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Congress Pays You $3 Billion to Keep Watching TV
Felix the Cat writes "After budgets cuts led to the layoff of engineers and scientists at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a US Senate committee has approved a $3 billion dollar subsidy to assist Americans in their difficult transition to digital television in 2009. The old analog television spectrum will be auctioned off to the highest bidder. The transition date was chosen to not interfere with college football bowl games or basketball playoffs." From the article: "The draft of a House bill would end analog transmissions on Dec. 31, 2008. It does not mention a subsidy for set-top converter boxes. So, lawmakers will likely have to work out differences between the two bills, though Stevens said he did not anticipate a big fight with the House over the deadline or the subsidy."
I have a hard time believing that they'll really end analog TV in 2008. There are too many people out there who (a) have low incomes, (b) like TV, and (c) vote. It's just that many of those same people don't know about this because they get their information from the TV news. This is supposedly going to happen smack dab in an election year, too.
Find free books.
Iraq costs $6 BILLION each month.
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make install -not war
I think the government is affraid that without TV's the public will develop critical thinking skills and start thinking for themselves. And critical thinking skills is not something the government would want the people to have.
This is necessary to hold the country together. Imagine the economic turmoil that would result if millions upon millions of people were to decide that $50 is too much to pay to continue watching TV and dump their boxes instead? All those souls, no longer absorbing advertisements? The reduction in impulse buying could throw us into another depression!
How about CONSUMERS pay for new TVs or converters themselves? They don't get cable free. They don't get a free CD palyer(sic) when cassettes go out of style.
The government didn't destory all cassette tapes six years after the CD player was first sold to the public, now did they?
CONSUMERS have already paid billions of dollars for televisions that work perfectly fine with free over the air analog signals. The government, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that free over the air analog signals should disappear, instantly making all of that equipment obsolete unless a digital converter box is installed. The government, in its infinite wisdom, has also decided that it will sell/lease this signal space for billions of dollars to private enterprise, with some fraction reserved for public service use.
It seems perfectly reasonable for the government to dedicate a portion of the revenues that it will realize with this giant electromagnetic spectrum swap to compensate CONSUMERS who couldn't care less about free over the air digital television verses free over the air analog television.
And if someone MUST baby the consumer, how about the fucking TELEVISION INDUSTRY do the subsidizing, instead? Why in the fucking hell should tax money go toward it?
Read the above. The purchasers of the old free over the air analog spectrum are in effect subsidizing the conversion. It's only "tax money" if you ignore this major detail.
If we're going to spend billions of tax dollars on televisions, let's spend it subsidizing people to NOT own them?
Because this is a democracy, and the "we don't even own a television" portion of the population has even less political power than PETA.
Seriously, we already fucking subsidize breeders and marriage.
Economic and political trends in Western Europe and Japan both show why subsidizing the "breeders" is a sound economic policy. I'm not even touching the comment on marriage.
Where do I go for the nearest de-education center so I can join the mind-numbed consumer masses?
As a married man with a child, a graduate engineering degree, a law degree, and a television, I officially invite you to go for (sic) the nearest tall building and take a flying leap. You don't need a de-education center, since your prior education seems to have failed to instill any sort of critical reasoning ability.
auction spectrum = still your governments dollars.
auctioned spectrum = BAD, unless its in lease form. I loathe that big businesses pay big bucks one time and profit forever off it. Govt should get a cut of profits generated by that spectrum forever.
Troll, Troll, go away and flame again some other day
On the plus side I will say that the level of transparency of corruption is much higher than I've encountered elsewhere in the world and you, usually, don't get killed for investigating who bought which politician, which I've seen before.
"[I]t is a wise man who admits the limits of his knowledge or skill, and that pretending either causes harm." --Terry Go
and if u must watch a show, remember that bit torrent is your friend
Just another crappy blog
What amazes me even more are all those people who insist on their right to bear arms to defend themselves from tyranny but never even kill a single corrupt politician with them.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
The conversation around the dinner table thing only works until you find out that your son is gay, your daughter a democrat, and your wife cares about black people.
When TV gets turns off, expect a jump in the domestic violence rate.
Humor us. What are the appreciable differences?
They were both strongly in favor of invading Iraq. And staying in Iraq. Are you suggesting that Kerry would have done the responsible thing and try to institute the Draft? Would that reknown leader of men convince the Congress to vote for such a measure? If so, why couldn't Kerry ever sponsor and pass a piece of significant legislation?
Are their border control policies different? Would Kerry beef up the border security, increase deportations, institute guest worker visas, and increase convictions of business owners that hire illegal immegrants?
Has Kerry helped push any legislation would show he understands the onerous cost of the federal gov't?
Face it. The boys at the top picked someone who wasn't going to upset the apple cart. And until THOSE losers are booted out of power, no matter what loser the Republicans put up, the Democrats will put up another loser.
And finally, we live in a country of dumbasses who vote, and dumbasses who don't vote. Until you can fix them, they'll be voting for "a Bush" every time.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
The most basic difference for most Kerry voters, I think, was not what would be done but what had been done. It's actually not unreasonable for Kerry to have chosen to stay in Iraq; it's a mess that the US made and which arguable we should try to clean up after ourselves. If we didn't, future deaths resulting from a civil war in Iraq would be blamed on us (not to mention a potential new safe haven for al Qaeda).
But the difference is that Bush HAD gone into a war, under what many prospective Kerry voters considered false pretenses, and for that he deserved to lose his office, even if his policies for the future were exactly identical to Kerry's.
For example, Kerry might have been able to get foreign assistance in Iraq, not because his policies were better than Bush's, but because for many countries the answer would be an automatic "No" to Bush. They'd say Bush had brought it on himself, whereas Kerry would be trying to fix a situation he inherited. That's not a guarantee, but there was no hope of any world support under Bush.
Actually, that's not even the most basic difference. The most basic difference is in the Supreme Court. It was obvious that Bush would appoint at least one new Supreme Court justice, and that he would almost certainly chose an anti-Roe nominee, whereas Kerry would almost certainly chose a pro-Roe nominee. The way it turned out was somewhat more complicated, but at the time both sets of voters may have had abortion (and other things that the Supreme Court weighs in on) at the front of their minds.
There were numerous other policy differences: privatization of social security, concerns over Bush's pro-business style (in particular, the energy policy for which many Democrats feel Bush should be punished), environmental policies.
I'm not trying to debate what should be done in Iraq, or to favor one candidate or the other. I'm just saying that the presence of similarities between the two doesn't mean that there weren't also differences.
But one last bone I'll pick: not all senators are there to sponsor legislation. An awful lot of work goes on in Congress that doesn't get names on bills. The details of the bills are where serious work gets done, not in the overall thrust. A President is as much a negotiator as a policymaker, and being good at those back-room skills getting bills actually passed is at least as important as initiating legislation. John McCain, for example, is more respected for his ability to make the resulting legislation reasonable than for the bills that he himself has sponsored.
Again, I'm not using this to comment on the election itself or take a stand on who you should have voted for. I'm just saying that if you're not seeing any differences, and you're not seeing Kerry's accomplishments, then you need to look more closely.