Sorting Through the Analog to Digital TV Mess

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday January 4, 2006 @05:16AM from the i'll-take-two dept.

H_Fisher writes "CNN offers an article from Fortune magazine, giving a look at the problems surrounding the mandatory switch from analog to digital TV in the U.S., now slated for 2009. 'Managing this transition -- which will render about 70 million TV sets obsolete -- will be not be easy,' Marc Gunther writes. Among the problems: millions of American households without cable or satellite access will lose free access to news and weather along with the rest of their broadcast fare. Uncle Sam's solution? 'Yes, the very same federal government that is cutting back on college loans and food stamps will soon be issuing TV vouchers' - $1.5 billion to help U.S. households buy new digital TV equipment."

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Re:Damned if you do, damned if you don't by daveschroeder · 2006-01-04 06:00 · Score: 0, Offtopic

Aside from the utter (and predictable) idiocy of your comment, what would happen, then, if we made the top 5% pay ALL of the tax burden? Aside from being horribly unfair to any thinking person, the bottom, say, 20% of our country will still be poor. Of course, they already pay NO TAX, so nothing changes for them. (And, for the sake of argument, let's say thy magically don't pay sales tax, either.) But they're still poor.

Let me guess: most of the money that the top 5% have - keeping in mind that these are households that only have to make about $120,000/year to be in this "top 5%" - has been "milked out" of other people, right?