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$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.
The Republicans are just as clueless as the Democrats in the current situation. The reason is because, just like the Great Depression, there really are no answers to deal with the current economic downturn. Only time and debt destruction can fix it...
In short.. They can spend $2T if they like, and it will do little to nothing to stop the current problems from advancing. When you are a nation that is 70% consumption and have a 400% GDP debt ratio, there is little you can do to 'simulate" the underlying fundamentals. Meaning, the problem was overstimulation to begin with..
Republicans are in fact the only ones holding this pork-laden monstrosity at bay.
I wouldn't bother with a bill in the first place--I don't see stimulating the economy listed as a federal government responsibility in the Constitution--but if you're going to do this at least be honest about it.
With something like 60% of spending happening in 2010 and 2011 they are "stimulative", they're pork-barrel spending. The boy President thinks that any spending counts as stimulus--the only thing this bill will stimulate is more government and more debt.
Some version of this mess will eventually pass, but hopefully we'll strip some of the pork out of it. One thing's for sure--this is not "change we can believe in".
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
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.
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.
No, money for schools would come from the taxes paid to their local governments by construction workers who have jobs as a result of the stimulus package.
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
holy shit. You actually believe that, don't you?
Yes, he does believe it and so do I. We've had 8 years of "tax cuts are how you stimulate the economy" and look where we are. But the Republicans continue to oppose the opposite tack as if it's not worth trying. Our schools are foundering. Our internet is slower than any other developed nation. Yet Republicans forced spending on both of those VERY NEEDY PROGRAMS to be cut from this bill. Both would be the epitome of economic stimulus but Republicans are obstructionists yet again. It's simply true. So yes, we believe it. Funny how that works.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I don't see stimulating the economy listed as a federal government responsibility in the Constitution
"Promote the general welfare"
You have it exactly backwards.
It's the Republicans (fascists though they are) that are right in macroeconomic theory and its the Democrats (socialists) that are in fact, operating in ideological mantra that spending is somehow going to work. It didn't work for Austria, didn't work for us in 1930's, didn't work in 1974 and won't work now.
The way I look at it, they have two ways to handle the economic crisis:
1. Do absolutely nothing and let the economy continue to deflate until we get back to pre-housing bubble status. The problem with this approach is that you'll have 25% unemployment, soup lines that are worse than the great depression, and the entire world will take 10-20 years to pull itself out of the mess, if people don't riot and burn the world down first.
2. Dump money into the economy and continue to prop up the housing bubble by buying failed mortgage debt, hoping for a soft landing. This approach is doomed to failure as well because you can't keep pumping money into a bubble hoping to sustain it forever. The bubble is going to either pop quickly or deflate slowly. This approach only kicks the football down the field another 5-10 years for the next generation of politicians to deal with it.
Guess which approach our government is picking? I guess I'd choose option 2 also but either way we're fucked.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
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.
Our schools are foundering. Our internet is slower than any other developed nation. Yet Republicans forced spending on both of those VERY NEEDY PROGRAMS to be cut from this bill.
Our schools are not foundering due to a lack of funding. They are foundering because a powerful public education cartel has driven school spending skyward, making the United States among the world's biggest education spenders, even as student achievement lags.
"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.
Oh my God you are so full of crap. No one is saying that building schools won't employ people. What is being said is, "what happens to those jobs when the schools built?" These are not permanent jobs.
Also, building schools is not what Republicans object to. It's the millions to birth control programs. How does giving out condoms provide jobs? How is money to Amtrak going to produce jobs? Sure, it helps out the people working for Amtrak, but every passenger on Amtrak is NON-passenger on Greyhound or Delta. How does extending unemployment benefits create jobs? How does allocating money so groups like ACORN can purchase houses and rent them out create jobs?
Now these may be great ideas, but they do NOT belong in the "stimulus" package if they do not stimulate. Seriously, how big of a moron do you have to be to NOT understand that?
In other words, don't let the facts cloud your preconceived judgment of "Republicans bad, Democrats good".
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
> You can ALWAYS count on stimulating an economy of the US's size by reducing taxation.
Yeah, so maybe not. Look up the velocity of money, which has fallen through the floor in the last few months. What that means is that people are essentially stuffing their mattresses, and any additional tax cuts will, in fact, not be stimulative. So you need to directly stimulate - and that means spend.
See this:
http://www.urbandigs.com/2008/12/you_want_to_see_what_deflation.html
Also take a good, long, hard look at deflation and what that means, especially in relation to potential tax cuts. Arguably, we are in a deflationary spiral right now.
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 :-)
Everyone screams "LESS TAXATION" and other hoopla to waive their economist e-peen around like it's some giant stick of holy fruition to wake up people you disagree with.
But you know what? I don't think that will help either. For smaller business, maybe, just maybe. Larger businesses already pay next to nothing through creative accounting and the government really doesn't give a shit. Less taxes just makes it easier on them to line their pockets that they are already lining.
Yeah, some business will be responsible and use less taxes to help grow their business, but I have my doubts as to it being a large majority.
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.
Bullshit.
Taxation can serve one of two purposes.
#1, it can fund actual necessary services that the majority of the populace agrees upon. Things like road infrastructure construction, police/fire/emergency medical services, public parks and recreation facilities, schools, and so on.
#2, it can be a form of "wealth redistribution", which is why the socialists are always playing class-warfare games and insisting on jacking up taxes on "the rich", which they define in ways that make no sense.
Now, taxation can also be done at different levels. Not everything needs to go through the federal government; in fact, the less that goes through the federal government the better, because the more layers you put between the money and its destination, the more you waste in bureaucracy.
And while you're whining about "very needy programs" being cut from the bill, remember the millions of $ that Obama slipped into the bill for his ACORN vote-fraud friends? Yeah, "somehow" the democrats don't want to give that one up either.
Now, tax cuts - in a normal economic environment - do stimulate the economy. Economics, on a micro and short-term level, work fundamentally on how much money there is in the system. If you jack the tax rate up to 50%, you will watch commerce plummet. If you reduce the tax rate, you will see that money reenter the economy - either by investment (banks or business investment, which retranslate into spending through loans) or by spending. The trick is to get the tax rate to where it needs to be to support necessary services and, yes, cut the programs that are either (a) not working or (b) unnecessary.
The problem in this economy is not tax cuts. The problem is that there is a massive amount of bad and unsustainable debt, due to incredibly poor education (most kids in the last 20 years having been given NO classes on basic economics and responsible financial planning in school), "give it to me now" attitudes, and a system of shoddy loans backed by the "securitization" model which grew out of the blackmail/fraud division (of which Obama as a so-called "community organizer" was one of the attack dogs) of ACORN and similar groups.
Over the last 15 years, an incredible number of bad loans were issued. Most of these ought to be in foreclosure right now. This ought to be an incredible time to buy a home for those who have been financially responsible over the last 15 years.
Instead, the government is trying to shore up the housing industry, wasted money "bailing out" banks without any oversight to make sure that the money went into new, properly vetted loans, and this new Spendulus package is based on what works in ordinary times, not on fixing the root problem.
The real answer to the current economic problem, alas, is time. Housing prices ought to be 50-60% what they currently are, and the market has to sort that out. An incredible number of people who previously had mortgages should never have been issued them under normal Three C's criteria (Capital, Capacity, Consistency aka Credit History), and this inflated the price of houses and not only screwed up the banks, but ripped off those who were being financially responsible.
If you're in a foreclosure situation on your house and you could reasonably get out of it with a 25% reduction in the base home value and a loan recalculation, I can see that. But you shouldn't be offered that just because you are in foreclosure.
You want to know why people are pissed about this barrel of pork crap Obama is calling a "stimulus" package? It's because the responsible people once again get fucked. I have over an 800 credit score, I'm building up money for a down payment on a house and doing things the responsible way, living within my means, and my tax rate is going to be jacked up to pay for an "economic stimulus" that consists of handouts to Obama's worthless friends and to "bail out" the mortgage of people who somehow got a
If you can read this sig, congratulations, you have your glasses on!
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.
And apparently, magic pixies will simply open up their checkbooks and give you trillions of dollars in taxes, too.
Maybe I'm different than the rest of you, but if I worked for it, I would like to keep it. I'm sick of being taxed out of 50% of everything I earn, so that it can be given to someone who doesn't deserve it.
Don't believe me?
Remember: Your taxes are more than income tax.
Here are some other things you are taxed on: Gasoline. Food. Clothing. Property. Investments. Cigarettes. Beer and Wine. TVs. Cars. Telecom taxes.
An interesting exercise is to take all of your spending for a month, and break it all down into taxes and non-taxes. You'll crap yourself, I promise.
We're getting raped enough with the taxes. Much like the schools, the government has more than enough money. The problem is a lack of accountability and wasteful spending - neither of which you are getting with the new administration.
Oh, don't get me wrong. You didn't have it with the last administration either. I'm not playing sides here, I'm just pointing it out.
More spending is going to help in any case. Neither will socialism - and make no mistake about it, America is no longer a capitalist nation. That era is now over, thanks to Congress.
Love sees no species.
They are also foundering because:
- We are having to pay OUR tax money to educate the kids of people who illegally entered the country and mooch off all our social services, demanding handouts even as they thumb their noses at our laws.
- Our classes are forced to move at the pace of the slowest fucking idiot, rather than stratifying classes into advanced and non-advanced, moving the smarter kids up to give them greater challenges and keep them from getting bored.
- Thanks to years of parent lawsuits, the very idea of holding a kid back a year because they haven't learned what they needed to learn has gone away. These stupid fucking parents insist "waah but it'll hurt his self-esteem don't you dare cut my kid off from his friends" - I see them every day and want to grab them, shake them, and yell your kid is a fucking moron! He is harming the education of the other kids around him! But nooooo... instead, we socially promote them, so the entire 8th grade class is still trying to read at a 4th grade level. Meanwhile, the smart kids are bored out of their fucking skulls. I've watched a friend's kid actually get sent home with "warnings" from the teacher. What was the kid doing? She was performing like a 4th grader in the 1st grade class. She picked up cursive writing watching her parents. She finished the "math homework" while the teacher was blabbing on trying to teach the rest of the kids how to multiply 2x2, and then got out a copy of The Mysterious Island I'd given as a christmas present and started reading.
US public schools are not foundering because we don't spend enough money. They are foundering because teachers' unions make it impossible to get rid of bad teachers, because school districts do not stratify and have allowed social promotion of retards to become the norm, and because they punish the exemplary kids rather than nurturing their intelligence and love of learning.
And most of this has shit-all to do with monetary spending, too, save for the fact that when the kids of illegals are found in public schools, the administration should be required to report it under penalty of jail time, and INS/ICE should use that as a great opportunity to track down the parents and deport the whole lot.
If you can read this sig, congratulations, you have your glasses on!
A debt crisis is just a generic way to saying that a nations (or world) wealthy class needs to realize their losses... Protecting a nations wealthy, which is what we are currently doing, is not smart and will not work long term because it will ultimately create social unrest. Personally, I would prefer option 3.
3. Realize that an economic collapse is inevitable, be a real leader, and prepare the public for it. Next, seize all major insolvent banks and wipe out bond and shareholders. Also, provide "fast track' legislation for corporate and personal bankruptcies. Next, expand social welfare services during the crisis to make sure that no one starves or is made unnecessarily homeless. Next, provide government sponsored services for newly formed businesses, and individuals fresh out of bankruptcy to help them get back on their feet. Meaning, once the mal-investment debt is destroyed, provide stimulus at a point where it actually has the chance of being used as a real investment.
And finally... Eliminate the fractional reserve banking model forever. It ultimate is the reason for boom and bust cycles, and in the global marketplace its time has come and gone...
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!)
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.
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
What happens when it was the government's meddling that caused the economic downturn in the first place?
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Businesses never pay taxes. YOU DO.
Businesses necessarily must make up for less profit by sticking it to their customers (in the form of higher prices or less choice), their employees (less wages, fewer benefits, and fewer jobs), their shareholders (less earnings per share, less dividends).
When you tax businesses, you're just indirectly taxing everyone else related to that business, including YOU. Business taxes appeal to the ignorant, because it makes it seem like someone else is paying, when in reality, it's YOU.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
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.
Promote != Provide.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
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.
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
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.