I believe you are correct. You may find the work "Progress and Poverty" by Henry George of interest and what has come to be known as the Land Value Tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
Prop 13 is killing California, repealing it and replacing it with a Land Value Tax, in my opinion, would fix it.
United States has become a government of corporations, by corporations and they have modeled the country after their image. I think we might have to turn to other organizations for solutions. I'm from Utah, the LDS Church (Mormons) for example have a whole welfare program (that works) for anyone who needs help (no need to be a member or religious). Just walk into any local church, ask to see the bishop and tell him you need help. The bishop can hand you money (no joke), provide housing options, food, jobs, medical care, etc. No strings attached.
The way I understand it is that my internet traffic is like a little dog that wants to get from my yard to Netflix's yard to play. To do that, the poor pup has to cross 6 other yards to get there. Some of the yards are nice and friendly with pretty flowers to sniff along the way.
Other yards are owned by mean people that don't want to let the dog through unless it's owner (your ISP) pays them more money. If the owner doesn't pay more money, the mean yard owners will make the pup sit there and wait for a long time until they say it's okay to go (LAG).
And sometimes, the mean owner have so many dogs waiting in his yard, he decides to throw them into the street, where they are never seen nor heard from again (packet loss).
Most people could definitely change ISPs and avoid the troublesome vendors their ISP is currently peered with but I live in a town (low population) and unfortunately Comcast is about as good as it gets.
One way to get around it is to route my traffic through a proxy to bypass the troublesome vendors but that would degrade my bitrate which is frustrating since what I really want is to just get what I am paying for 50/mb and wish the internet providers would just work it out.
This peering issue has affected me a lot. I watch a lot of gaming streams online and during peek hours Twitch.tv has becomes unusable. During a major tournament this is very unfortunate. Another example of this peering dispute affecting me is with the game League of Legends.
Almost everyone who is on Comcast (myself included) during peek times experiences lag that makes the game unplayable. Your character "skates" along the map and usually when it buffers and catches up to you you'll find yourself dead. My friends and I got together to play over the weekend and ended up having to stop due to the lag.
Heres a thread where the guys at Riot are trying to identify the issue. It wasn't until 7/22 that they identified the problem everyone has been having was due to a peering dispute between Verizon and other vendors. To fix the problem they are having to make changes with their provider to route traffic to bypass problematic junctions.
Its been very eye opening to me. I have a 50mb connection and I always thought that as long as I had a faster connection I wouldn't have lag issues. It was disappointing to learn that regardless of your connection you can still be throttled by ISPs and their vendors.
In all seriousness, how can you support this? Is it assumed that he lives with somebody who pays for his living expenses? If I didn't have so many bills to pay I feel like I would be more of a shut-in.