FCC chair defends broadband discounts for poor people against Republican attack

Lawmakers criticized FCC for something that was decided by Congress, chair says.

See full article...

 

[ender78]

The commenters here are the biggest group of circus seals I've ever seen.

Ars Technica: rEpUbLiCaNs BaD! hAtE pOoR pEoPlE

tosses fish*

Reddit atheist commenters: Arr Arr Arr!!!!

How the hell would you know, this is your first post here.

 

[artvandelayIIII]

You could start by forgiving peoples mortgages, business loans, and credit card debt. Those would do even more to stimulate the economy and help working class people's lives by a massive margin.

Great idea! You have my vote.

 

[AmanoJyaku]

How the hell would you know, this is your first post here.

On that account, yes...

 

[artvandelayIIII]

This reminds me of being in college and those CD clubs where you signed up and got your pick of 12 albums for 1 cent, but then owed a monthly subscription fee. Everyone would order the free CD's and never pay their bill, knowing the company couldn't do much.

Then the Visa babes on Spring Break giving out $300 prepaid visa cards in front of the bars with only your drivers license needed for approval. People would claim, I was drunk and couldn't legally sign the contract, I'm not paying, sue me!

This is the way we ended up with $2 trillion in college debt unpaid.

Go to bed, grandpa. You're making zero sense and all your half baked libertarian-light horse shit is rightly being downvoted into oblivion.

 

[jmarchel]

What is it about our government that thinks socialism is great? Especially in light of US 290 trillion debt debt?

 

[EnPeaSea]

Then the Visa babes on Spring Break giving out $300 prepaid visa cards in front of the bars with only your drivers license needed for approval. People would claim, I was drunk and couldn't legally sign the contract, I'm not paying, sue me!

Um... a pre-paid Visa card is a gift-card that can be used anywhere that takes Visa.

 

[JSW0]

Just to maintain some perspective: the US provides $646 billion in subsidies, every year, to multi-billion-dollar fossil fuel companies. And globally that number is $5.4 trillion.

But hey, we can't afford $30 to help people get on the internet, because that costs too much.

https://www.budget.senate.gov/chair...fuel-subsidies-we-are-subsidizing-the-danger-

You cite some eye-watering numbers, but if you read the linked report from Senator Whitehouse’s office, you get a much different and quite an unclear picture. The $646 billion number comes from an accounting of the cost of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide, and no information about how that number was calculated is provided. In actual cash subsidy, which would be the equivalent to the cash subsidy for broadband being discussed in this article, the cited report says “In the United States, by some estimates taxpayers pay about $20 billion dollars every year to the fossil fuel industry.” Similarly, no source is given for those estimates or how they were calculated, and of course the industry includes refineries, oil services, all many of companies. Since the number only comes from “some estimates,” there are obviously other estimates that are lower, and likely still others than are much lower. In other words, these suspect large numbers are provided for political reasons - they sound very bad and make people mad. To be clear, subsidizing any profitable industry is questionable I would agree, and certainly climate change is a major problem that has to be addressed.

 

[kragg]

Do you have to have a maniacal laugh in order to be a republican?

No, a mean streak a mile wide and a puddle deep sense of curiosity.

 

[AmanoJyaku]

You cite some eye-watering numbers, but if you read the linked report from Senator Whitehouse’s office, you get a much different and quite an unclear picture. The $646 billion number comes from an accounting of the cost of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide, and no information about how that number was calculated is provided. In actual cash subsidy, which would be the equivalent to the cash subsidy for broadband being discussed in this article, the cited report says “In the United States, by some estimates taxpayers pay about $20 billion dollars every year to the fossil fuel industry.” Similarly, no source is given for those estimates or how they were calculated, and of course the industry includes refineries, oil services, all many of companies. Since the number only comes from “some estimates,” there are obviously other estimates that are lower, and likely still others than are much lower. In other words, these suspect large numbers are provided for political reasons - they sound very bad and make people mad. To be clear, subsidizing any profitable industry is questionable I would agree, and certainly climate change is a major problem that has to be addressed.

If only you bothered to quote the statement in its context. It was the opening statement to a public hearing. The evidence was supplied in that hearing. Which you can find if you bother to look for it. I suspect you don't care, so I'm not going to link it.

 

[had to change your name]

In what way? I claimed the HOPE scholarship pays 100% of tuition, which it does and posted the numbers. Someone claimed it did not but they were wrong.

What part did I not support.

Straight from the front page of the HOPE Scholarship website. (emphasis mine)

Georgia's HOPE Scholarship is available to Georgia residents who have demonstrated academic achievement. The scholarship provides money to assist students with a portion of the tuition cost at a HOPE Scholarship eligible college or university.

https://www.gafutures.org/hope-state-aid-programs/hope-zell-miller-scholarships/hope-scholarship/

 

[JSW0]

If only you bothered to quote the statement in its context. It was the opening statement to a public hearing. The evidence was supplied in that hearing. Which you can find if you bother to look for it. I suspect you don't care, so I'm not going to link it.

The original post suggested that taxpayers subsidize the fossil fuel industry to the tune of $646 billion. This is obviously wrong. Consumers are subsidized to that amount, since those costs are not reflected in the price paid. Yes, if consumers had to pay for the $646 billion annually fossil fuel companies would make much less money, because demand would be crushed. That would indeed reduce atmospheric carbon, but it would also make the US considerably poorer, especially on a relative basis. As for the $20 billion estimate, whatever information there is about how this estimate was reached I can be pretty sure that it is maximized for political effect. Others will minimize for political effect. This too is obvious. Again, I think cash subsidies to fossil fuel companies are suspect, but they have been helpful in getting the industry through very unprofitable periods were it was still in the national interest to increase supply. This national interest has been abundantly clear in the last year as supply from overseas has been highly constrained due to war. Again, I think climate change must be addressed. My comments lament the absurd politicization (everywhere, not just here) of what is essentially a practical/technological problem. This is, after all, a tech site, no? Anymore it reads like every other site, and the comment section indulges in the religion of political affiliation.

 

[Hopefully Smarter]

Fill every republican’s mouth with concrete.

 

[test6554]

I dont agree with republicans on this, but I can see their point of view. They don’t care whether poor people can access the internet. They just don’t want taxpayers to pay for it.

They aren’t going around “attacking” poor people, they are just fed up with going around supporting them via taxation.

Thing is, the poor feel like they are being attacked due to lack of financial education and certain old-fashioned values that don’t align well with capitalism (in a good way). Values like sharing and selflessness that we could all use a bit more of these days.

 

[acefsw]

$38K is not even minimum wage, so that can't be an accurate number. Teachers charge $50+ per hour for tutoring work around here and are booked up. Our piano teacher gets $75 an hour... Why are we arguing about teacher salaries?

My point is rewarding the people with current college debt is extremely unfair to everyone else. No one has explained yet why it's ok to pay off the people who owe money, and screw over the people who paid their dues? It's just seems wrong on all levels.

OMFG, you're thick as a fucking brick. Minimum wage is 15k a year. You do know that $7.25 an hour is still the federal, and Georgia's, minimum wage, right?

 

[Deleted member 807857]

I dont agree with republicans on this, but I can see their point of view. They don’t care whether poor people can access the internet. They just don’t want taxpayers to pay for it.

They aren’t going around “attacking” poor people, they are just fed up with going around supporting them via taxation.

Thing is, the poor feel like they are being attacked due to lack of financial education and certain old-fashioned values that don’t align well with capitalism (in a good way). Values like sharing and selflessness that we could all use a bit more of these days.

The poor are taxed to support the rich, not the other way around.

What world you livin' in, buddy?

 

[Dumdums]

Republicans and far-right conservatives are why Americans and Canadians can't have good things.

I have no problem with the taxes I pay going to support programs where poor people (working, disabled or otherwise) catch a break which can improve their quality of life.

I'm done with right-wing crap and have set the wheels in motion to leave this continent when I retire in a decade. My plans is to go somewhere that hasn't been completely brainwashed by a Murdoch owned media outlet.

 

[Deleted member 388703]

I dont agree with republicans on this, but I can see their point of view. They don’t care whether poor people can access the internet. They just don’t want taxpayers to pay for it.

They aren’t going around “attacking” poor people, they are just fed up with going around supporting them via taxation.

Thing is, the poor feel like they are being attacked due to lack of financial education and certain old-fashioned values that don’t align well with capitalism (in a good way). Values like sharing and selflessness that we could all use a bit more of these days.

In reality, the sole motive of Republicans is exactly the same as any other foreign-backed terrorist cult like them - murder as many Americans as they can.

 

[tuddy_tilly]

What is it with Republicans that they continue the war on the poor???? Pulling up your bootstraps doesn't happen overnight. Food, water, housing, education, and communications are basic necessities to survive. They're stuck with this false scare tactic of the 80's version of the welfare queen. Single black women who were popping out kids to receive checks from the government. That idea proved to be such a low percentage of the poors that it remains laughable. People need help, plain and simple. They don't want to raise minimum wage and not every state has raised theirs. Especially in the Red states.

Currently, 30 states and Washington, D.C., have minimum wages above the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. Five states have not adopted a state minimum wage: Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee. Two states, Georgia and Wyoming, have a minimum wage below $7.25 per hour.

But hey, keep them as wage slaves and they can't better their lives. Plus they'll keep voting red.

well put...

 

[superduf]

Looking at the letter by gop senators linked in the article, it's more nuanced than portrayed - such as serious issues with the program not managing fraud found by the GAO ("FCC has not developed processes to monitor certain antifraud controls. GAO identified weaknesses in these controls, including potential duplicate subscribers, subscribers allegedly receiving fixed broadband at PO Boxes and commercial mailboxes, and subscribers with broadband providers' retail locations as their primary or mailing addresses."), and the criticisms of Rosenworcel in the letter itself raise issues of whether the program is actually helping those that need it ("it appears the vast majority of tax dollars have gone to households that already had broadband prior to the subsidy. According to your testimony, the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC) found that only “20 or 22 percent” of ACP recipients lacked broadband prior to the ACP.6").

Am all for helping out those that need broadband access, but not enabling govt-funded fraudsters along the way...like those jokers with the barbie dolls...

 

[C.M. Allen]

And there it is. "It worked for me 30 years ago" and applying the same expectations for everyone today. Exactly the same as the boomers saying they were able to buy a house in cash while they worked a blue collar job and the wife stayed home with the 3 kids, so kids these days are just lazy.

It's hilarious that cries about 'laziness' are coming from the same generation that LITERALLY ruined the housing markets for generations to come (permanently, in fact, without the significant government intervention it'll take to pry the market out of grip of private equity firms).

 

[alansh42]

…except for 1976-1980, which was the disaster of stagflation under Carter. It took Reagan and Fed Chairman Volcker to break inflation, and bring the economy under control. Coupled with a simplification in taxes, and, government spending, the US economy did well until the recession in 91..

I'm old enough to remember the novelty Nixon pennies made in reaction to inflation during his term.

Not to mention Ford's WIN buttons.

And Paul Volcker was appointed by Carter.

You're really bad at this, aren't you?

 

[alansh42]

Looking at the letter by gop senators linked in the article, it's more nuanced than portrayed - such as serious issues with the program not managing fraud found by the GAO ("FCC has not developed processes to monitor certain antifraud controls. GAO identified weaknesses in these controls, including potential duplicate subscribers, subscribers allegedly receiving fixed broadband at PO Boxes and commercial mailboxes, and subscribers with broadband providers' retail locations as their primary or mailing addresses."), and the criticisms of Rosenworcel in the letter itself raise issues of whether the program is actually helping those that need it ("it appears the vast majority of tax dollars have gone to households that already had broadband prior to the subsidy. According to your testimony, the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC) found that only “20 or 22 percent” of ACP recipients lacked broadband prior to the ACP.6").

Am all for helping out those that need broadband access, but not enabling govt-funded fraudsters along the way...like those jokers with the barbie dolls...

Simply having internet doesn't mean it's not causing you economic stress. If they're not able to pay other bills due to a high cable bill.

Just about every study has shown that rather than subsidies it's better to give people the equivalent in cash and let them use it according to their own priorities. Like with oil subsidies. It would work much better to give that to the public and let them decide if they want to spend it on gas or something else.

But that veers dangerously close to a universal basic income, and doesn't favor the specific industries that the subsidies support.

Yes some people will waste it, but that's dwarfed by the waste of giving people subsidies for one thing rather than what they need.

 

[hpsgrad]

In what way? I claimed the HOPE scholarship pays 100% of tuition, which it does and posted the numbers. Someone claimed it did not but they were wrong.

What part did I not support.

There's the claims about the size of student loans I deal with in post #116:
https://meincmagazine.com/civis/threa...epublican-attack.1498333/page-3#post-42518657
There's the claims about teacher salaries that Coriolanus dealt with in post #108:
https://meincmagazine.com/civis/threa...epublican-attack.1498333/page-3#post-42518569
Then there's your assertion that this program is solely a vote-buying scheme (which has to make the Biden admin a bunch of fucking morons, because there's other voting blocs that could be bought more cheaply and without Republican party lawsuits gumming up the works). I'm not even fucking with that nonsense because it's incoherent and you're never going to budge on it.

Your post #107 helps clarify one significant contributing factor: you've asserted that difficulties in repaying student loans just means that someone made poor life choices beforehand. That is, by definition (so you say), if you struggle with student loan debt, you made bad choices. Other people are very clearly not working from that definition, and I'd assert that the evidence just can't support it, in the sense that the value judgment of 'bad choices' implies that people should have known better, could have made better choices with the knowledge they had at the time. This is effectively impossible to prove, but the way you've set up the conversation everybody is supposed to take this as given and try to rebut it, and oddly enough you can always deflect a rebuttal to what is really an unprovable counterfactual claim.

Your post #121 is full of broad claims that the numbers simply don't back up. And when pressed on those numbers, you retreated to a much narrower claim that happens to be true: in GA, HOPE scholarships do pay full tuition. Tuition. Not 'tuition and mandatory fees', not 'tuition, fees, and books'. Tuition. And on that basis you appear to expect us to accept your much broader claims about how it should be trivially easy to avoid debt if one goes to school in GA to be a teacher. Unless, say, one is a non-traditional student and they have no HOPE eligibility. Or, if they have a bad semester through no fault of their own (WHOOPS! That's impossible to do, because all bad things are just the result of a poor life choice beforehand! But pretend for a second it's possible), they lose HOPE eligibility until/unless they complete some number of credits and have a good-enough GPA at the next credits-achieved milestone/gateway. How is that student going to pay for those credits? They're almost certainly going to turn to loans, or simply abandon school.

HOPE is actually a great example of a rebuttal to your broader position, about 'fairness'. You continually complain about how unfair it all is to people who aren't harmed in the least by student loan forgiveness, on the basis that some undeserving group is getting something. Consider HOPE scholarships. A person who graduates from HS in 2024 has 7 years of HOPE eligibility (with a few extensions for military service, etc.). A person who graduated in 2014 had 10. A person who graduated before 2011 has unlimited duration of eligibility. How is that fair? It's not. Exactly analogously, a person who is entering higher education in the 21st century needs to pick up a far greater proportion of the cost of that education than a person who did so in the last 20 years of the 20th (1980-2000), and that person picked up a far greater proportion of that cost than a person who did so in the previous 20 years (so, 1960-1980). How is that fair? It's not.

So, we could easily reframe the fairness question as a remedy for an unfair situation that recent students have had to deal with. But you won't accept that. You'll just switch to all the folks who did pay off their loans, or the ones who didn't take loans (GI Bill is the typical go-to for this) and stick with your original position: the folks struggling are struggling because they fucked up, and they don't deserve aid. That's fine, you don't need to change your position, and I'm surely not attempting to change it here.

A final consideration: for students who are in an income-based repayment plan (IBR/IDR) for 20 (undergrad) or 25 (years), the federal government will pay the lender the remainder of the loan amount. For folks who have been in an IBR/IDR for that time, it's going to be most of the value of the loan. Skipping the wait does a couple of things that are good public policy:
1. it permits the student to engage more fully in the job and consumer economy; this is good for the economy.
2. it saves the federal government money (because they're paying lenders to cover the full obligation during the IBR/IDR)

Now, it's not fair. It still doesn't give those folks a deal that is as good as what people in the 20th century had. It doesn't hand 'virtuous' people with en equivalent amount of money. It still spends government funds. You can find loads of reasons to object to such an approach, and I expect you will.


So there you go. A giant wall of text you don't care about and which won't change your attitude one bit. It took me a long time to generate it, and all you have to do to make my time and effort entirely wasted is to say 'SEE! I was right about HOPE, you're full of shit.' Which is why I don't bother with detailed rebuttals, and generally don't address arguments about fairness, or moral vitue or 'good' life choices. I did so today because I took pity on you.

 

[Hawkeye666]

Criminalize being poor. Bring back debtors' prisons.

</snark>

 

[EnPeaSea]

Criminalize being poor. Bring back debtors' prisons.

</snark>

Basically is the status quo already.

 

[ccarterc]

What is it about our government that thinks socialism is great? Especially in light of US 290 trillion debt debt?

Truthfully, I don't mind helping poor people out some (and do so), but our government makes it a habit of giving money to rich people, and that bugs the hell out of me.

 

[Matthew J.]

I always thought Republicans liked this program, because the payments essentially go right into the pockets of the ISPs and allow them to maintain their artificially high pricing.

Maybe we should end the program for good and replace it with some good old-fashioned monopoly price controls!