White House Makes Last-ditch Push for Internet Subsidy Program (reuters.com) 82
The White House plans to renew a push in April to convince Congress to extend an internet subsidy program used by 23 million American households just weeks before it runs out of money, officials said. From a report: In October, the White House asked for $6 billion to extend the program through December 2024, but Congress has not funded it, potentially putting millions of households at risk of losing their internet service. Federal Communications Commission Chair Jessica Rosenworcel told lawmakers in a letter that April is the last month participants will get the full subsidy, with partial subsidies in May.
Congress previously allocated $17 billion to help lower-income families and people impacted by COVID-19 gain broadband access through a $30 per month voucher to use toward internet service. "We have come too far to allow this successful effort to promote internet access for all to end," Rosenworcel said on Tuesday. "Despite the breadth of this support and the urgent need to continue this program to ensure millions of households nationwide do not lose essential internet access, no additional funding has yet been appropriated."
Congress previously allocated $17 billion to help lower-income families and people impacted by COVID-19 gain broadband access through a $30 per month voucher to use toward internet service. "We have come too far to allow this successful effort to promote internet access for all to end," Rosenworcel said on Tuesday. "Despite the breadth of this support and the urgent need to continue this program to ensure millions of households nationwide do not lose essential internet access, no additional funding has yet been appropriated."
Another Inflation Reduction Act? (Score:2, Insightful)
We can just print the money.
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We can just print the money.
Yeah, like we do for quantitative easing, why not?
This is more of a subsidy for the telcos than the users
You should not have been modded down.
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There was an element of sarcasm. It's clearly election year vote buying, at the expense of creating more off-election-year crushing inflation.
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What do you imbeciles consider "trolling" versus stuff you just don't agree with? This is clearly election year spending, yet pointing that out means I'm "trolling?"
And the enshittification of Slashdot continues unabated.
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What do you imbeciles consider "trolling" versus stuff you just don't agree with?
Opposing political views technically aren't supposed to be modded down so long as they're expressed in a sincere manner. I'd guess the mistake you made was the use of condescending snark rather than writing something along the lines of "Deficit spending is not an ideal way to address this problem."
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Now we gotta cleanse our posts of any hint of "snark?" That's fucking ridiculous.
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Now we gotta cleanse our posts of any hint of "snark?" That's fucking ridiculous.
QFT. PC speech was the nose under the camel's tent -- a back-handed way to control speech.
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Carlos Slim. Mexican Telco Tycoon.
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Everybody around here has gotten so earnest and serious.
I was telling a joke. Laugh.
Seriously, that a Mexican drug cartel was forcing residents of a town to subscribe to their internet service was discussed on Slashdot. A lot of the comments were that the fee the cartel was charging for this was a sweet deal compared to what those of us in the U.S. are getting stuck for by our telco or cable company.
OK, alright already, maybe the fees were quite high on a purchasing power parity basis considering w
$17 billion??? (Score:4, Insightful)
With that amount of money plus all the revenue from the "universal service fee" scam .. the telcos must have a massive toilet in which to flush so much cash down the drain and have nothing to show for it. How do they manage to do it without clogs?
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Ah the allure of "freedom" without the "personal responsibility" part is intoxicating.
Mostly the problem is that you can't discharge student loan debt in bankruptcy. Also, at the risk of having an popular opinion, perhaps approval for a student loan should have some stipulations about which sort of majors the funds can be used towards. That'd put a real quick end to schools pushing students into unmarketable majors. If you really did want to major in something that doesn't have a reasonable likelihood of leading to a career where you'd be able to pay off the loan, you should have to pay f
Re:$17 billion??? (Score:4, Informative)
We learn from the best. https://www.finance.senate.gov... [senate.gov]
Thanks, (Score:2, Informative)
I'm putting "forgiveness" in quotes because Biden doesn't have the right to forgive *anything*. Nor has he.
What Biden did was find a bunch of loans for which the terms of the loan were already satisfied and no debt was owed but which somehow the loan officers were somehow still illegally collecting payments for and made said officers follow the damn law
You're a right wing
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This makes no sense. Citation neded.
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Good point, if a college educated person can't figure out they already paid off their loan they should definitely get their money back.
They *did* figure it out (Score:2)
You can stop paying I guess, but you'll get sued and they'll wreck your credit score and garnish your wages.
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That's America for you (Score:2)
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The idea that it must either be "Team Red" or "Team Blue" is a worldview six times dumber than astrology.
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The idea that it must either be "Team Red" or "Team Blue" is a worldview six times dumber than astrology.
I agree, and yet it's a worldview most Americans have.
That's what decades of voting for "the lesser of two evils" has reduced us to.
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you're not allowed to do anything nice for the poor unless 50-60% of the money goes to the rich.
Since the broadband subsidy money basically ends up in the hands of the major telcos anyway, it does all ultimately go to the rich. You don't honestly feel bad for the greedy telco companies?
If we're talking about giving poor people an extra $30/mo, great. Increase food stamps or some other means-tested assistance program, and let the families decide for themselves how to spend the money. Internet certainly is a nice-to-have thing, but it's a bit insulting to the people who are stretching every penny to
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I don't know what rock you have been living under, but life today is almost impossible without some form of daily internet access.
I'll agree with that to a point, but perhaps those issues could be directly addressed rather than considering internet access to be an essential service in need of a government subsidy? Banking and shopping can still be done in the real world at brick and mortar establishments. I still see plenty of people doing things this way. Receiving and paying bills can be done through the good old US postal service, though some companies have begun to charge for paper billing.
The main pain point where not having a
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If you want to argue against putting an internet earmark on the $30, then you might point out that just giving money to poor people, without restrictions, is one of the most effective things that you can do to help them [npr.org].
If you want to a
HA! Look who's really pushing (Score:5, Insightful)
Verizon (VZ.N), Comcast (CMCSA.O), and AT&T (T.N), have all called for Congress to extend the program.
Ah, there ya go! Need any more be said?
Coupons (Score:5, Interesting)
You have a lemonade stand. At your stand, you sell lemonade for $1 a glass. The government announces that they are giving everybody a $0.50 coupon you can turn in to a lemonade stand, and the lemonade stand can hand it in to the government to get $0.50.
If you were a lemonade stand operator, you could keep prices the same, or raise prices $0.50, as you know everyone will have an extra $0.50 to spend on lemonade.
This happens with subsidized housing. This happens with the mortgage tax exemption. This happens with government contracts in general. This happens with student loans. If you want something to be cheaper, you make it easier to make more of it and you don't dump gobs of money into the market.
Re:Not exactly (Score:4, Insightful)
The government rolled it, built a new city 85% of the way and let private companies do the easy part (throwing up the frame and spackle) and get fat profits from it.
LOL, no. Read about Levittown. Housing became more affordable because Levitt figured out how to mass produce homes, and did so in an area with no zoning restrictions. The only subsidies were a few hundred dollars from the GI bill.
If you wanna have some *real* fun go look into how our food supply works. It's more centrally planned than anything the soviets ever did, we just don't talk about it because we're worried dumb Americans will dismantle the system, which is working quite well thank you.
You mean all the subsidies going to US farmers, and protectionist tariffs, so we have some of the highest grocery prices in the world? Yes, I agree with that. California and the federal government subsidizes almond growing, because California has little extra water laying around, and almond growing uses a lot of it so it gets expensive. Which, to me, means almonds are a poor crop to grow in California.
I am for free markets. That crap is anti-free-market.
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That really only works if you have a monopoly controlling the market. As soon as there's competition then the rules of supply and demand take over
Gotta phrase it another way. (Score:1)
"Despite the breadth of this support and the urgent need to continue this program to ensure millions of households..."
Ah, there's the problem. "Ensure" and "insure" are very close phonetically. We all know how loathe Republicans are to approve any program that helps poor people get insured, so they really need to rewrite their talking points to imply this program is about giving tax dollars to telecom giants. Then they'll jump at the chance to approve it.
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Nah (Score:4, Insightful)
The internet is already super cheap, it's on every phone and every isp has low price plans. Can't afford internet at home, local libraries, and pretty much every other restaurants offers free wifi. This discount program is being abused by every major ISP out there already.
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> Can't afford internet at home, local libraries, and pretty much every other restaurants offers free wifi.
Do we send the kids who have a "remote day" called at school to McDonald's? The library doesn't open until two hours after school starts. And there's a snowstorm going on.
Maybe we could forego one day of war spending to help out the poor kids?
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Maybe we could forego one day of war spending to help out the poor kids?
Nice idea, but it will never happen because we might accidentally help the "wrong" poor kids.
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Remote primary school has been one of the worst ideas in the past two decades. Both of my kids were subjected to it during COVID, both of them actually LOST points on standard testing in the same school year (they are tested at the beginning of the academic term, the middle and at the end to show progress, it was negative each time.)
And my kids are not unusually stupid, nearly everyone in their classes showed the same, it was the same at the city and state level.
When it became clear COVID stupidity was goin
This is NOT "new money" but reallocation of old (Score:5, Informative)
In essence, Congress appropriated (allocated) a massive chunk to the FCC to operate this program (Affordable Connectivity Program, ACP for short) over a multi-year window; the latest appropriation was for years 2022-2024. But looking at their "spend" (how much was actually deployed/paid out to program administrators and internet service providers alike) during these annual budgets, combined, came short of their maximum appropriations/allocations.
The net difference? Roughly $4+ Billion USD (to complete the 2024 Fiscal Budget Year which ends on Sept 30th 2024) plus $2 bln to complete the 2024 Calendar Year allocations -- which was possibly unused appropriations from the original 2020-2022 approvals.
The end result? Previously-appropriated funds could be re-allocated to close-out 2024... and allows a new President (or Biden's second term) to negotiate with their Congress on whatever the FCC programs get for 2025+.
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In essence, Congress appropriated (allocated)
You were right the first time, of course :)
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The end result? Previously-appropriated funds could be re-allocated to close-out 2024... and allows a new President (or Biden's second term) to negotiate with their Congress on whatever the FCC programs get for 2025+.
And allows Biden and whoever (in either party) in Congress to crow about how they are giving people a nice handout / charity in 2024. Everything being done by everyone from now until November is crucial optics.
Radical idea (Score:5, Insightful)
unpopular opinion: the government isn't responsible for leveling outcomes across all of its citizenry.
A humane state certainly takes care of the least-fortunate, ensuring they have basic nutritional needs, gainful work to do, basic clothing, a place to live. This is one of the reasons we formed societies; first for security, but second to collectively care for those who cannot care for themselves.
However, beggaring both the middle class* and the future** to ensure that those who are perfectly healthy and able but simply don't want to work have comfortable lifestyles, cell phones, private homes, nice clothes, a car or two, the internet, enough food to be obese ... is absurd. Almost as absurd as massive subsidies to huge, profitable firms because they're so big we fear the consequences of their failure. (Setting aside the pedestrian realities of government corruption, backscratching, nepotism, etc)
Understand that the government makes no money. Every dollar of wealth printed by the government is EITHER:
a) represents wealth taken from it's citizenry by skimming from what they have by any number of taxes, or
b) a tiny little decrease in the buying power of every other dollar in existence, like modern-day form of of seigniorage
So when you hear the phrase "federal dollars will pay for..." - that's (for at least half of us) YOU. YOU are "federal dollars". When "federal matching funds" are spent to not-build a gigantic white-elephant high speed rail in CA that nobody's going to use? That means some UPS driver in West Virginia is paying for it, a little bit. So is the dancer in Austin TX, the piano teacher in Boise, and the youtuber in Portland.
*let's not kid ourselves, the main people paying taxes are the middle class, and *maybe* the lowest tier of wealthy. The highest tier of wealth have the spare money to hide it or hire lawyers to structure their lives so that they pay nearly nothing.
** that the wealthiest society in all of history still can't afford all the shit we want to have so we have to borrow 38% (!) of our budget every year against the future is reprehensible.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.go... [treasury.gov]
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Government benefits haven't gone up measurably in years, but inflation is roughly constant at 3% per year
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"The average person is assumed by the social safety net to have internet at this point. Some doctor's offices are "portal driven", and calling them has a cheerful bot telling them to check the website."
Absolutely good point.
NONE of that needs broadband. None of it.
I have no problem with US gov't recognizing minimal basic internet access as an infrastructure issue to subsidized citizens who need such basic assistance.
(Maybe make the fucking ISPs earn their sweet monopoly deals for once instead of the taxpay
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"what about those who are disabled and trying to make their lives better"
Great point. Note that I'm talking about healthy individuals that can hold jobs. I see them standing begging on multiple streetcorners every morning.
The disabled absolutely should benefit from the wealth of this country, the wealthiest in history. Right now, the scam artists and worthless people are sucking all the $ out of the air so that we don't have them to spend on people who are trying to do the right thing. Helping you go to
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"Are there no prisons?"
"Plenty of prisons..."
"And the Union workhouses. Are they still in operation?"
"Both very busy, sir..."
"Those who are badly off must go there."
"Many can't go there; and many would rather die."
"If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."
-Charles Dickens "A Christmas Carol"
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"Are there no prisons?" "Plenty of prisons..." "And the Union workhouses. Are they still in operation?" "Both very busy, sir..." "Those who are badly off must go there." "Many can't go there; and many would rather die." "If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."
-Charles Dickens "A Christmas Carol"
Not having $30/mo for internet is not the same as suffering in a Dickension workhouse. I can't believe I actually have to say that. (Actually, I can believe it, which is worse.)
Also, it was a private charity that was asking Scrooge for a donation.
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>> to ensure that those who are perfectly healthy and able but simply don't want to work
Elitist nonsense. A considerable fraction of the US working population doesn't earn a living wage and can't afford basic necessities. Access to the internet is one of them these days, and a few dollars of assistance there is a good national investment.
Your whining about taxes is also bogus. The local, state, and federal governments provide essential services. That costs money and as a recipient you are going to hel
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Really? I have actual statistics:
https://www.heritage.org/pover... [heritage.org]
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I agree there is no good reason anyone needs super fast internet for day to day life. Even modems on phone lines would work fine for most things. And in a country where the homeless have smartphones, I find less desire to pay for everyone's netflix addiction. For even $20/mo you can get a cell plan with a decent amount of data. An older phone is practically free. In most of the US, that's a 5G signal with decent coverage. Even with lower signal levels that's >100Mbit/s. I've gotten over a gigabit when ri
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>> Government spending is the problem, not revenue.
That's clearly untrue.
"Federal spending decreased by 8.4% in FY 2023, the second year of decreased spending since a record high in FY 2021"
"Federal revenue decreased 15.5% in FY 2023"
https://usafacts.org/state-of-... [usafacts.org]
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You have cited the Heritage Foundation, which is a fountain of disinformation. If you had bothered to look at their footnotes you would have seen that most of them are from 1987. For example; 'over 22,000 "poor" households have a heated swimming pool or a Jacuzzi' comes from "Housing Characteristics 1987".
You also cite the Tax Foundation, which is devoted to reducing taxes by any means necessary no matter how deceptive. They cite 'statutory tax rates', which almost no large company in the US actually pays.
"
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"I don't like the things their statistics prove, so I'm going to declare them a FOUNTAIN OF DISINFORMATION."
thestreet.com has whole sections on crypto and cannabis. Very credible source!
Yes, of COURSE the statistics show "statutory tax rates", how else are we going to compare region vs region?
Oh noes, some US companies paid nothing? it's the same in the Euro tax regime
Amazon: $44bn sales, $0 taxes paid.
https://www.theguardian.com/te... [theguardian.com]
Ikea? https://tehcpa.net/tax-plannin... [tehcpa.net]
You want to pay more taxes? Pl
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>> I don't give the faintest shit
Big corporations and the obscenely rich don't pay their fair share, which you admit. Raising taxes on the wealthy would solve a lot of problems. You've made it very clear that you don't give a shit, so why should anyone care what you think?
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So when you hear the phrase "federal dollars will pay for..." - that's (for at least half of us) YOU. YOU are "federal dollars".
Kind of, but not really. A single cruise missile can cost upwards of 5 million dollars. I have paid nowhere near that in taxes over my entire life. They have tens of thousands of them and fire them from time to time to ensure that they work.
A single battle tank costs $10 million dollars. We have thousands of them. A single F35 costs $100 million.
But our military is not even our largest expense and you seem to think that taking money from the money we earn on our jobs is paying for the military expenses? LOL
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What?
" I have paid nowhere near that in taxes over my entire life. "
I mean, that's a staggering statement - either you're being disingenuous or haven't the faintest idea where government revenue comes from.
You know it's not just you, yes?
There are about 160 MILLION other people paying income taxes....that's about $2.3 trillion or about $15k per person average per year (this is FEDERAL taxes of course, not including state).
"meager amount of cash they get from fucking with us barely covers the costs of fuckin
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No one formed societies to take care of the least fortunate. Societies were formed so that we could scratch each others' backs, and ultimately be more productive through specialization.
UBI (Score:3)
Why don't we have Universal Basic Internet with 100mbps to every household for free? Like water!
Oh wait.
Well I was kind of just trolling, but are there countries like that?
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No. There are no countries like that. Because TNSTAAFL
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You misspelled TANSTAAFL
The first A is for Ain't
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Why don't we have Universal Basic Internet with 100mbps to every household for free? Like water!
Free water? The only place you get free water in my neighborhood is from the retention pond near the entrance road. Hope you enjoy dysentery. However, the city water that comes out of the pipes and has been properly treated to potable standards? You get a bill for that.
My brother has a well and he's spent so much money fucking around with replacement pumps and other various issues related to the water quality that I'm not sure I'd call that "free", either.
a worthwhile benefit to many (Score:3)
I see people whining here because they think it is some kind of election year pandering but clearly that's not the case. This would merely allow previously allocated money to be spent. I had qualified for the subsidy and I have appreciated it very much
"Congress previously allocated $17 billion to help lower-income families and people impacted by COVID-19 gain broadband access through a $30 per month voucher"
17 billion (Score:2)
You subsidize 30 USD/month for 12 months, that is 360 USD/year. Mulitply by 23 million households, you get 8 billion per year
We talk about 17 billion. Where are the remaining credits going?
Free! (Score:2)
Everything should be free. Do away with money altogether.