$6 Billion Proposal For High-Speed Internet Grants 280
witherstaff writes "House Democrats have proposed $6 billion in Internet investmentsas part of a sweeping economic stimulus bill that the full House is expected to vote on next week. The $6 billion is considered a down payment on efforts Obama will make in this area over the next several years. Of course let's not forget the $200 billion broadband scandal that the large telecommunication companies have been paid but never delivered on."
Verizon Fios cherrypicking (Score:5, Informative)
You know how FiOS is just about everywhere along the east coast? Well, everywhere except Boston.
Why? Because in MA, each town decides if it wants to grant a franchise for cable TV. Not internet- just TV.
Verizon doesn't like that, but the burbs are the best customers- they have lots of HDTV sets, they like the packages, and they don't do annoying things like share their Wifi connection to 6 other people in a apartment building.
Well, guess what? Verizon has been rolling out FiOS to damn near everywhere in the state, even west-nowhere places like 500-person towns out near Worcester nobody has heard of...yet still no FiOS for anyone in Boston. It's even been in the papers- THREE YEARS AGO- about how Verizon was cherrypicking. A year ago, someone asked Mayor Menino what the fuck was going on, and he pointed the finger squarely at Verizon. Not that I trust him, but in the meantime, some hick represetative from the western end of the state gave Verizon tens of millions of dollars to roll out services in the western end of the state...with no requirements that they provide service to the city.
Meanwhile, we're stuck with really crappy DSL offerings, Comcast's throttling and misleading advertising (go on, try to find the real speed, not the "powerboost" speed which you get for all of about 10MB of transfer), or RCN's overall shittyness. Worse still- Comcast has just started getting really nasty about incoming SMTP and HTTP; they've shut me off twice, despite best efforts to sneak under their radar. I suspect they're enforcing their ToS to try and catch small/home business owners saving $50/month (yes, you read that right- $100/mo for internet service for businesses.)
Remember the Cities, ok? (Score:1, Informative)
Some cities (i.e.: Worcester, MA) have horrible choices: 5Mb/.7Mb Charter with their copious outages and soon-to-be-reborn NebuAd or (about) 2.5Mb/.7Mb Verizon while Cape Cod enjoys 30Mb/2Mb cable access. Reason: old "last mile" wiring.
Remember us in the cities too please?
Re:Nationalise the networks (Score:3, Informative)
from what i understand the government is buying up troubled assets (TARP) from banks and whatnot to get them off the banks books. in return the government gets equity warrants which allows the government to purchase non-voting shares (which probably may or may not be preferred) in the bank from which it bought the troubled assets.
this really all goes back to how our finance system works. normally a bank has 'x' dollars to lend out. once they lend out the 'x' they package up those loans and sell them to someone else. now the bank has more money to loan out. problem is, no one wanted to by debt anymore since many people have been defaulting on those loans.
here is a basic place to start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Assets_Relief_Program [wikipedia.org]
Re:Ahh ... the generosity (Score:3, Informative)
Seriously, why is the answer to mismanagement of money (tax payer or private money as the recent market troubles have shown) always to give away tax payer money?
Your mistake is believing this is an attempt to solve the previous mismanagement of money. That is not the case. This and the other public works projects are about wealth redistribution. Basically, the idea here is to take money from the few, incredibly wealthy people who have gained ever larger shares of the wealth, in order to move some wealth to the huge portion of the US that has none and save the economy from total collapse.
I'm so glad that the Democrats are so generous with MY money. Of course, the Republicans before them were basically the same, as were the Democrats before those Republicans, and so on going back quite a ways.
This election we did have a clear economic choice with the two parties. Both parties understood the need to move wealth to the poor in order to save the economy. Both (I think) understood that trickle down economics and moving more wealth to the wealthy was a failure. Both claimed to want tot trim government spending but understood the realities of how small of cuts they could really make without making the economy even worse.
The clear difference was the Democrats want to increase taxes for the ultra-wealthy and move that to the poor. The Republicans wanted to borrow more money from foreign powers and move that to the poor and hope that our currency would hold value anyway and we'd find a way to pay it off somewhere later on.
Make bad choices in the marketplace? Here is some tax payer money. When is this going to stop?
The problem we have now is we can't realistically let the failed economic ventures collapse because it will take the whole show down with them. After we solve this crisis, there is one simple thing we can do to help prevent it from happening again... but I doubt you'd get more than a few votes for it. Ban foreign and corporate lobbying and put strict controls on favors given to civil servants or people who recently were civil servants. People have rights to give their money to political parties and candidates, but corporations and foreign power have no inherent rights and it is absurd that this legalized bribery is tolerated. If you really want this to stop, push that agenda has hard as you can locally and in your state.
Re:Nationalise the networks (Score:5, Informative)
Your information is dated. The TARP program never bought any "troubled assets." The TARP program directly invested in banks by buying newly issued preferred shares.
The TARP program originally sold to Congress was to buy troubled assets. That plan was quickly abandoned after the program was passed. See the "changes to the initial program" section from your wikipedia link.
Re:Subject (Score:3, Informative)
Plenty of Democrats where unwilling to support it so without republican support the bailout would not have passed. (It failed the first time.)
Re:Stimulus? (Score:4, Informative)
What I don't understand is how this could be considered economic stimulus. Sure, it'll help in certain marginal ways, but the only thing that can fix the US economy is if the government quits taking half of what everyone earns and lets the earners of the money figure out the best way to spend it.
Actually, that is exactly the opposite of what they need to do. The recession is happening for the same reason the great depression did. If you don't progressively tax the wealthy, the wealth condensation effect pools larger and larger shares of the wealth into fewer hands. Eventually those on the bottom have nothing and live on credit, until that too collapses. That's where we are now. It's not that the US is poor, it's just that the bottom 50% has a net worth of zero. With no money they can't invest and pay huge amounts of their income paying interest just to get by. It's like a tax on being poor that goes to the wealthy instead of the government. When all the wealth consolidates the economy becomes unstable.
The solution to this is to take more of the taxes from the very wealthy and less from the very poor, ideally while creating jobs for the unemployed. It doesn't help the unemployed if you don't tax the income they don't have, you need to create jobs in the US. Public works projects are a traditional way to do this and spending money on broadband can create a lot more jobs than in other areas because it enables new telcos to form and existing internet businesses to expand, if it is implemented well anyway.
If you give tax breaks to the lowest earners, they buy more tv's and mcdonald's...
The low earners are already not paying any taxes because they have no income or not enough to count.
...give the tax breaks to the middle and upper class, and they end up investing in new business and current business expansion.
Tax breaks to the middle help. Tax breaks to the upper class, not so much. That's what they've been trying for the last 8 years. It's called "trickle down economics" and even the die hard supporters are admitting it is a failure. Everything they invest is a tax write off anyway, so taxing them less does not really motivate them to invest more and lot of what they invest in creates jobs overseas instead of in the US.
If the greedy bastards in DC would quit thinking of tax revenue as their "income" and just cut taxes across the board, including corporate and capital gains taxes, I'd bet you a non-free beer that you would see IMMEDIATE stock market growth, followed by strong GDP growth, dropping unemployment, and REAL opportunity.
It's been tried historically and it did not work. The problem is wealth disparity more than anything else. Tax cuts across the board do nothing to redistribute the wealth, so it will continue to consolidate and we'll have continued instability.
Tax dollars spent on infrastructure do stay in circulation. They go to pay wages to people who are currently unemployed. Bill Gates pays a thousand times less taxes than I do (as a percentage of income). He can afford to pay a much, much larger share and still eat and live normally and if he has to that money can do a lot to solve the debt problems of the very poor so they don't lose their houses and so they can have jobs building infrastructure that grows the economy overall. It helps the US economy a lot more than letting him give it to Africans and invest in creating more jobs in India.
Basically, I don't think you've really studied the economics of recession and the great depression specifically. There are some good books out there that are informative and entertaining. You might want to check one out.
Re:Verizon Fios cherrypicking (Score:1, Informative)
False. I live in Verizon's first (or maybe second) test-market area in the DC area - Oakton, VA in Fairfax. I remember 6 or 7 years ago getting a postcard in the mail saying FiOS was here.
Well guess what, FiOS isn't here yet. Why? Because I live in a 25 year old condo development. The townhomes across the street can all get it, but not my condo. Cox provides 10Mbps/2Mbps internet as their standard offering thankfully, but it doesn't have the low-latency that fiber offers.
I literally called week after week that first year, and many times since to inquire, get my name on the "list", etc... with no luck.
Even though I'm willing to pay double the price for "business" class service (read: static IP and no port blocking) they've still ignored my neighborhood.