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FCC's Spectrum Auction Approaches $20B in Bids
An anonymous reader writes "After 32 rounds, the FCC has raised more than $18.8 billion in its 700-MHz auction, well surpassing its own early estimates of attracting between $10-15 billion in offers.
That's undoubtedly good news for the agency. Since the auction began on Jan. 24, both the FCC and wireless experts have expressed ongoing concerns about meeting those estimates. Once the auction was underway, those worries were compounded by a shaky economic forecast and the possibility of a looming recession."
According to their budget sheet (133 page PDF warning), their proposed budgetary resources for 2008 is $433 million.
As I haven't been following the news very closely, does anyone know where this $20 billion will go?
I, like many Americans, am ghastly concerned with how my government spends money. I hope that the FCC doesn't pull an M.C. Hammer and put spinners on their pocket protectors or pass out diamond studded platinum iPods to all of its friends. Will this money be put under control of congressional spending? Will this money be put in a fund to supply the FCC with emergency regulation cash?
You're going to suddenly have over 40 times the amount of resources you normally have. Even if they went nuts and ordered yet another all marble Parthenon-dupe building in DC they couldn't burn all this cash. Please don't be stupid.
My work here is dung.
I figured my $50 bid wouldn't fly, but a man can dream.
I'm auctioning the oxygen inside FCCs Washington offices, who'll start me at $1 billion?
Oh yes, the 3G spectrum auctions in Europe .
I think we should be more worried about paying down our debt http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/ than the trillion dollar budget. And even still $20b $1t. Especially considering that the dollar is down in value which makes that number look even worse when we pay out to foreign companies.
Layne
what business exactly does a government have selling a unique public resource to some private interest (thus automatically establishing a govenment backed monopoly), rather then presiding over equitable sharing and access to the said resource by all citizens?
So why is deficit spending attractive? For several reasons. Politically, it is easy to sell "lower taxes!" For the political Right, it is also a way to shovel money into the pockets of the wealthy: about 1/3 of the debt is loaned to the government by rich people in the form of verystable investments - T-Bills, bonds, etc - at around 9% interest.
A-Bomb
The current bidding for the C block has NOT stalled at $4.71 billion as the story states. A new bidder upped the bid to $4.74 billion a few days ago. This was made possible because there are 2 ways of bidding for the C block: either outright for the whole block, where the bidding reached $4.71 billion, or for 8 pieces of the block individually. If the cumulative price for the bidding of the 8 pieces exceeds the bid for the whole block, then that bid trumps the whole block bid. The cumulative bid for the 8 pieces now stands at $4.74 billion, which means that the C block is still under contention. Today's latest story from the NYT gives more info on the auction.
This is nothing more than a shameless tax on a free medium -- the wireless spectrum.
Historically the FCC has always accepted bids almost without regard to how the winner will use the spectrum and it's overall benefit to the consumer. This time round they have the requirement that the spectrum will be 'somewhat' open to competition by forcing the winner to allow any compatible device to use the spectrum.
But by allowing bids of +$4 billion they leave the winner no choice but to stick it to the consumer in order to get their money back. And that will come in the tried and true method of nickel and diming us for every trivial service they can think of.
The winners in this auction should be the ones who have the best ideas that will best benefit the consumer, *not* the ones who come up with the most bucks. I mean, did the FCC even consider that the 700Mhz part of the spectrum would probably be best used for a meshed Internet and that MIT already has a working prototype for such a network? Sadly we probably just gonna get another phone network based on the old 20th century model that maximizes profit and stifles innovation.
Hilarious stuff, well, maybe not. Until you get to the bottom of the page, where you come to this little gem:
[FUCK BETA]
The idea behind tax cuts is that the closer you get to the Laffer curve, the closer you get to maximizing tax revenue while minimizing economic damage. If that means temporarily running deficits, OK. Think about it: who gets a higher return on capital, the small business owners who make up the bulk of the top bracket taxpayers in America, or Congress? Getting tax rates below the curve is assumed to be too unlikely to think about right now. From a moral perspective it would be desirable but I think most of us on the Right would settle for practicality.
The problem is that Congress takes the new tax revenue, spends it, and then spends some more. The President can try to slow it down. Unfortunately this President has shown little to no spending restraint, with the mess caused by a bunch of Saudi trust fund brats who thought they could pick up where the Battle of Vienna left off just adding insult to injury. We had a brief reprieve when Gingrich was Speaker of the House but it's been downhill ever since. I doubt a President McCain or President Hillary combined with a Democrat-dominated Congress is going to make any improvement.
Did anyone else read the headline as $208? Maybe it's just my font but for a moment I was planning on bidding myself. I'm not sure what I'd do with a wireless spectrum at the moment, but for that kind of money it'd be worth buying one just to keep around in case of emergency.
About 2.5 weeks of interest payments to service the debt.
Your math is off. Let's make up some numbers. 9% of 3 trillion tax dollars = 270 billion dollars. 270 billion dollars in interest paid divided by the total debt of 10 trillion = 2.7% So based on these numbers, 9% of tax revenue it used to pay the average 2.7% interest rate on the total debt. The interest rate is not 9%, that is just the percent of 'income' (cough) that we are using to pay on the interest on the debt, we've already spent. (By 'we', I mean those idiots in DC.)