More Fallout From FCC VoIP Decision

EconomyGuy writes "While many of us have been celebrating the recent FCC decision to keep regulation off of VoIP, but there may be some undesirable results for those progressive geeks who believe government should do more than provide military defense. As VoIP takes off as a replacement for the traditional copper-wire network, local and state governments are going to lose more and more funding for important services like 911 and Universal Service."

Comments

I think you've been reading the wrong newspapers

[John Murdoch]

I'm not American , but I see America going the wrong way and cutting funding for the wrong things (ok, it's not a socialist state) ... Education, Healthcare, Emergency services are things which have intangible returns on investment.

I think you're confusing the issue--and perhaps you've been spending too much time reading the European Left press. Somewhere, somehow, you have the impression that "tax cuts" have affected education, healthcare, and emergency services. Let's run down the list:

• Emergency services John Kerry, in the waning days of his campaign, made as crass a political promise as Americans have heard in seventy years. He promised to "put another 100,000 firefighters on the job." Despite the fact that the rate at which fires happen has plummeted with the advent of things like the National Fire Code, National Electrical Code, etc. Simply put, municipalities are laying off firefighters and closing firehouses because there's nothing for them to do, not because they don't have federal funds. Firefighters are typically paid by municipalities, from funds collected by a tax on property insurance premiums, without any federal funding. (Most firefighters in the U.S. are actually volunteers.) There WAS a short-term federal program to fund additional police officers which did expire during W's first term. Letting federal funding expire isn't quite the same thing. (And if those municipalities needed the cops, they should be able to fund them locally. Four years of federal boodle is plenty.)
• Education Federal funding for education is heavily focused on three areas: college tuition assistance (mostly federally-guaranteed student loans); special education funding for the emotionally, physically, or mentally disabled; and preschool funding for disadvantaged and "at risk" children (primarily through a program named Head Start and other programs targeted at providing free breakfast and/or lunch to poor children). Special Ed and Head Start/free breakfast/free lunch are all "entitlement" programs--which means that anyone meeting the criteria for assistance will get it, regardless of the federal or state budget issues. In other words, those programs are immune to budget politics: you cannot "cut" the budget, because the budget is, essentially "as much as it takes." There's a sigificant point to this, which I'll touch on below.
• Health care Federal funding for health care in general has increased--but the total costs of health care are skyrocketing. Traditionally health care in the U.S. has been an employer-paid benefit--but the cost per family of a barely-humane insurance policy can be crushing to a small business (heading past $700 per month for a $5000/family deductible and 80% co-pay when I shut down my consulting firm). There are millions of Americans who do not have adequate health coverage today, and it is a significant problem. That does not, however, mean that a federally-funded single-payer system (the U.K.'s National Health, or the health systems of each Canadian province) is a good solution. Those systems (especially Canada's) exist because there are private pay systems to alleviate overcrowding and provide cutting-edge treatment. When 90% of the Canadian population lives with 100 miles of a U.S. hospital, it's easy to live with a state-run health system: you can always cross the border to get a second opinion, or to get a test done sooner. That's not to say that our system is perfect--far from it. I believe that there are dramatic inequities in how private insurance works--there is essentially a widespread practice of "collusion in restraint of trade" going on between doctors, hospitals, and a network of ostensibly not-for-profits insurors known as Blue Cross/Blue Shield. There is tremendous price-gouging going on in medical malpractice insurance. There are outrageous damage awards in lawsuits, fueled by the contingent-fee that rewards lawyers for bringing all

Re:They don't collect enough tax?

[nomadic]

Also, 9/11 was finalized on Clinton's watch.

It was executed on Bush's watch. It succeeded because his administration ignored the entreaties by the outgoing Clinton officials who knew how dangerous the terrorists were, but was ignored by the neocon chicken hawks who thought a few years in right-wing nutjob think tanks gave them a handle on how the world worked.

Re:BULLSHIT bullshit bullshit

[nursedave]

Welfare makes up a small part of government expenditures, and most recipients are not "non-productive parasites", but productive citizens temporarily fallen on hard times

No, the majority of welfare recipients are second- and beyond-generation welfare recipients. There is little if any incentive to get off the government tit for most of these people. Social security is *not* a retirement pension plan, it was never set up to be such, but has metamorphasized into the ponzi scheme it is today.