Sorting Through the Analog to Digital TV Mess

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."

Comments

third

[Anonymous Coward]

third

Re:Damned if you do, damned if you don't

[daveschroeder]

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?

11.36% obviously did not RTFA...

[rts008]

Much lower than I expected. This number was obtained by a quick and informal survey of (at time of survey) 264 comments. The criteria I used to determine poster did not RTFA was: 1. comments directly referring to a voucher for a new tv with the poster's understanding the vouchers were for a tv, not DAC box for those depending on OTA reception of signal. 2. vague posts (ie:several comments along the lines of 'after 2009, no more tv for me'- having no way to determine whether these type comments were in reference to not willing to buy new tv, or not willing to buy DAC box or not willing to subscribe to cable/sattelite, etc.) were not counted as "did not RTFA", even if the context of said post indicated otherwise. 3. basically #1 was main (only) criteria as "did not RTFA", using #2 (and similar) as qualifiers or obvious cut-off points for #1. Very informalal for sure, but repeatable by anyone that cares to check. LOL