Slashdot Mirror
$2 Billion For Broadband Cut From Stimulus Bill
pdabbadabba points out a CNN report on changes to the planned economic stimulus bill (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 [PDF]) that will remove the $2 billion allocated to broadband development. The changes also eliminated smaller amounts allocated to NASA, the National Institute for Standards and Technology, and the National Science Foundation. $16 billion in school construction funding was removed, as well as another $3.5 billion for higher education construction. A variety of environmental projects were also cut or reduced (half of the $7 billion set aside for energy-efficient federal buildings, half of the $600 million for hybrid federal vehicles), and over $8 billion in health-related provisions are gone. The bill will likely go to vote in the Senate on Tuesday.
Frankly, the telco's were given million of dollars to expand broadband years ago and essentially pissed the money away. As for education spending, I've always said it should be cut and prioritized. The idea that money allocated to education actually goes to educate kids is a sick joke in this country. Higher education? Many universities sit on huge sums of money and still get government help so I'm not losing sleep over that one either. This is supposed to be a stimulus bill but it's been nothing but an attempt to get all the candy out of the bag and eat it at once. With less than 20% of any of it slated to go into effect in the first year the Obama "pass it or else" mantra is exposed as rhetoric.
"Bipartisanship" isn't useful in this context, because one party is working from macroeconomic theory and reason, and the other party is working from the ideological mantra of "Spending Bad. Tax Cuts Good." To the Congressional Republicans, things like school construction won't result in jobs for construction workers: apparently magic pixies will simply drop the new schools out of the sky in exchange for our money.
President Obama needs to realize that it's the U.S. Congress, not the Snuggle-Senate, and beat some heads together to get good policy through. The $800b he proposed was too small to begin with, and all of these cuts make it more likely that we're not going to have enough stimulus to do anything useful.
I'm a lawyer, but not yours. I wouldn't represent someone who thinks taking legal advice from Slashdot is a good idea.
$100 million from law enforcement wireless (original bill $200 million)
$100 million from FBI construction (original bill $400 million)
Need to keep pumping that taxpayer money into law enforcement so they can keep us safe from "obscene porn" http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/optf/ and continue to win the drug war.
They need to be able to blame somebody when this supposed "stimulus" fails miserably. And I'm hesitant to call it a stimulus because more than 80% of the cash will be sitting in bank accounts untouched for at least a year, obviously not doing much stimulating.
I am sure they would love to ignore the Republicans... Unlike the House rules, however, the senate requires 60 votes to get anything substantial done. Meaning, they have something called filibuster rules that allow individual senators to slow/stop bills in its tracks...
Meaning, the democrats are not trying to be nice and work with the republicans... They are forced to deal with at least 3 Republicans to get the stimulus bill moving forward and they know this... Hence, the reason for the compromise..
Cutting higher ed and broadband gives the Republicans what they want: Keep the sheep stupid and uncommunicative.
So, will Monday night's speech ditch the theme of "bipartisanship"? Isn't getting him any votes anyway.
There is no difference between the parties these days when it comes to spending.
They both want to spend *more*. There is a slight difference in what they want it spent on, but only a little.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
That stuff should not be in a STIMULUS bill. Each of those things should be in their own separate bills.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So let them filibuster. Let them hold everything else up and yell loudly to the media that the republicans are against saving America!
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
Except if you bothered to pay attention even the congressional budget office said that the stimulus bill if passed will do more to hurt the economy in the long term over doing nothing.
http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/feb/04/cbo-obama-stimulus-harmful-over-long-haul/
Wake up Sheeple. You are perfectly willing to sit and listen to what 'Dear Leader' says. You listen to the talking heads regurgitate what better suits the Obama agenda and eat it up like its chocolate ice cream on a hot summer day. Just like the global warming crap. You take Al Gore's word that the sky is falling and we need to all drive Prius and eat vegan or we are going to be extinct by summer. You listen to them say there is a consensus on man made global warming when the truth is the only consensus is that the climate is changing, like it has done for the last 4.5 billion years.
Please, get a clue. Wake up. Take the Red Pill.
DO SOMETHING. Don't blindly follow the Pied Piper to our doom.
Don't rush me, Sonny. You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles.
I have a feeling a lot of politicians just think that it's not that important. They just don't get it that we can add tubes, and it's worth it.
No.
This is about creating jobs. Quickly. While it would be great if you could take unemployed factory workers and have them run fiber to everyone's house, it isn't very realistic. To 'break ground' quickly on this project would require the money going to people who already know how to and have the skills necessary to build this. Realistically, that is only the cableco/telco/and really big ispco that isn't a cableco or telco.
My congressman was not going to stand up in front of the world and ask for money that was going to be handed over to those companies.
It doesn;t mean there won't be a separate bill, it just means it won't be in the stimulus porkfest.
How come Cleveland has more spending on its public schools than most other G8 nations, but they are all shitholes. Maybe the students are stupid and unwilling to learn? Maybe they come from a culture that denegrates education before it even starts? I mean, how come Democrats always talk about more money for schools and for public institution but at the same time, continue to spend billions on an arts and media that does nothing but continually denegrate culture, learning, and refinement? I mean, people are only doing what you tell them, and you are telling them to do stupid stuff.
This is my sig.
And while we are at it, lets dump Brown vs. Board of Education too while we are at it, eh? After all, if a state wants to start segregating schools you can just move to another state, right? Or if the state wants all their public schools to teach intelligent design, you should either hold your nose or move--under no circumstance should you appeal to those pesky activist judges in the the federal courts, right?
Want to improve education? Operate at the neighborhood level. The community can figure out the best way to educate their kids. But the devil is in the details and here in America, we value providing a fair chance to anybody regardless of socio-economic status. That means the federal government has an obligation to make sure a child in one state has as good of an education as in another. That means that regardless of what crazy sounding idea the neighborhood comes up with, a student there should graduate with the same knowledge as from some other place. One of the easiest roles the federal government can play in ensuring equity is leveling the playing field so all school districts get the same funding.
PS: good luck with killing the teachers union--you wouldn't win an election on that platform.
And corporal punishment? Seriously? I've been trolled, haven't I :-)
When you give someone a tax break, you become less of a bloodsucker, than you were before, when you were taxing them higher... Or did you call telcos "bloodsuckers" over something else?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Only time and debt destruction can fix it...
Exactly. That's why when I read the headline my first thought was GOOD.
Fixing this problem by taking on more debt is like helping a trauma victim by stabbing him.
As nice as it would be to have the IT sector get a big slice of pork, it's just not in the national interest. And that's how we have to think for the next few years. "What's good for me" will have to take a back seat sometimes to "what's good for the country."
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
So, doing some simple math I compute that those top 10% (roughly 14 million taxpayers) are responsible for $800,000,000,000 times 0.71, or about $40,000 each.
Let's ignore for the moment that this is deficit spending, so no one's taxes will be raised. You still fail at simple math. A couple making 109K would only owe 40K in taxes if EVERYONE in the top 10% earned EXACTLY 40K, which is patently false. Many people earn more, and would thus shoulder more of the cost. Let me use your own numbers to prove you wrong.
- there are 138 million taxpayers in the US
- 5% of the population earns between 109K and 154K.
- This 5% pays 11% of the taxes.
So AT MOST, your couple would owe 13K, and to get a number that high, I'm still making the false assumption that everyone in that bracket earns the base of 109K (not because it's plausible, but because your link doesn't give a better breakdown). That's a far cry from your 40K.
I came here for a good argument
It's actually quite easy to spend $800b, just don't let the government do it. If you must "stimulate", just send a check to the people that you are taking the money from in the first place. That would be almost $3000 apiece for every man, woman and child in the USA.
Now, as far as your assertion that there endowment is down 30-50%, I doubt that. They have their own money management office that has some very sharp folks investing. Not your typical IRA or retirement money manager like we peons have. Let's say you're right. So now it's down to only 17 billion! Boo hoo! I'm sure they're starving over there!
If they really need it make up for short falls, then why does it keep increasing every year? Ah, more donations - you may say. That's true. As a matter of fact, people who have never even attended Harvard give them money. What I'm saying is, Harvard could piss their entire endowment away, and there would be plenty of folks out there who'd give them money. Why? Because Harvard (and all the other Ivy League schools for that matter) have a name. They'd have their money back in a few years.
As far as research is concerned, I don't know. But the thing is, I see they get a lot of corporate and Government grants for research. I never see anything about Harvard themselves funding something.
Whatever. You can't lump in an Ivy League university with the rest of US higher education. Those folks are in their own league and I would be incredibly surprised if they ever have financial difficulties.
Tax cuts. More tax cuts and tax rebates and tax credits. It really works, I've seen it.
You get your tax cuts, you take your receipts to that little 4x5 H&R Block kiosk in the middle of Walmart, you walk around while they prepare them, they cut you an advance refund check, and you take it over and buy a new flatscreen Vizio TV to hang on the wood panelling in your trailer. And that stimulates the economy.
Duh.
The reason for these cuts is that the Republicans have an ideological predisposition to cut taxes, period. These cuts serve primarily to increase the proportion of tax custs in the bill, despite the fact that tax custs do not stimulate the economy as well as direct spending would, because tax cuts mostly benefit people who are in a position to save money.
Why is the stimulus necessary? Because the Congressional Budget Office says that supply of goods and services is going to contract by $2 tn, or 14% of GDP. What the "less government through less taxes" movement is doing is making the already undersized stimulus less effective, significantly increasing the risk of a downward economic spiral. That's my job and your job they're going to take.
Do you even know what stimulus is?
650 Million for converter boxes?
Which will go to companies who make them and their workers, and hopefully get spent and enter the economy.
350 Million to buy back watershed lands?
Which will go into the pockets of people who have watershed land, and hopefully get spent and enter the economy.
1 Billion to the census dept for ???
Which will go to census workers, and hopefully get spent and enter the economy.
All those things are exactly the entire damn point of the bill. There are things in there that are not, and won't help stimulate anything, but you're apparently so ignorant you don't know the point of the stimulus bill, which is to spend money on crap so that the money enters the economy.
Republicans, OTOH, want to put it in the economy via 'tax cuts', which, ignoring the fact those are skewed towards those making more money, shows they at least get the concept of 'stimulus' somewhat better than you.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I agree with you 100%. Which is why pretty much the only thing the feds can legislate is bills that level the financial playing field. The *can* however, say words that have no legal impact. Words like "read to your children instead of park them in front of the TV".
This sounds good on the surface, but I'm not sure it is "correct" and you'd have to tack on things that would make some uncomfortable. I'm thinking things like sex-ed, contraceptives, abortion, adoption... that kind of thing. People are gonna do the nasty no matter what it does to their tax status--you best provide people options to both prevent pregnancy and help them out in case they do get pregnant. There is probably a reason nobody proposes what you say, even if it might a workable solution. It would be a mess politically--but I think if somebody was bold enough we could pull something off--it wouldn't be exactly what you want though.
Better yet, make hours spend doing volunteer work with non-profits (and schools) something you can deduct the same way as other charitable donations. As always though... how do you value the hourly wage? I can see a million ways to exploit either of our plans if not careful.
A letter from the CBO about the stimulus bill (PDF)
Instead of relying on someone else's bias to interpret things for you, how about doing some digging and go to the source?
Please tell me where in the linked CBO document it says the stimulus bill will be harmful?
More recent PDF (with some newer changes)
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/politics/020209econbill.pdf
FTA:
Partially cut:
* $3.5 billion for energy-efficient federal buildings (original bill $7 billion)
* $75 million from Smithsonian (original bill $150 million)
* $200 million from Environmental Protection Agency Superfund (original bill $800 million)
* $100 million from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (original bill $427 million)
Fully eliminated:
* $55 million for historic preservation
* $50 million for Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service
* $98 million for school nutrition
* $2 billion for broadband
* $100 million for National Institute of Standards and Technology
* $50 million for NASA
* $50 million for aeronautics
* $50 million for exploration
* $200 million for National Science Foundation
* $100 MILLION FOR SCIENCE
* $25 million for Fish and Wildlife
* $55 million for historic preservation
* $90 million for State and Private Wildlife Fire Management
* $16 billion for school construction
* $3.5 billion for higher education construction
~~~
YES I read the entire link I posted (took me just over an hour) and it just seems to me that everything cut was everything Obama promised to keep, and everything kept was what Obama was against when he was running.
OK so my actual question after all of this is this: Why are we cutting sciences yet throwing hundreds of billions of dollars towards the military still (see article X in the linked article.) I'm not an economist, I just noticed a very ugly trend in the above documents and would like someone with a bit more economic experience to explain (please!)
Someone who makes $109,000 per year is going to have to come up with another $40,000 in taxes. Also remember that many people file jointly, so that $109,000 is really more like a married couple, both of whom work, each making $54,000.
Uhh, no. Stop making up math. Two people making $54,500 each do not equal one taxpayer making $109,000. My wife and I together make around $150,000, but, individually, we make about $75,000 each. Thus we are clearly not in that top bracket you are talking about. Only two-adult families with one income-earning worker might possibly fit in your picture, and those A) are rare and B) benefit from cost savings in other ways.
So, doing some simple math I compute that those top 10% (roughly 14 million taxpayers) are responsible for $800,000,000,000 times 0.71, or about $40,000 each. Think about that. Someone who makes $109,000 per year is going to have to come up with another $40,000 in taxes.
That top 10% is a wide range, you know? Why did you just divide the tax burden equally among those at your arbitrary 10% cutoff? If (and I'm making this number up) the top 5% pay 50% of taxes, doesn't that mean the top 5% (using your math) should pay $57,000 in taxes each, while the second 5% (including your favorite $109,000 earner) should only pay $24,000? Or maybe divide it somewhere else? Or maybe recognize that it's a gradual scale and making arbitrary divisions only serves those looking to manipulate statistics?
Most people with that income have lost several times that in their retirement plans in the last year (another made up statistic by me), and would love to give up $24,000 if it meant the economy turned around and they regained the rest of their lost wealth before they wanted to retire.
your hard-earned money
My money does a lot of things, including pay for my lifestyle, but it also pays for the education of other people's children (we have none) and other people's defense and other people's roads (we mostly use toll roads). And yet all of those things benefit us, too, so I'm perfectly happy to pay for them.
Fortunately you benefit from them too, and so you get to pay as well. Isn't civilized society a great place to live?
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
My god.... you actually believe you're doing this math correctly?
If the top 5% pay that much, that makes up $479.5B. The top 10%, according to you, pay a total of $560B. That means that the second highest 5% would pay ~$80B, which, divided over 7M people is about $11,400, which is in direct contradiction to your earlier assertion that someone making $109K would pay $40,000.
To put it simply, you're full of shit, and don't know even the slightest thing about math.
Um, you FAIL MATH FOREVER.
I can't even begin to list what is horrible wrong with your math, but here's a hint:
You realize that total US yearly revenue is 1.75 trillion right? Which, according to your logic, means a person making $109,000 a year currently pays about $90,000 in taxes. Seems like they would have caught on at some point that, after taxes, they're living below poverty level and eligible for government aid.
Or, you know, you've insanely taken a group that pays an average of 71% of taxes and extrapolated those taxes onto the minimum people fitting in that group.
That's not even getting into your completely incorrect assumption about joint filing. Joint filing does not work that way. If it just magically added up incomes and treated them as a single person, no one would ever do it, as it would always push people into higher tax brackets. Duh.
Incidentally, any web page that lists the 'percentage' of total taxes pay by income percentage is lying. Lying by statistics.
We don't tax people by head, we tax them by income. Comparing the number of people to taxes paid is inherently dishonest. The top 10% of the people may, indeed, be paying 71% of the income taxes, but they're making like 60% of the income, which is, of course, what the income tax is taxing.
Here's an actual view of the situation, although it's only by quintile. Once it got to 10% and 5% and 1% it the amount of taxes would, indeed, go up somewhat, but not to the amount you're imagining.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Yes, you have just seized the senator by the balls there.
There are still enough corrupt asshats left in congress to block any and all good ideas to put people back to work. They are still stuck with the idea that tax cuts solve all problems, but are too short sighted to realize that the last 8 years of tax cuts and outsourcing jobs overseas are what got us here in the first place.
I do not hold the republicans solely @ fault here though. The dem side has sought to put plenty of wasteful pork like "Family Planning" crap in their bills as well. I also don't think much of Obama's idea to give 1K to the poor that don't even earn enough to pay taxes @ all. Give them jobs so they earn enough to pay taxes. Give them a shovel and a road to build. What's so hard about that?
All these people just don't get it at all. Everyone in America needs to write their senators and representatives, both republican and democrat, and demand they get with the program and write legislation that will put money into the hands of the working class in the form of jobs and tax cuts. People need to feel warm and fuzzy enough to spend money on new homes and consumer goods. Only that will turn the economy around.
Tax cuts for billionaires won't work, they never have, they never will.Many here don't realize the 2001 (republican) congress with a republican president are the ones that authored all the shady legislation (think derivatives and other stupid ideas) that snowballed into the recent global economic crash.
"Suppose you were an idiot...and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself." Mark Twain
You missed a crucially important point: Tax cuts have an immediate impact on the economy. Stimulus takes months or years to propagate into an economy.
Here is the problem. Most of this stuff is pork that should be spent and debated on their own merits. In the Stimulus package, it was originally passed off as an emergency bill with no debate. When the Republicans grew a pair, it forces the debate but the so called necessity of spending doesn't offer a proper debate.
Think of this like the bailout bill, there was such a rush to put it out that key politicians including Obama said it doesn't need to be perfect, we can change things later, then we find out that the bail out paid for parties at large resorts and so on. All of the stuff cut from this bill are things that will need more of a debate then what is currently availible to the politicians. So while they are cut from this bill which was basically a spending and appropriations bill before, they aren't off the table, it's just an affirmation to push them to the proper time, place, and environment to consider them. There are no short term job creation or direct financial benefit with them to the public in the near term so they don't need to be included into a stimulus bill by necessity which would bypass the traditional debate surrounding them.
In short, when they drafted the original bill, they went past stimulus and started piling in wish list items, some of which have been rejected for quite some time, some of which might be good for the country but has no direct effect on the goals of the stimulus goal, but most of all deserve to be properly considered in normal debate. Sneaking them into this bill was only an attempt to remove the debate on them, cutting them out doesn't mean they are gone, it just means they will have to go throught normal channels.
I'm glad someone took the GP to task for that horrible bit of innumeracy. I think it's fair to go a little farther and estimate that a 109k household will pay on the order of 2/3 the tax of a 154k household, so we're talking around $8K rather than $13K. That's still quite a bit, and people are justified in their concern that the money be spent in a way which will have a net effect rather than just shifting things around to less efficient uses e.g. from Greyhound to Amtrak.
Let's ignore for the moment that this is deficit spending, so no one's taxes will be raised.
Let's not. Where, exactly, do you think it comes from?
A) Borrowed from people by issuing treasury bonds or other debt instruments
That just means they'll have to tax people later to pay for the original spending. (Plus, given that the Fed is BUYING treasury bonds like crazy to force the interest rate down, this seems unlikely.)
B) Spent without taking or getting it from anyone
This is inflation, which is actually a hidden tax (on savings, rather than income). Allow me to illustrate:
According to http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h6/hist/h6hist1.txt, the current M2 money supply is around 8 trillion. Let's pretend that's the best measure and run through a couple different hypothetical scenarios:
1) The government says "we are going to take 10% of your dollars and spend it on things." This is a regular tax of $800B, albeit based on accumulated money (how many dollars you own) rather than income (how many dollars you gained this year). Price levels don't really change, although money is redistributed a bit depending what the government does with it. (Assuming it's for "stimulus," price levels of consumer goods might actually increase, since the spending will be targeted to people who are more likely to spend it again on consumption.)
2) The government says "we are changing the US currency from the 'Dollar' to the 'Tollar.' We are going to create 10% more Tollars than Dollars, and everyone will be given 1.1 Tollars for each Dollar they previously had." Just before the day of the switch, you could buy a loaf of bread for $3.00. After the switch, it will cost exactly T3.30, because $1.00 = T1.10 by definition. Since you have 10% more Tollars, this doesn't mean anything to your consumption or earnings possibilities.
3) The government says "we aren't going to change the name, but we are going to create 10% more Dollars, and everyone will be given an additional 10c for each Dollar they previously had." This is exactly the same case as (2). The name of a currency is irrelevant. After this distribution of 10% extra dollars to everyone who owned dollars, the loaf of bread will rise from $3.00 to $3.30, and nobody will be able to buy any more or less than they previously could, just like with the switch to Tollars. Dollars devalue by 10%.
4) The government does (3), and then (1). (3) has no actual impact of quality of living (unless you were trading on the currency exchange), and (1) has the normal impact of a 10% tax on all savings, so the net impact of (4) is basically the same as (1).
5) The government says "we are going to create 10% more Dollars, and spend them instead of giving them to you." This is like (4), but just cutting out the administrative step of giving people money and then taking it back. The net impact will be the same as (4), which is the same as (1).
So you can see that an inflation-funded spending program of $800B will have the same effect (once the money is spent) of taxing everyone 10% on their accumulated savings! It would be beyond the scope of this post to discuss whether or not that's a good idea. I simply wanted to demonstrate that deficit spending is not some magic way to avoid taxing people. It just changes where and when the tax is applied. It will either come now or later, as an income tax, inflation tax, or something els
Obama is not your saviour. He is a politician, and the USA is driven by lobbyists whom the best of are backed by the richest corporations.
Want too see how bad things really are for the USA.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=ca2_1234032281 Wait till about 2:20 in.
46137
650 Million for converter boxes?
Which will go to companies who make them and their workers, and hopefully get spent and enter the economy.
You do know that no converter box is made by a US company? This will do wonders for all those Chinese folks, except they are probably made in a mostly-automated factory with 20 employees. It might do some good for Walmart and Best Buy selling them, but not all that much.
We gave up on consumer electronics a long, long time ago. I think the last TV plant in the US closed in the 1980s sometime. And I believe it was in Chicago. All the familiar brands (RCA, Zenith, etc.) are now owned by companies in China and Korea.
Or maybe they just don't see this working out any better than the first $200 billion.
When a government job is created, it is not stimulative. It is a transfer from taxpayers to another taxpayer, and since government activity is never 100% efficient, there are significant losses. A direct transfer payment (without government meddling) would AT LEAST be 100% efficient.
Not that it makes the plan a good idea. In order for any "stimulus" to work, it must generate more jobs or economic activity than it costs. There is very, very little in this package that does this.
Please don't repeat this completely discredited meme. You only look foolish doing so.
The truth is that the public sector and the private sector both do things very well and very badly. Mostly because human beings run both of them.
There are plenty of examples of effective government programs, just as there are plenty examples of failed private programs.
The jobs it will create, if any, are jobs that will be around in 4 to 12 years, not tomorrow or next month or even next year. The idea of the Stimulus is to get jobs sooner then that.
Yes, it will. But it will also take a resource planning comity to select a site for the schools, a study on traffic patterns so you don't have little Susie crossing a highway on the way home like she is playing frogger, an infrastructure upgrade in the area so the water supply lines and the sewage lines can handle 500 extra people and so on. I know, they just relocated a school in my area, ended up building it in the adjacent lot and took up part of the playground to do it. It took over 5 years before they broke ground, then another 2 to put the structure up, 1 year to upgrade the sewage and water supply moving to it and it isn't expected to be open for another year or two.
First you need to determine what kind of broadband will be delivered because of the funding, then you have to figure the layout of the new broadband infrastructure based around existing right of ways withing the limits of the chosen technology. Then if you plan to deliver it to anyone who isn't already being servers by broadband, you will have to negotiate new right of ways and perhaps go to court to secure them is one doesn't already exist. Time Warner wanted to put Cable down my road and the township demanded $3 per customer and Time Warner backed out because they were already going to have to be paying Verizon a conduit charge to tag along their existing right of way.
Both of those scenarios are not just things you can simply do. There are legal requirements, permissions to get, perhaps to force through the courts, and planning as well as other things that need to be accomplished first. It just takes too long to get done.
Here is the problem, if they can't survive debate, then they probably aren't the top priority at the time. This is exactly why they need to be debated and why they need to be processes like regular spending. If we had more pressing needs the School construction, maybe like repairing existing schools or perhaps upgrading them to be more energy efficient so they cost less to operate then we should go that route. Perhaps the wireless spectrum that was just sold can and will fill the broad band gap and do what is necessary there without the use of Government funding. Perhaps when the broadband issues come back around, there will be more money for it because someone can make the case of how important it is instead of one person attempting to sneak it into a bill with no debate.
Both of those issues are things the US government probably shouldn't be involved with anyways, but if they are going to be involved, then it should be discussed and let the chips fall where they may on the merits of the programs.
The problem is this: Just as we would still have Americans reading by candlelight and shitting in outhouses if it wasn't for the rural water and electrification acts of the 1930's so too will we have a whole damned lot of Americans unable to get ANY usable Internet without a broadband act. Why? Because the big telecos have already run to the places where they can make massive profit and simply aren't interested in running anywhere else. Let me give an example from my own life.
When my parents built their house the cable and ISDN stopped approximately 2 blocks from their house. You can actually see the cable and DSL junction boxes from their front porch. That was 29 years ago. Do you know how far away it is now? That's right! 2 blocks away. Even though there are now a good 3 dozen houses on that little 5 mile road, all of which would have been happy to buy the full bundle package for 5 years. How do I know that? Because about 7 years ago I got all the neighbors together and we sat down and talked. It turned out there was a couple of small business owners living there that would love to telecommute into the office, and I had just gotten a large check. So we got together and offered the cableco 15k simply to run the cable. We even offered to get together as a group and sign 5 year agreements for the full bundle package. By our estimate they would make over a quarter million over the life of the agreement and the only out of pocket costs would have been the labor, since at the time that 15k would have paid for the line.
So now they can telecommute and I can just access my families PCs by remote when they need fixes, right? WRONG! To wire up the lousy 4.5 miles they wanted 75k ABOVE whatever the costs of the line PLUS labor were. And from talking to folks around the state and throughout the south I have found a disturbing pattern (at least for me) in the way the telecos behave. Everyone I have talked to says the same thing, that the telecos and cablecos haven't run anything in over a decade, or in our case, in 3 decades. That the little ISPs got bought out by the big guys and that is when any upgrades and rollouts stopped dead. Meanwhile while our lines get slower and shittier by the year our rates are climbing and the FAP (what y'all call a cap) keeps getting worse because they have us by the short hairs. In my area the cable is now $156 for basic/phone/lowest Internet with a FAP of a lousy 36GB. From my neighbors I have learned that the DSL is the same but have worse speed and a even shittier 25GB FAP. Oh, and anyone who uses Linux or OSX gets screwed since all Windows updates don't count against the FAP but all of y'alls do. Nice huh?
THIS is why we need the broadband bill. There is a GOOD reason why we break up monopolies: It is because it doesn't take a monopoly long before its ONLY job is to kill any competition and keep its iron grip on the market. Well then WISPs and the free market will save us right? WRONG. We got a shitty WISP a few years back and I hear they will be out of business by this fall. Why? Because the teleco has been squeezing the living hell out of them for access to the backbone and they simply can't afford the 10 years worth of lawyers fees to fight back. Because monopolies have deep pockets and can SLAPP you into next week. If WE the people run the lines then WE own them. We can then lease them out to multiple vendors and finally have competition so that prices will go down and quality/speeds will go up. The free market only works if there is competition but the buying frenzy that the big telecos and cablecos were allowed to do has ended competition for a great lot of the country.
Believe me in a lot of ways I think the same as you. I am a Barry Goldwater small government type that was run out of the Republican party when the religious nuts took over in the 80's(yes I am old....get off my lawn!) but even I admit there are certain jobs that simply can't be left to the free market. Like bridges, freeways, and yes, broadband. I have seen with my own eyes how broadband has bec
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I'm not going to get involved in the big debate over Keynes vs. the gold bugs. Just on the actual topic of the subject note...
The House had a $6B broadband appropriation, divided between rural (Dept. of Agriculture) and not-necessarily-rural (NTIA) programs. The Senate totally rewrote those sections. Sen. Rockefeller (D-Verizon) added about $2B for "advanced broadband" defined as 100 Mbps down, 20 Mbps up, in the form of a corporate tax credit, for new service to any residential customer. Even if only a tiny percentage took the higher speed, and it was totally closed to competitive Internet or telephone services.
So the grant could not be used by most standalone ISPs, because they're generally not profitable (so no need for a tax credit), or aren't Corporations (partnerships, municipalities, non-profits, etc., don't get anything). Nor could cable (upstream speed limits) or AT&T (U-Verse is too slow). The money had exactly one recipient in mind, It was a subsidy for pulling FiOS in suburban areas to compete with established cable companies and ISPs. The "underserved" areas could include Tampa, New York City, Short Hills, Santa Monica, or Chevy Chase.
The subsidy would have added precisely zero new FiOS lines, since it would have covered their existing plans. It was just more money for Ivan Seidenberg's bonus. Good riddance!
Science is "pork" on this bill because the purpose of this bill is to stimulate the economy from the bottom up. And /., of all places, should know that science seems to have no place at the bottom of America... Seriously, "science" is such a general term that it doesn't really say what it's for. R&D? That has a future payout, like infrastructure, but only if it succeeds in finding something of value (cure for cancer, AIDS, etc., or proves the toxicity or carcinogenic nature of something, or disproves the toxicity or carcinogenic natures of something commercial, or finds new materials for building things better, etc.) Most of science seems to get results that are, let's face it, uninteresting. "Chemical X does not correlate with condition Y." It's useful knowledge in that it eliminates (or supports the elimination of) something. But that's not going to stimulate anything.
Science is probably also pork if it's moneys targetted to special interest groups - such as a specific Senator's home state college - especially if it's solely to get their vote.
Similarly, without having RTFA, the construction costs for education are much more convoluted than, say, building more roads and bridges. You need to ensure you're putting schools where they're needed, and not just in some CongressCritter's back yard, again, to get their vote. Proving additional road infrastructure as useful where you put it is MUCH simpler than proving optimal (or near-optimal) school placement.
I'm not saying that this is money poorly spent. Merely that I agree with sumdumass' assessment that these probably should be debated on their merits rather than rammed through with the stimulus package.
I know of two schools locally where imminent construction has been put on hold due to loss of state funding. I'd say these qualify as 'shovel ready' and certainly would provide stimulus and necessary infrastructure.
After 8 years of "no time to discuss" in order to pass anti-american legislation, I find your argument that we must stop and discuss anything which might be 'debatable" laughable. Everything is debatable to someone, especially those with a self-serving agenda.
"You have liberated me from thought."