Wealth & Money Quote by Jerry Weller

In the late-90s/early-2000s glow of the "information superhighway" metaphor, Jerry Weller is doing two things at once: translating a technical policy fight into a road trip, and smuggling an ideological claim into a feel-good image. "Toll booths" is the masterstroke. It makes taxation sound like petty, annoying rent-seeking that slows everyone down, not like the price of building and maintaining the road in the first place. The line is engineered to trigger a consumer's irritation rather than a citizen's calculus.

The specific intent is legislative and tactical: justify using the tax code to shape internet access and commerce, typically by cutting or preempting certain taxes on online services, equipment, or transactions. Framed this way, a tax break becomes a public service, a removal of friction. No one rallies for "narrow tax incentives for telecom and e-commerce", but plenty of people will nod at the idea of clearing obstacles from a futuristic highway.

The subtext is pro-growth, deregulatory optimism with a quiet corporate friendliness. If the internet is a highway, then private providers become the builders and gatekeepers by default, while government is cast as the guy with the coin bucket. It's a neat reversal: policy is presented as liberation, even though the mechanism is still governmental power, just deployed through tax preferences rather than spending.

Context matters because "information superhighway" is a period tell: an era when broadband was expanding, e-commerce was consolidating, and lawmakers were scrambling to look technologically literate. Weller's phrasing isn't trying to be poetic; it's trying to be inevitable.