Living on someone else's dime, you don't get Netflix. You don't need Netflix to eat, find a new job, etc.
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FCC Unveils Proposal For Low-Income Broadband Subsidy
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How much is that?
YeuEmMaiMai
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if you have internet, you are not poor. if you have a place to go home to every night, you are not poor, if you have food to eat you are not poor. If you have a car, cell phone, nice clothes, etc. you are not poor. If you are spending money on non essentials like smokes, booze, etc., you are not poor.
If you "dramatically increase the minimum wage", the results will be:
1. More stuff will become automated - less jobs
2. Prices on just about everything will go up.
The end result will be:
1. More unemployment
2. The "poor" will be in even more of a hole
As a former onsite Dell repair technician, I also have some first hand experience with how these deadbeats live.
1. They choose to live in filth - big piles of trash all over the place. I often wondered if they had ever bothered to clean anything up at all.
2. They always seemed to have money to buy computers, big screen TVs, a cable plan with 300+ channels, and usually had a nicer car than I did.
3. They also almost always seemed to be able to afford enough cigarettes to chain smoke.
The truth of the matter is, that a lot of these "poor" people are that way by choice. They know that they can game the system and nobody will do anything about it, so that is what they do.
heatlesssun
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Whatever one's views are on raising the minimum wage, many working people think they aren't being paid enough and in looking at the Presidential race that issue seems be hitting home no matter what side of the political spectrum one is. For instance, if Trump were to somehow get Apple to make iPhones in the US, won't that increase the price of iPhones just as much as raising the minimum wage would increase the price of Big Macs?
They can be transmitted, but how long would you wait to download a 20+MB PDF that some governmental agency created to save paper?
Now, imagine how long it would take to upload said form.
D
Deleted member 93354
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instead of "Let them eat cake"
I say, "Let them eat modem bits"
it isn't our job to provide broadband and subsidize big monopolies bottom lines. Regular modem access while painful is fine when used for job search, advisory, AP news, research, or educational purposes (which is the purpose of providing access)
Broadband is only necessary for content rich sites. (Facebook, Netflix, Youtube, etc...) Those are hardly a necessity and I don't want my tax dollars subsidizing some welfare momma to sit on her tail all day watching youtube.
I say, "Let them eat modem bits"
it isn't our job to provide broadband and subsidize big monopolies bottom lines. Regular modem access while painful is fine when used for job search, advisory, AP news, research, or educational purposes (which is the purpose of providing access)
Broadband is only necessary for content rich sites. (Facebook, Netflix, Youtube, etc...) Those are hardly a necessity and I don't want my tax dollars subsidizing some welfare momma to sit on her tail all day watching youtube.
heatlesssun
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When was the last time you tried connecting to the Internet with POTS and a 56kb modem? Does that actually work as well as you're saying today because the Internet is much more bandwidth intensive these days than 20 years ago, even for things you may not consider "content rich".
Reliable broadband I believe is overall as important as reliable transportation to employment and employability, especially for better paying work.
thedocta45
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I see your problem you did the math wrong, currently 12 million homes take advantage of the service at 9.25 per month that's 111,000,000, and then annually the program would cost 1,332,000,000 each yeah, so the government is running the program with an overhead of only about 11% or 168 million, that's pretty good for the government.
Regardless entitlement programs needs to be seriously overhauled.
How does one define abuse.
something like 70% of households have broadband int he US. There are 116,011,000 households in the us and about 251 million broadband users. distributed amongst those households. 2.25 billion at $9.25 a month would at best cover just shy of 20.3 million households assuming zero overhead. That is unlikely.
So it won't fix the problem, and who are you going to tax? either the users of broadband directly, or indirectly by taxing the providers. That's $1.60 on top of everyone's bill, assuming that the carriers don't mark up the fee. It doesn't sound huge, but for my bill, that's a 3% markup year one assuming it doesn't grow and bloat to provide what is minimally a 20-30% discount depending on if it is used for broadband or voip (assuming similar pricing to my area is the norm).
It sounds pretty broken to start, who needs abuse?
Armenius
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That is $9.25 a month for an estimated 20 million households, and the proposed budget for the subsidy program is $2.25 billion a year. 9.25 * 20,000,000 * 12 = 2,220,000,000, or $2.22 billion. Budgets are always rounded up.
TwistedAegis
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That didn't happen when the minimum wage was first instituted. It also didn't occur after the end of slavery - the ultimate wage increase in this country's history. People act like this hasn't happened before, in actual fact, that somehow raising the floor will cause this catastrophic change. It hasn't, and won't.
TwistedAegis
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Honestly, so what? Forget the morals, if it's cheaper than micro-managing people's lives and requiring big government to save pennies on the dollar, just f'ing set up the program and let people live their lives. We're reaching an epoch where income and wealth gains aren't spread at all - look at the way productivity and income increases completely decoupled in 1970.
So we can an ever decreasing number of people who "deserve" all the wealth they've got, with an increasing to 90% of the population "undeserving" of anything but filth and misery, or we can continue to want to live in a modern society and not go back to feudalism.
bbqrooster
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The original program was 9.25/month subsidy to 12 million households with a budget of 1.5 billion. The government eats up 1.5 billion - 12 million x 12 x 9.25 = 168 million as overhead. That's an overhead rate of 11.2%. The new proposal is 9.25/month subsidy to 17 million households with a budget of 2.25 billion. The government eats up 2.25 billion - 17 million x 12 x 9.25 = 363 million. The overhead rate is 16.1%. What this is telling me is that the larger the program, the less efficient the government is using the money. Gee, no wonder they want to expand the program so that the government employees can waste more taxpayers' money.
Dr. Righteous
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What do LOW INCOME people need with internet connectivity??
Aren't things like Cable TV and Internet access a LUXURY not a necessity?
Running water and electricity are a necessity for American standards of living. South America? No such thing.
Aren't things like Cable TV and Internet access a LUXURY not a necessity?
Running water and electricity are a necessity for American standards of living. South America? No such thing.
YeuEmMaiMai
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oh how did we ever manage before there was broadband? I just don't know how we did it.
Feel free to donate your own money and quit telling the rest of us what we have to do with ours.
Who said Netflix? Dude, web pages dont' operate well with slow connections. When I got DSL 16 or 17 years ago, pages would load lightning fast. Today, that wouldn't happen. And Dial up is not a way to browse the web, unless you're using software to download the web while you sleep.
Oh how did we ever live without Electricity, running water, cars. Oh how did we ever live without refrigeration. Oh how did we ever live without climate control. Oh how did we ever live without public education.
Welcome to the 21st century.
YeuEmMaiMai
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relevancy to what I said? absolutely nada....
"oh how did we ever manage before there was broadband?"
YeuEmMaiMai
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again you missed it.... no one should be forced to pay for someone else's luxury... selective reading much?
Cell phone is pretty essential in finding a job.
Smartphone no, but cellphone, sure. Compared to the hundreds we dole out for disability and snap, 10 bucks for a cellphone is a drop in the bucket.
All of it.
That's funny, there's a whole bunch of people in this thread who want the government to dictate how poor people spend their money.
IRS 1040 & Instructions is 3 Mb which is 15 minutes on a bad connection. You only get 3 months to file them. Of course you can find longer forms, but how many large ones aren't connected to the fact you make money or are spending it? And can likely afford broadband or a phone already.
$10 for broadband means $10 for Netflix since you are not require to spend the money
Most sites people need to visit (and entertainment is not a need) are stripped down to be mobile friendly and save bandwidth.
And if someone needs research, that's what libraries and their high speed connections are for.
"Their" being the tax payer's money in case your forgot.
So, when you start collecting your Social Security checks, do I get to choose how you spend them, or is that the government's job?
heatlesssun
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When was the last time anyone in this thread went to a local public library for Internet access? I don't think I've stepped inside a public library in 5 years and probably not used a computer in one in well over a decade.
heatlesssun
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Yeah, I have no idea why so many people freak out over little programs like this when by far and away the biggest wealth redistribution programs in the country are Social Security and Medicare. All other programs combined are nothing compared to those two and even if you cut them all beside Social Security and Medicare, you'd still have large public deficit spending at the federal level in this country.
I doubt I will get anything from that joke of a mandatory savings plan. I take after the short timers in the family, but in the chance they will still be paying out and I live long enough to reach whatever they raise the age to, I will be getting a subset of the money I 'invested'. Meanwhile all kinds of people who haven't put a dime in it get all kinds of money out of it without needing to what will probably be 70+.
Yes and it will kill everything eventually no social security or welfare. It all goes bye bye. Why speed it up when we need to avert that and maybe even save the programs for the really needy, not someone looking for a break on broadband.
I would wager from the sheer amount of asshole in this thread that not a single one of them have been to a public library since they were about 12 much less ever experienced being unemployed and how impossible it is to find work without internet. Quite honestly it is disgusting. I'm all for more controls on social programs to stop abuse, but the knee jerking over this is just so out of touch it is sad.
How about you show me how its done and give $120 to some down on his luck guy with a flat screen TV & a cable subscription and come back and tell me with a straight face there was no better place that money could have gone?
YeuEmMaiMai
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too bad that is taken out of employer and employee taxes or did you miss that part...
I don't think you know how social security works. Batting above your average here bro.
CaptNumbNutz
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And yet there are 20 illegal migrant workers sitting in the parking lot of my Local Home Depot every morning. They don't seem to have problems getting work without the internet.
You see one side of the issue, a whole lot of people have seen the other side. Myself and my fiance see both sides daily due to where we live in KC.
My fiance works a local supermarket while she's going to school. She sees the people who truly benefit from these programs, and she sees an awful lot of people who abuse them. She makes less than 20k a year, yet she doesn't qualify for assistance. No matter, my meager 30k a year and my decision to use condoms keeps us afloat and out of welfare. Meanwhile, I get to see Thugnificient ghetto clown pull up in his $40,000 SUV with another $10k in chrome rims park in the fire lane, buy cheetos and prime rib on his food stamp card, and then bitch about the prices he didn't just pay while flashing the wad of $100 bills in his wallet as he puts the card back in there.
Does this happen often? That's relative. I see it happen at least once a week. For most people, one occurrence like this is too often. Subsidy programs do help people, but if there are enough instances like I mentioned to get people this angry about them, then you should try and see their side of it.
Not everyone abuses subsidy programs, just like not everyone makes up these stories about the abuses or hates on them without reason. Think about that before you start calling everyone assholes.
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How about you understand I spent 18 months unemployed with no internet and it was the shittiest time of my life because the library near me has awful hours and cost me gas I couldn't afford to get too. How about you understand that no internet makes it basically impossible to find a job no matter how motivated you are if you don't live in the city. Finally how about you fuck right off with your self righteous attitude about something you don't know a fucking thing about. I couldn't get a low end job because I was "over qualified" and the econ in my area that I lived in at that time was horrible.
edit: I'll go ahead and add I ended up getting a job and despite it all kept my house before you start even trying to compare me to the deadbeats you assume everyone on assistance is. However my point is even a basic 1mb internet would of given me far more job searching time than I could ever get going to the library during its limited hours and limited computer use time due to demand.
What is killing Social Security other than there are more people taking out than putting in, or that people move money from it, though they're not supposed to?
I look at it that by the time I'm old enough to actually retire (if they don't jack the age up to 80) on SS, I won't see a dime of it, and I've basically worked myself to death to give the government a massive interest-free loan.
athenian200
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Slower speeds of dial-up are probably not the reason they're doing this, as logical as that might seem at first blush. It would be easier to sell the argument to that landline service is so expensive these days that cheap broadband amounts to a lower cost than dial-up. I used Dial-up for ages, I think until 2006 or so. A lot of those ISPs have found ways to make it work, like even further than V.96 compression. They prioritize HTML and text, etc. I've even used dial-up connections recently on some computers out in rural areas that have no other options, and there are ways to make it work. Disabling images and scripts, using mobile versions of webpages, etc. Worst case, it takes an hour to load instead of a minute? So what? They don't have anywhere to be. I would hardly say that your time is valuable if you're looking for work on the government's dime. E-mail is essential these days, but it works fine over dial-up. A dial-up modem is also fine for receiving and sending faxes, which quite a few businesses still have. Bear in mind that looking for work on the Internet is a lot more likely to require e-mails and faxes than watching videos or looking at high-quality graphics.
But nowadays, by the time you pay $30 per month for a landline and $10 for dial-up, you save little or nothing over broadband and a re-loadable TracFone. It basically costs a minimum of $50 to get any kind of home Internet connection these days. My Mom and I were some of the last people in our area to ditch our home phones for a cell phone (in 2012), and ultimately it was because they kept walking up the price of landline telephones to the point that it didn't make sense to have one anymore.
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