Nicholas Johnson
FameRank: 4

"Nicholas Johnson" is best known for his controversial term as a dissenting Federal Communications Commission commissioner, 1966-1973, and his book, How to Talk Back to Your Television Set. He currently teaches at the University of Iowa College of Law, with an emphasis on communications and Internet law, and since 2006 has posted over 1000 blog essays.

In addition to How to Talk Back to Your Television Set (Little-Brown; Bantam, 1970) and Test Pattern for Living (Bantam, 1972), he is the author of Your Second Priority: A Former FCC Commissioner Speaks Out (2008), Are We There Yet: Reflections on Politics in America (2008), What Do You Mean and How Do You Know? An Antidote for the Language That Does Our Thinking for Us (2009), Virtualosity: Eight Students in Search of Cyberlaw (2009), "Predicting Our Future Cyberlife" (2012), "From D.C. to Iowa: 2012 (2012), and new editions of "How to Talk Back to Your Television Set" (2013) and "Test Pattern for Living" (2013).

More Nicholas Johnson on Wikipedia.

A viewer who skips the advertising is the moral equivalent of a shoplifter.

Taxing poor families runs counter to decades of effort to help people lift themselves out of poverty through work.

This is a growing environmental problem.

Of the 13,000 objects, over 40 percent came from breakups of both spacecraft and rocket bodies.

In too many states, the poor and near-poor who are working to join the middle class are instead being taxed right back into poverty. For a family in poverty, a few hundred dollars is a lot of money.

Alabama now has become the only state with an income tax threshold below one-half of the poverty line. Every other state that taxed the incomes of the poor in the early 1990s has reduced or eliminated this tax burden. Alabama stands alone in its failure to act.

What happened before, until about 15 years ago, was that you used it and forgot about it, like anything else in society [at that time]. We decided that was not really the wisest long term strategy.

Eliminating state income taxes on working families with poverty-level incomes gives a boost in take-home pay that helps offset higher child care and transportation costs that families incur as they strive to become economically self-sufficient. In other words, relieving state income taxes on poor families can make a meaningful contribution toward making work pay.

It used to be that people needed products to survive. Now products need people to survive.