to the internet than everyone else.

There is no practical difference between paying for higher speed access and having your access slowed down unless you pay more money.

Once you establish that no one should be able to get access to the the latest internet technology only by paying a higher rate for that access, then you can test whether any FCC action passes this test regardless of the words used to mask its effect.

You know you already pay extra for higher speed uploading to and downloading from the internet.  The FCC is also considering having you pay more for higher speed travel once you get your content onto the internet.  Enough is enough already.

I wonder if the President is paying more attention to campaigning for a position with some Wall Street outfit like Goldman Sachs than he is to running the government for the benefit of all of us.  You can’t always tell what motivates a person, but you can judge the impact of his actions.

New Economic Perspectives has the article Randy Wray: What are Taxes For? The MMT Approach.

But in the case of a government that issues its own sovereign currency without a promise to convert at a fixed value to gold or foreign currency (that is, the government “floats” its currency), we need to think about the role of taxes in an entirely different way. Taxes are not needed to “pay for” government spending. Further, the logic is reversed: government must spend (or lend) the currency into the economy before taxpayers can pay taxes in the form of the currency. Spend first, tax later is the logical sequence.

Some who hear this for the first time jump to the question: “Well, why not just eliminate taxes altogether?” There are several reasons. First—as we said last time–it is the tax that “drives” the currency. If we eliminated the tax, people probably would not immediately abandon use of the currency, but the main driver for its use would be gone.

Further, the second reason to have taxes is to reduce aggregate demand.

I have read about this aspect of MMT before, but this is the first time I have read these details and this emphasis.  It helps to hear it explained this way.  It also helps to put up front what are not the implications of MMT that one might  assume having heard only the first part.

The part of needing to have taxes to reduce aggregate demand implies that MMT proponents do believe in keeping inflation under control by having enough taxes to reduce aggregate demand if that demand would become inflationary.  So it is unfair to claim that MMT proposes to print all the money you want so much so that it would cause inflation.  MMT wants you to have the correct understanding of the role of currency for a government that issues its own sovereign currency.  It wants to free you of the idea that taxes need to be levied in order to fund federal government expenditures.