FCC Rural Phone Subsidies Reach As High As $3,000 Per Line 372
jfruh writes "The FCC's Universal Service Fund has a noble goal: using a small fee on all U.S. landlines to subsidize universal phone coverage throughout the country. But a recent report reveals that this early 20th centuryy program's design is wildly at odds with 21st century realities: Its main effect now is that poor people living in urban areas are subsidizing rich people living in the country. The FCC says that it's already enacted reforms to combat some of the worst abuses in the report — like subsidies to rural areas that add up to $24,000 per line — but even the $3,000 per line cap now in place seems absurd."
The urban poor subsidized the rich for a while now (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not unique to phones. It also applies to highways, minor airports, housing tax incentives, and a number of other "American Dream" elements that really have nothing to do with having a successful society.
Re:The urban poor subsidized the rich for a while (Score:5, Insightful)
"That's not unique to phones. It also applies to highways, minor airports, housing tax incentives, and a number of other "American Dream" elements that really have nothing to do with having a successful society."
So it's not socialism? Damn!
Re:The urban poor subsidized the rich for a while (Score:4, Informative)
It's rural areas being a drain on the nation's resources. They're anti-tax but demand huge government spending, just for them.
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There's a book - a dry book, I'll grant, but a damned fine one - called Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West [amazon.com]. Its author, William Cronon, talks in an early chapter about the work of Johann Heinrich von Thünen [wikipedia.org]. von Thünen recognized that cities function as concentrators of wealth that is fundamentally generated in thei
Re:The urban poor subsidized the rich for a while (Score:5, Insightful)
OK, you can keep your broadband. Us country folk will keep all the lumber, minerals, and produce.
Yeah yeah, and we'll keep all the money, finished goods, and medicine(or at least the intellectual backing thereof). Or... it could be we live in a complex interconnected society, and every discussion of fairness doesn't need to slide into "well our subculture is better than yours".
Re:The urban poor subsidized the rich for a while (Score:4, Insightful)
The guys producing the food win. As much as ag subsidies piss me off, a reliable food supply is the first order of business for any society.
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For most of human history, actually, organization, manpower, and "tech", such as it was, was the result of farming. Farming allowed higher population density, required better organization, and allowed society to support a few people with a job other than providing food. That really only started changing with the Enlightenment.
Re:The urban poor subsidized the rich for a while (Score:4)
There's a difference between an unfair burden to subsidize the wealthy(which doesn't describe all of the use of this program) and considering those living in a region to be worthless. I don't really think that anyone was leveling that accusation. I grew up rural, became urban, and that's life. At least we can all agree that suburbs are worthless, right?
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Interesting. Let's see what will happen.
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Yeah? How you going to do all the bustling economic activity in the dark? The bulk of the hydro electric dams are out in the rural areas, as are fossil fueled power plants. Not to mention all your fresh water comes from rivers and aquifers generally supplied by rainfall in rural areas and mountains. Every city has an area around it that supplies basic necessities to keep the city alive. The larger the city, the further its tendrils have to reach to keep it running and livable.
If the complaint here is that r
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To "subsidize" the government-provide items you listed, you need to pay taxes. By and large, the "urban poor" do not pay much in taxes (except perhaps local sales taxes or use fees). The only reason "subsidize" makes any sense in the original article is that many poor people pay for telecommunications services out of their own pockets.
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You say that, but you're only thinking of federal taxes. There's a huge poor tax in the form of things like sales tax, which hits basically every dollar poorer people see, but not the wealthier people in the world. I should also point out that while I'm an urban person, I'm not poor, and I pay quite typical income taxes.
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Re:The urban poor subsidized the rich for a while (Score:4, Insightful)
Certainly not to the same extent, no.
According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a Washington, D.C.-based research organization, Washington families living at the federal poverty level pay 17 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes, whereas the highest-income families pay 3 percent. [seattlepi.com]
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That article was specifically addressing Washington state. While other states will also have a tax burden on the poor, it will vary from place to place.
Of course the rich pay local and sales taxes as well. The main point your are trying to make is that they may not have to buy as much of the taxed items to live comfortably. But almost everyone I know spends all of their money on something, and it is fairly difficult to find places to buy things now were you don't pay taxes. I will tell you that when I b
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But almost everyone I know spends all of their money on something
Almost everyone you know is far from rich. A wealthy individual will invest a considerable proportion of their income instead of spending it. It's not that they're buying items exempt from sales tax; they're not buying things period.
A poor person spends all of their income. This necessarily prevents them from accumulating wealth, or becoming rich. The rich, by definition, did not spend all of their income, enabling them to accumulate wealth, or become rich. Any of the income that they didn't spend (i.e. a
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A jurisdiction has a certain sales tax rate, say X%.
A poor person, Mr. A, spends all his money. X% of his net income goes towards sales tax.
An upper middle class person, Mr. B, spends half his money and invests the other half. X/2% of his net income goes towards sales tax.
A truly wealthy person, Mr. C, spends one percent of his money and invests the remainder. X/100% of his net income goes towards sales tax.
Why would we, as a society, support a tax that has a poor person paying 100 times more, as a percentage of his net income, than a truly wealthy person?
1% is an unrealistic number, the lowest I've seen is the ultra rich spending 3% of their money, so I've used that instead.
Well let's fill those numbers in, and fix your gaping holes -- I'm pulling numbers from Illinois State.
A jurisdiction has a certain sales tax rate, say 10% (Chicago, and 1% on food, magazines, etc).
A poor person, Mr. A, spends all his money ($10000). 100% ($10,000) of his net income goes towards sales tax, most of it toward. ($1000)
An upper middle class person, Mr. B, spends half his mon
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Re:The urban poor subsidized the rich for a while (Score:4, Informative)
Especially since they get 83% of their first 20,000 too.
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Wealthy people can afford to avoid taxes, like sales taxes. In California, we have a fairly high sales tax, which has driven much of the commerce outside the state, and online. People shop online for everything simply to avoid paying almost 8% in taxes when they spend money.
Guess what else happens, businesses close, people lose their jobs. And liberals are dumbfounded why.
Taxes are a necessary evil, not a way to raise funds to correct the evils people see in society. IF you want to fix the evils in society,
Re:The urban poor subsidized the rich for a while (Score:5, Informative)
As a % of income, rich people pay maybe 1% sales tax, while poor people pay 5-10% sales tax or more.
% of income is a worthless metric. If your income is 95% spent on subsistence, even a 2% tax is onerous. If your income is spent 5% on subsistence and 95% on savings and non-essential expenses, even a 20% tax may not be onerous (except emotionally).
I hope no one needs help in figuring out which of the above are rich and which are poor.
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Bullshit. In the states I know about, food, clothing and rent are not taxed. There's not a whole hell of a lot "poor" people are buying that is not food, clothing, and rent. The exception would be a car. If they can even afford one at all, usually they have to make do with a used car 7-15 years old, and the sales tax on that is not very much. Gas has its own tax and is not really covered by "sales tax".
If we
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I can't help but think you don't know about many States, then.
I've lived in some where SOME foods are not taxed, but I've never lived in one where clothing was not taxed.
And I've never heard of one where "rent" was considered a "sale" and therefore taxable....
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Florida has sales tax on services, such as storage rental.
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If we had the national so-called "fair tax" (a kind of consumption tax; i.e., sales tax), poor people would pay none at all, because the "prebate" would cover all their purchases
It's funny, because the 'tax them but rebate them' crap is wide open to just removing the rebate and leaving them stuck in the lurch. And frankly we already do this this 'prebate' you talk about with the Earned Income Tax Credit. Which the GOP has been opposed to for decades. linky [motherjones.com]
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Please travel more.
In my state clothing and prepared foods are taxed. Rent would include property tax, since that has to be paid by the landlord. Sales tax on cars here is the same as every other item.
Fair tax is a simple scheme to move taxation to the middle class. The rich would benefit greatly at my expense.
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They said:
(except perhaps local sales taxes or use fees)
It's just that they didn't realize how much a percentage of the poor's income this represents (just about the same percentage as the sales tax rate itself).
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I can be more due to things like fixed registration fees, and the like.
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Sales taxes in many states exclude food and clothing. Rich people will tend to pay more sales tax, depending on how much they consume. That's what we care about, right? We'd rather they invest their money.
In my state, it is half on food, and not reduced at all on clothing.
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Re: The urban poor subsidized the rich for a while (Score:4, Insightful)
Not true.
The rich do not become rich by spending. Sure it probably is true that a larger portion of expenditures are subject to sales tax for the wealthy. But, ultimately, a smaller portion of their income is spent rather than invested.
And no, I don't give a rat's ass about them investing their money. Especially given that there's no guarantee that the investments will benefit me or other Americans. And their tax rates are lower than they are for people that are less well off.
Re: The urban poor subsidized the rich for a while (Score:5, Informative)
"Capital gains" are taxed differently than "income". This leads to a situation where our tax policy ends up being quite regressive, in that the wealthy are paying lower tax rates than the poor. If this is truly what we want as a society, we should campaign to have the "income" tax brackets reflect this. However, I don't think you'd have much popular support for a policy that takes the tax brackets and flips them around so that the rate goes down as income goes up. That means that our tax policy is not only regressive, but it's also sufficiently misleading to have won the support of the electorate despite being against their own interests.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that investments are "evil". GP was merely stating that money that is invested is not spent, and therefore is not impacted by a sales tax. This is only "evil" if you believe that it is a moral imperative to pay sales tax. Reading comprehension FTW.
Re: The urban poor subsidized the rich for a while (Score:5, Informative)
For a company's worth to increase, someone must've given them money. They must've earned that money to begin with. The money was taxed then as well. The money is taxed not twice, not three times, but continuously.
And that's not a problem. The problem is when a person (corporate or corporeal) is taxed twice.
The corporation is taxed on net income. The corporation is taxed once.
Stockholders are taxed for any dividend they receive from the corporation. They are taxed once as well.
If stockholders choose to sell stock (sell more than they buy), then any gains are taxed there. Once.
Going by your logic, the money is being taxed infinitely many times. First at the corporate rate, then at the capital gains rate, then at the sales tax rate (when investors spend it), then again at the corporate rate (when corporations make profits), forever, as long as it keeps circulating. While this is true, it's far from insightful. Nobody cares when "money" is taxed, they only care when they themselves are taxed.
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2) If there is no difference in capital gains as opposed to income, the incentive to invest in companies would be to profit from the investment. Any tax rate short of 100% would preserve this incentive.
3) My employer would do it the same way he does now, as this company was built with no third party investment. Consequently, I don't see how this
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The short-term rate scales exactly with the progressive income tax. The long-term rate is LOWER than the progressive income tax for the poor (as in it's more progressive), equalling it at the 25% bracket, and then remaining flat.
Not entirely accurate. Let me clarify, based on tax policy from 2008 through 2012. The long-term capital gains rate never equals the progressive income tax rate for the corresponding tax bracket. The long-term rate is always lower than the progressive income tax for the poor, for the middle class, and for everyone else. If you were in the 10% or 15% income tax brackets, you paid 0% on your capital gains. If you were in the 25%, 28%, 33%, or 35% income tax brackets, you paid 15% on your capital gains. Long-t
Re:The urban poor subsidized the rich for a while (Score:5, Insightful)
Anybody paying for phone service pays for this subsidy via the USF. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Service_Fund [wikipedia.org]
It's also worth noting that because of the way that the poverty level is calculated, people that are in urban areas don't qualify when they would be pretty well off in more rural areas, if they were making the same amount of money. Which makes subsidies to the poor at the federal level disproportionately favor the freeloading states over the states that actually contribute to the pot of money being used to provide the subsidies.
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You know, I can't take responsibility for people who are foolish enough to play the lottery with their last dollar. That's not a tax, unless you want to consider it a tax on stupidity. Stop being stupid, and the tax is no longer levied. The PA lottery sends proceeds to programs for seniors, so if you proposed to eliminate it you'd be accused of ageism anyway. Government is the problem.
Guess who keeps raising the taxes on alcohol and tobacco? What was the first tax Obama raised when he came into office?
Tax incidence and benefits paid (Score:4, Insightful)
Claiming that renters (there are renters outside the city, BTW) are paying property tax is also as dumb as claiming that when I take out a loan or use a credit card,
You got this one wrong. You have to examine the incidence of taxation [wikipedia.org]. The property owner has to pay taxes but he pays this by passing the cost on to the people renting the property. The actual tax incidence is on the renters, not the landlord. The amount of the tax is irrelevant in this case in determining who is the one ultimately burdened with the tax even if the amount of the tax is just one penny.
For the same reason this is why gasoline taxes are fundamentally a regressive tax (hurts the poor more than the rich). The oil companies do not absorb the cost, they merely pass it along to their customers, more of whom are poor than are wealthy.
There is a cap on the SS tax because there's a cap on benefits.
That would be a more credible argument if they amount paid in equaled the amount paid out in benefits to each beneficiary. Most beneficiaries [bankrate.com] receive more in payments than they pay to social security. And let's be frank, there is a cap on SS tax because the wealthy are a powerful lobby and have undue influence when it comes to financial legislation. Your argument is just some sugar to help get rid of the icky taste of reality.
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Official answer: $113,700 [ssa.gov].
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> 2. Most states also draw income from urban poor in the form of taxes on alcohol, tobacco, and by state-run lotteries
Cry me a river.
You just jumped the shark with that one.
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Airports and housing incentives may not be necessary for rural areas, but a certain base level of road infrastructure is absolutely necessary. It even makes sense for urban areas to subsidize roads in rural areas.
After all, how the hell else is the food going to get from the fields to the cities?
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I'm not going to argue with you. "Transportation is a necessary element of a post-industrial society" is so obvious as to be incontestable.
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Easy, we ship the food in from overseas in exchange for things that we produce in urban areas. Or we use the railroads that are more cost effective anyways. Leaving the rural folks to actually pay their own way for the infrastructure that's primarily used by rural folks.
Honestly, this extreme level of arrogance and greed on the part of rural folks needs to stop. Service cuts disproportionately affect urban areas, even though urban tax payers contribute most of the money that pays for those services.
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Just another example of those slick country con-men taking advantage of good innocent city-folk.
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Not every broken system is broken because of fraud.
and vice versa (Score:4, Interesting)
It also works the other way around: rural folks subsidizing ridiculously overpriced housing, education, public safety, and other services that the "urban poor" use. Many of the "urban poor" are likely poor because they are "urban" in the first place. And what about the rural poor who really do need these subsidies?
That's the whole problem with all these "great society" programs: nobody really knows what the money should be spent on. Once you go down this road, you lose yourself in ever more complex and wasteful schemes of economic central planning, rent seeking, and outright corruption.
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I'm not sure what you want to "respond to". I'm saying: for most subsidies, nobody knows whether they are helping or hurting society. You certainly haven't made any compelling argument. In the absence of clear, demonstrable benefits to society as a whole for a particular type of subsidy, it should be eliminated.
Government math (Score:2, Insightful)
Much like other government regulations, these subsidies were written with certain assumptions that haven't been reassessed over the years. In this case, the assumption that a couple copper wires were the primary driving factor in whether someone had access to modern telecommunications. Today, wires aren't actually necessary in most cases in the first place. The land line for dedicated voice service at home is rapidly fading into obscurity, and even home access to Internet services in some rural areas is
Re:Government math (Score:5, Insightful)
Land line is most certainly required in rural areas if for nothing else than emergency services. When you are 20 minutes to an hour away from a medical facility you don't want to run into a situation where you can't get a cell signal or the cell service is down. I would wager 95% of rural residents pay for a copper wire even if they don't use it so they have it in an emergency. At least all the ones I know do.
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Then they can pay for it themselves. I don't understand why urban areas have to subsidize rural areas at the expense of our priorities. If they can't figure out how to make their lifestyle choices cost effective, then perhaps they need to learn how to be self reliant.
Re:Government math (Score:4, Insightful)
If they can't figure out how to make their lifestyle choices cost effective, then perhaps they need to learn how to be self reliant.
Farming is not cost effective. The self reliant method would be for them to stop farming and move into the cities with you, where you can buy all your food from Mexico and China while American fields sit fallow. And then, in the next famine brought about by climate change, you and your family starve to death because America is no longer self reliant for food.
I don't like the idea of subsidizing rich people who want to live in the country, but the idea of subsidizing farmers so that American food products are cost effective (without the troublesome alternative, tariffs on imported foods) makes perfect sense, and part of that includes ways to let farmers collaborate and communicate. How else are they going to access farmersonly.com?
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Citation needed. Let's see your statistics.
Your assertion is certainly not true in the area where I grew up. There are a couple of notable corporate farms. There are several hundreds of economically-on-the-edge family farms. Maybe 1 in 20 family farms throw off enough cash to privide a decent living without subsidizing the income by sending the wife into the city for a 9-5 job. But that's just my raw data, covering the 1000 square mile area I am familiar with. And I discarded the Amish from the dataset
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the other fund (Score:2)
Rural Rich? Bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
Its main effect now is that poor people living in urban areas are subsidizing rich people living in the country.
Uhhh, I grew up way out in farm country in Ohio. I have lived in five different major metro areas. The people in the country are not rich. What kind of bullshit psy-ops lobby-funded advertising is this, and why is it being parroted blindly here? Let's just do a quick bullshit check. One web search, second hit, talks about a study done in Oregon:
In 2011, the (per capita personal income) in non-metro counties was $31,383 and in the metro counties it was $39,267; a difference of $7,884 (25 percent). The difference was due primarily to the difference in earnings from work.
Obviously that's just one data point, feel free to do more comprehensive research yourself. I'll tell you from personal experience; people in the country make less money on average than people in the city. This report is some assholes like the Koch brothers, a lobby called "Alliance for Generational Equity," trying to create infighting so they can drown the government in the bathtub. Let's not start being their lickspittle mouthpieces, parroting their easily debunked lies.
Re:Rural Rich? Bullshit. (Score:4, Insightful)
So earnings are 25% higher but cost of living is 50% lower. Land and homes are cheap in rural areas. In the town of 600 my Wife is from you can rent a 4 bedroom home for $200 a month, and that was the price as of last labor day.
Yea, there are few jobs and the jobs that do exist are primarily crappy and low paid, but overall the poor rural resident is far better off than the poor city dweller.
Re:Rural Rich? Bullshit. (Score:5, Informative)
So earnings are 25% higher but cost of living is 50% lower.
First, no, it's not 50% lower. Land and homes are cheaper, but they are not the majority of your cost of living. Electricity, food, and consumer goods are much closer to parity price (though retail markup is higher in the city, of course). Gas is very close to parity, and you have to use more of it because everything is further away. There's no public transit, and people in the country lose efficiencies of scale in police, fire, and education services. So sure, there's an effect from cost of living, but it is nothing like 50%. I gave you numbers in my post -- you want to counter it with some ridiculous claim, you show me something to back it up or you're just a blowhard.
And even if it is big enough to balance the 25% difference in income, that still doesn't make rural folks rich. That term being wielded by a lobby to describe people making $32k in the US is pure bullshit regardless of the relative cost of living.
Re:Rural Rich? Bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the objection here is to paying that high subsidy to provide service to the vacation homes of people rich enough to maintain 2 homes, who should reasonably be able to foot the bill themselves. IMO the subsidy ought to only be paid on lines serving a primary residence, ie. no vacation homes and the like.
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Not only they make less money, they also have less access to...well, everything. Living on a city you can get groceries at, basically any time of the day. On an emergency you can be in the hospital within minutes. Your cell phone works. You can get very fast and cheap internet. Power is reliable and water is available.
Out in the country, the only "equal" service is satellite TV. Anything else is more expensive.
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This. I live in a rural area, and I'm fairly well-off, but there are people out here who are far less fortunate. But this isn't really an issue of rich vs. poor. This is an issue of everyone needing access to essential services. Land lines remain an essential service in rural areas, especially since there are areas out here that do not have any cell phone coverage at all. Land lines are also often the only source of internet access besides satellite - I'm fortunate enough to have DSL, but I know people
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So why not subsidize cell coverage for rural areas, and forget the "running wire to every house in the hills" crap?
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a lot more poor people in the cities are paying the USF to support a few people in rural areas
Who really funded this study? (Score:5, Informative)
I really wish that the press releases of shadowy "think tanks" (and consulting firms, for that matter) were treated with a little less credulity and more scrutiny. This study was published by a group calling itself the "Alliance for Generational Equity". Who are these people and who do they represent? We don't know. I did some Googling to see if I could find out more about them, but didn't find much. No Wikipedia article, nothing on SourceWatch. Nothing about their funding sources appears to be public. How do we know this "think tank" isn't just another sockpuppet of the Koch Brothers?
I was able to find some information about Thomas Hazlett, one of the authors whose name is on the study. He's a professor at the GMU Law School, which is not an encouraging sign (that law school is a notorious den of right-wing crackpots). Hazlett is also against net neutrality [youtube.com]. This man is not on your side; he's a shill for rich plutocrats. Listen to anything he has to say at your peril.
I wouldn't quite go so far with that analogy (Score:2)
But, urban areas do subsidize rural areas. I live in Kansas and it's amazing how remote and sparse humanity gets just 5 miles outside of the KC metro. There was a stat from I think the 2004 Prez election where, except for 2 exceptions (Texas and Colorado?), every red state was a net consumer of tax revenue and every blue state was a net producer.
When I riding my motorcycles over hundreds of miles through farmland where there's hardly any traffic and hardly any houses, you still see immaculately maintained
"Rich people" "Rural areas" (Score:3)
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The cost of doing the old business (Score:5, Interesting)
In the early 90s, an older couple in Eastern Kentucky decided to break down and pay for a landline telephone. GTE offered to drag them a line for $5000 or so (I forget the exact amount). Outraged, they appealed to the Kentucky Service Commission. The Commission discovered that GTE was going to have to pay almost $25k to get the line to them, and was already eating much more of the cost than could be demanded under the law. The couple chose not to get their phone line.
A friend of my father ran a lucrative contracting business that bid on GTE contracts. He kept mule drivers under contract, because they were often the only way to drag poles around certain parts of the Appalachians.
These days, this exact same couple would be able to pay $40 to $80 a month to get a cell phone. The tower will be a couple of hills over, with a microwave feed back to the home network and a small diesel generator on-site. For the cost of one phone line, an entire area can get phone and internet service.
The same economics are working in India and Africa. Excluding possibly power, there will be significant portions of the world that will never, ever be wired.
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You state that there are parts of the world that will never be wired, which I don't doubt, but when you are talking about in the US, why? Almost all rural areas are served by electric coops. There is nothing stopping using those same power lines to carry voice/data/media, other than adding filters at the transformers. Of course, the cable and phone companies don't want that to happen. Nor do the ham radio operators who do have a legitimate beef in that using the power lines disrupts ham radio operations. Bu
Rural land lines are going away soon (Score:3)
As someone who lives in a rural area, even though I'm not rich, I can tell you that the quality of phone lines in rural areas are pretty much crap and you're better off going with a mobile phone. If the phone companies are being paid per active line, this whole thing will go away in a few years anyway.
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As someone who lives in a rural area, even though I'm not rich, I can tell you that the quality of phone lines in rural areas are pretty much crap and you're better off going with a mobile phone. If the phone companies are being paid per active line, this whole thing will go away in a few years anyway.
You underestimate the power of lobbyists.
Poor subsidizing the rich? (Score:2)
The summary states that the program has devolved to poor people in urban areas subsidizing rich people in the country. While that may be true, Would not the rich people in urban areas also be subsidizing the poor people in the country? Last time I checked, urban areas had a lot of people of different classes and while there are definitely some wealthy people in the country, in the vast areas known as fly over country, the wealthy are far and few between. But, if you are talking about the rural areas of CA
Waste fraud and abuse offend everybody (Score:4, Informative)
But... reading the paper I smelled a preconceived agenda. The paper was sponsored by Americans for Generational Equity an ostensibly bipartisan group concerned with the fact that the "Pig in the Python" is getting closer to the snake's cloaca. And the group worries that said meal is (or soon will) be providing less nourishment than it takes to digest it. Read: The Boomers are greying and will suck the life out of the country before they become python excrement. Think of the children.
A look at the group's composition [nndb.com] reveals a majority of Republican notables with a sprinkle of moderate Democrats. The FCC is a bipartisan body and fairly judicious by nature IMHO. I have to wonder what is really going on here. There are hundreds of more fruitful places to look fo WF&A. As for real waste? Check out the US military. [washingtonpost.com]
Bullshit study (Score:5, Interesting)
I work for a telco. We're required by law to provide phone service to everyone... period. In some counties we're required by law to keep 911 service working regardless of if they residents even want a phone, or even if the building is abandoned! We've got houses on top of mountains, we've got houses at the bottom of the grand canyon on Indian reservations that require microwave dishes to link the bottom of the canyon with the top. Or techs have to hitch rides on helicopters to service some of these people. The vast majority of whom are not rich at all. Rich people like to live in the countryside around cities or small towns, not in the Appalachians where these subsidies have the greatest affect.
Not that all the government subsidies are perfect. The most recent, the Rural Broadband initiative, is total pork. But the standard tax on lines that allows rural customers to get basic phone service? No, that's probably one of the most important programs in US history. If hadn't been enacted most of the country (geographically) would still be without service. If they were to drop it all together, rural customers would get cutoff almost immediately. We're talking entire towns. And before you start talking about cellphones, how do you think all the cellphone providers get their data links for those towers? The phone companies.
Who the fuck is Alliance for Generational Equity? (Score:5, Informative)
And who's paying them ~$100,000 a year?
http://www.guidestar.org/organizations/26-2171390/alliance-generational-equity.aspx [guidestar.org]
Their web site www.truslseniors.org is down
Another question is, who the fuck is C. McClain Haddow, the guy who's running Alliance for Generational Equity?
http://reporting.sunlightfoundation.com/lobbying/client/alliance-for-generational-equity [sunlightfoundation.com]
Mother Jones has a hint.
The Artful Codger
Trashing the AARP with Grandma Green.
By Michael Scherer
July/August 2005 Issue
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2005/07/artful-codger [motherjones.com]
The real pedigree of the group Green represents is hidden under layers of PR and politics. The Seniors Coalition was cofounded in 1989 by conservative activist Dan C. Alexander Jr., three years after he was sent to prison for arranging construction kickbacks as an Alabama school-committee member. Today, its top outside lobbyist is C. McClain Haddow, a former Health and Human Services official who spent time in prison with Alexander for failing to file a timely ethics waiver when he gave his wife a government contract. Haddow has also lobbied for generic-drugs manufacturer Mylan Pharmaceuticals.
The organization’s Washington activities regularly blur the needs of seniors with the agendas of corporate donors. After it took money from Microsoft in 1999, the coalition lobbied on antitrust litigation, and after it took money from Lottery.com in 2000, it lobbied on a bill that would restrict Internet gambling. Money also poured in from the American Petroleum Institute and the American Public Power Association—just as the coalition spoke out against the Kyoto Protocol and lower gas-mileage standards.
The Seniors Coalition is especially tied to the drug industry. PHRMA, the pharmaceutical industry’s trade group, gave the organization $2.2 million between 1999 and 2000 (the only two years for which full financial disclosure is available). Other drug industry sources funneled the group an additional $300,000 during that time. But Tom Moore, the coalition’s chief operating officer, writes in an email that only 22 percent of his organization’s funding comes from industry, and that the group “retains its complete independence in developing [its] legislative agenda.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing [wikipedia.org]
There is some interest group behind this that is going to save a lot of money if they eliminated the Universal Service Fund (which has its pros and cons), and this outfit is crying crocodile tears over the urban poor. Or generational equity. I'd take them more seriously if they were up front with their real agenda.
Re:FCC (Score:5, Insightful)
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Also, if they're including manpower to actually run the cable. I know people who have the only house within 10 miles, and it's rugged terrain to boot. It's to the point where they had to sink telephone poles in the roadway itself (near the edge of the road) because there was no other way to run the lines through that area. I can easily see why it would take a lot of money to run cables in areas with mountainous or heavily forested terrain.
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So, put in fixed wireless. A tower every dozen miles or so on hilltops is cheaper than a hard line running along a road. And much less likely to get taken out by falling trees.
But then I suspect not doing so has more to do with the subsidy design and regulations. Universal Service was intended to fund POTS. Start putting in FTTH, 4G or broadband wireless and you'll get the city folk upset about running gigabit Internet to the hillbillies and not them. Once broadband access gains the same status as POTS had
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From the FIRST PARAGRAPH of the article:
"some rich areas of the country receiving up to US$23,000 per line per year from the agency's Universal Service Fund"
Per line, per year. Not one-time.
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Mitt, is that you?
Laying cable in rural areas isn't cheap (Score:5, Informative)
Start doing studies. It is simply not that expensive to run and maintain cable, not even in rural areas.
Where I live (semi-rural outskirts of a major metro) the labor to string cable costs $1/foot and burying cable costs $8/foot. (source is a comcast field engineer) My nearest neighbor lives 600 feet away and the length of the line between my house and then next one is about 1200 linear feet due to how the line is routed. For someone on a farm this could easily be 3000+ linear feet. So there is your $3000 right there without even getting into the cost of the wire itself, the switchgear, signal boosters, customer service, engineering and the rest.
Now I have no idea if the subsidies provided are appropriate to the actual cost but it is genuinely expensive to run cable to rural locations.
Re:Education (Score:5, Informative)
I grew up in a fairly rural area. It's sort of like an onion.
At the very center of the cities are poor people, there's middle class urban dwellers surrounding them with a few high-wealth neighborhoods. Around them are poor people that live on the edge of the city. Around them are the middle-class suburbs. Further out are some higher wealth suburbs. Once you get past the suburbs, more poor people. Get out to the small villages and there's some middle and lower-middle class. Rural areas near these small villages have a healthy mix of wealthy and middle class. But you get way out there in bumfuck and it's all dirt poor people. Of course, there's exceptions at every level. There's going to be eccentric millionaires who want to live way out in the boonies, but they're largely outnumbered by the people living in shacks (and yes, America still has plenty of people living in shacks in the woods).
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I think the argument here is that the expensive phone lines are going to the homes of the eccentric millionaires. You're quite right that a lot of rural people are poor though.
There's a slight inaccuracy in your geography. Right smack in the middle of a city is often a glob of wealth in the form of corporate offices, cultural icons, and the like (think Park Ave, New York). The next ring is the dirt-poor urban people, mostly black or Hispanic. Then comes progressively wealthier and whiter rings of suburbs un
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If they need to run the same cable for multiple services, they'll usually give you some kind of deal like that. Time Warner does it for cable - I only subscribe to cable Internet, but they throw in basic cable TV for no additional fee.
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Might not want to say that too loudly. I'm in the middle of a major city and FTTH may never arrive. The local ISPs have yet to make anything resembling a firm promise for FTTH and 5mbps service is the best my neighborhood can get. As recently as a couple years ago, there were neighborhoods that weren't able get more than 1.5mbps service.
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1. When having access to produce and livestock became a 'right'
2. Why people have to have foodstuffs that requires 90% or more of the country to pay for it because of where they choose to live
3. Why I should pay more because someone wants to live in an urban center where they can't make any food for themselves and don't have land for livestock.
4. Why they can't move
She's a double edged sword, pavement-dweller.
5. Why, after all of the above, if they don't have skills, can't live off the land, can't get a job, can't move, and are poor, we don't relocate them someplace else since they must already be living on the government dole. When you don't make your own way and don't contribute to society, you don't get to decide the rules that govern how you receive free money and other things.
That one is easy to answer:
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution.html [archives.gov]
Re:Please explain... (Score:5, Informative)
1. When having a phone became a 'right'
It became a right when having a phone was a necessary step in getting a job, something we consider fundamentally necessary to taking part in modern society.
2. Why people have to have phone that requires 90% or more of the country to pay for it because of where they choose to live
Cart before horse problem. Their families lived there, then phones became necessary.
3. Why I should pay more because someone wants to live in a rural area where they can't make any money and don't have phone service. And where storms can bring down phone lines causing thousands of dollars in repair costs for a phone they don't pay for.
The same reason you pay more so someone else doesn't get robbed or shot. Enlightened self interest isn't a complex idea.
4. Why they can't move
Why don't you move to where they are to lower the cost per person of the line? Oh now moving is a huge onus to place on someone?
5. Why, after all of the above, if they don't have skills, can't live off the land, can't get a job, can't move, and are poor, we don't relocate them someplace else since they must already be living on the government dole. When you don't make your own way and don't contribute to society, you don't get to decide the rules that govern how you receive free money and other things.
Because they actually earn more than they cost, as part of a complex interconnected society, and their location may be important to maintaining the support network for the country's agricultural base? Who knows? You're criticizing totally anonymous people we don't even remotely know individually, which turns out to be easy.
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2. Phones are not necessary in an area where there aren't any phones. Everyone is in the same boat. They didn't talk to anyone when they moved there, nothing has changed or needs t
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And how do you know that your lower cost of living doesn't reflect subsidies? I mean that's essentially impossible to say.
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Sure, then those of us that live in more rural areas should also not have to contribute anything to your public transit costs, sanitation, or emergency services. Also, you can buy the reservoir water for your municipal water systems off of us, instead of having free use of these rural water supplies. Merchandise should also have to cost more, since the warehouses are in more rural areas where the land is cheap, too. And you don't get any benefit from the highways that run through the rural areas between
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, I moved to a more rural area. And I don't think I should have to contribute to that.
Re:Please explain... (Score:4, Informative)
1. It's part of the national infrastructure, just like roads and electricity and the USPS (although that one is becoming a bit outdated). The more widespread communication is, the better the country as a whole becomes.
2. This is the same argument used against... everything. The country works because the masses subsidizes the niches. I'm sure you use plenty of things that are subsidized by people that don't use them. Got kids in a public school? Landowners subsidize that even if they don't have kids. Drive on a public road? People who don't own cars subsidize that. The list goes on.
3. People can't make money in rural areas? Apparently you have no concept of telecommuting, farming, logging, etc. As for the rest of 3, refer to 1.
4. Why don't you move? You're likely not living in the most efficient place possible either. Also, moving can be damned expensive. Personally, I live where I do because I enjoy the area
5. If you actually read the summary, you'd realize they're talking about rich people in the country being subsidized by poor people in the city. Maybe you should move to somewhere with better literacy rates, it might rub off on you. But hey, it explains your signature.
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The highway trust fund was exhausted more than a decade ago. Maintenance expenditures now exceed all gas tax revenue let alone necessary reconstruction. General fund monies now subsidize highways and roads because congress is unwilling to raise the gas tax to re-stabilize the trust fund. Blame an irrational public that would rather draw debt or not fix the roads than see their gas taxes go up a nickel.
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1. Never
2. They don't
3. There's wireless service (NOT cell phone service but wireless analog lines)
4. Why should they?
5. Are you a fucking retard? Did you even read the fucking SUMMARY? It says POOR PEOPLE are subsidizing the RICH.
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1. Basic infrastructure was deemed important. Most infrastructure is tax-funded, but telecommunications happens to be a private industry now. Most of modern society involves being reachable in such a way.
2. It's not just people who choose where the live - that's a consequence.
3. Above-ground wire lines are still much cheaper than buried. Even when taking into account the cost of replacing poles after storms. These people pay for their phones. They just don't directly pay for the lines being built. Nei
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You're thinking of income tax. There are lots of other taxes. Sales tax, gas tax, taxes on almost everything processed or imported. In the end, even if they get back 110% of what they paid in income taxes, they still paid some sort of tax.
Middle class does tend to get hit a little harder because we don't get that income tax back, but it's damn near impossible to pay zero taxes overall.
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The tax in question is imposed on the Telco's, and recovered by a fee they add each month on the phone bill. Legally, it is counted as a tax when the corporations pay it out, but called a fee when the individual actually pays it in. Anyone with a land line pays it, however poor they are. The EIC for a single person, at max, is $ 480. The fees the phone companies charge that subsidise the universal service charge are usually about $72 per year, so just having a land line phone would eat about 20% of that EIC
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Your proposal becomes mob rule by abstention. Any majority that comes into power could, merely through inaction, undo any piece of legislation, whereas, in the converse, the item can still be repealed, but must be brought up for the scrutiny of debate and discussion and is subject to veto.
In your proposal, you get crazy shit where the fifteenth amendment expires because the country reverts to racism and segregation after the forward steps of reconstruction. Or did you intend Constitutional legislation to