https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...nternet-users/

It will take a sustained groundswell of public (as in "voter") support for this plan to become a reality. The big entrenched ISPs, (i.e. AT&T, Comcast, Charter, et al.), will pour billions into the coffers of members of Congress to make sure President Biden's broadband plan goes nowhere. This is the kind of issue that guarantees members of Congress retire with millions of [unspent] dollars in their campaign war chests - money they get to keep if they decide to retire rather than run for reelection.

The reader comment concerning "natural monopolies" appended to the end of the linked article is especially interesting.

This isn't fast enough for people?
And you need to take $100 billion out of the pockets of the productive members of society and give it to unproductive unions and socialized buildouts?

Grand hugely wasteful socialist plans like this are why countries go broke

Yep Tooth, I see your point. I'm sure all those people living in rural areas are very grateful for their "high speed" internet service delivering ZERO Mbps upload and download speeds.

There are always problems to be solved that money can solve. For $100 billion, is broadband internet to the boondocks really the best problem to solve? Is it even in 50th percentile of desirable problems to solve?

If you magically got a charity endowed with $100 billion, would you use it to bring broadband to way out farms in Montana?

If you got $100 billion given to you and were told to rank order a list of ways of spending that money that maximized economic return and prosperity (or security or comfort or a million other metrics) for that money, where would "spend $100 billion to bring broadband to some rural areas that already have 3G" rank on that list?

I'm for fast internet for rural people, but isn't starlink mostly going to solve this problem?

This is a nightmare for all of us. Currently, if you have an issue with your internet, you have the option to switch to a different provider. If this happens, we're stuck with government run internet. It also paves the way for censorship

He may not understand Bitcoin, but he nailed this one pretty good.

I'm sure this would be even more of a grift by the companies involved, but for wired internet I don't see how you can have a real market without shared infrastructure.

You can't switch when you have one option. How many people have access to two high speed, low latency, no/high cap internet options?

Productive members of society?
Isn’t the US in a trading deficit for the last like 40 years ?

Without that 100 billion , isn’t the US with 30 trillions in debts already ?
I know you don’t believe in data but seem to me the current way of doing business in the US isn’t working very well for a very long time now .

Using an LTE hotspot, I clocked like 25mbps up and down driving in pretty rural areas of North Carolina recently. Even with one bar of signal, I never dipped below 10mbps.

I did lose signal altogether for parts of the drive but I suspect it wouldn’t cost that much to add additional towers to get 100% of US homes (including rural) covered by LTE service.

The other provisions of the broadband proposal I think are more significant.

So who profits the most and who gets wrecked?

The populace will be happy for faster internet while giving up so much more. The ol' we're here to help. How about not letting companies fight for years in the court system to delay other companies from competing versus Comcast and the likes.

The system works for a certain class/group.

I think he is alluding to the fact that rich people pay an overwhelming majority of all tax money collected and they are the most responsible for economic growth in the country. Not sure where you were going with this, but I think both of these points are widely agreed upon by most economists.

And who’s responsable for the debts in the US I wonder ?
You seem to think when the fed and government does a bail out , it is profitable for the middle class ?
How many is it , 4 bail outs now since 1998 .....

And you wonder why the rich makes lot of money , because they are profitable to society or because they just get saved by the fed and government by adding debts for years .....?

“ Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk among US billionaires getting richer during coronavirus pandemic”

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money...ovid/43205617/

Wtf can a middle class worker can do when the whole economy is shut down , government indebted itself like crazy and you got billionaires in the states that do close to 1 trillions of profits in a shutdown economy in 2020 alone .
And you think they pay enough taxes ???

Makes perfect sense !

it would be a lot cheaper if the gov just did it instead of shipping tons of money to the corporate cartel monopolies.

kinda like everything else that is a public need.

anyway, I am productive. I live in an urban area. I pay a shitton for complete shite internet.

its stupid to paint this as a some socialist endeavor. this is one of the most capitalist achievements since the health care bill. the whole point is to give money to the rich cartels.

you think it takes money from producers and gives it to unproductive "people"? I agree. it takes money from people who work and produce all day every day and gives it to oligarchic cartels (who are people btw, ask the Supreme Court) whom actually destroy wealth. a bum on the street does more for society than any big business.

The stats just don't bear that out, I'm sorry. The two largest budget items, comprising about 60% of the budget, are public health care and welfare/pensions to poor people. Other programs for the poor make up even more of discretionary spending. Overall about 72% of the federal budget is wealth redistribution from the most productive workers to the poor; most of the remaining 28% is military and a bunch of smaller essential programs. Not much goes to the rich.

Then there are state programs - again mostly going to the poor - and college financial aid, privately paid for by the rich/productive. It's quite a staggering wealth transfer that goes on from the highly productive to the unproductive. People with higher IQs and better work ethics spend a good chunk of every day being slaves for those with lower IQ and poor work ethics.

the health care money goes to corporations!

My mom lives out in the middle of nowhere, the internet is horrid. My little brother, and many of his friends who live in the same area, have been at a huge disadvantage, especially because of the pandemic.

Even if you try to use LTE it's horrid.

My step dad has worked his whole life, isn't rich at all but never took a hand out and didn't even graduate from HS. But **** them, LOW IQ IDIOTS.

Man how do people think like this?

I think you forgot tax cut for decades for the rich and corporations.
That cost of tax break is directly supported by the rest of the Americans right ?
I mean if corporations and top 1% gets tax break , who pays for those if not the rest of the people ?

Ps: ho yeah I forgot the Wall Street bail outs too !
More than once !

You mean they can't surf social media all day? Horrible! The world can be cruel sometimes.

Strange comment from a bitcoin lover , knowing how important a good internet connection should be .

TS wasn’t surprising because his disbelief in bitcoin and probably all the economic sector tied to it , but you ...?

The economic reality is that it's a small percentage of the population, very high IQ hardworking people, who cause all economic growth. When they're the holders of capital (i.e. very wealthy) the poor have the best outcomes in the long run.

It's an ugly reality but that's just how it is. Or maybe it's not an ugly reality. Sane people would be grateful such people exist and make the lives of the poor far better than they could achieve on their own. Take out the sickening left wing politics of envy (which is a disgusting emotion responsible for most of the suffering in the 20th century) and the US has a pretty great system that's extremely generous to the poor relative to their economic worth.

Really ?
are we at that point yet or the very wealthy still need even more money then they have now to achieve your utopia for the greater good of humankind ?
And what time frame u talk about when you say, "in the long run" ?
I mean if its so clear in your mind you should actually have some ideas about it ?


how is the system "extremely generous " for the poor ?
All i see the system do is bailing out wall street for the last 20 years for keeping inflated assets prices high , seem pretty socialist to me and not letting free market operates.
giving hundreds of billions $ of tax cuts for decades for those that needs it the less....and you call being extremely generous for the poor ?
So the top 1% are suppose to know better than the government on what the poor needs right ? So what are they waiting for ? not enough money yet ?

This utopia has been achieved. Capitalist societies crush all others in the wealth of the poor.

We're already in the long run. The poor, the stupid and those with bad work ethics have incredible lives compared to:

- History
- What they could achieve on their own
- What they would achieve under an anti-capitalist redistribution system.

This is settled. The experiment has been run for most of the 20th century and we have the results.

They live comfortable lives with resources given to them by hardworking slaves, far more than they could produce on their own. They have schooling, health care, shelter, slaves to support for whatever children they have, heating, cooling, cooking, entertainment, travel, computing, labor saving whitegoods, all kinds of cool gadgets.

That's all you see because politics comes before reason and data for you. Approximately $70 trillion has been directly given to the poor by the hard working rich in the last 20 years in the US alone; Wall Street has had a few trillion at most. That's not counting the other external benefits that the hardworking rich create.

It's a fairly small aberration from free market principles. The greatest distorter of free market forces is regulation, not subsidy; it creates barriers to entry and favors existing entrenched participants. But the left loves regulation; Trump did a large deregulation push for example which Biden is undoing.

I don't know what you mean, "need it the least". The best people to give capital to is those who invest it in productive assets and the development of productive assets and their ecosystem.

You see these giant headline numbers - Elon Musk is worth $150 billion or something for example, and think "that's so unfair!". But that $150 billion isn't consumption or resource hoarding. Maybe $100 million of it is. The rest, the $149.9 billion, represents control of productive capital. And who best to control that productive capital than the person smart enough at developing productive wealth creating ecosystems than the person who did it from scratch over decades? They've literally proven their ability to do that. And it's not an easy thing; money is very easy to waste and very hard to use efficiently and in generating scalable wealth ecosystems that benefit all.
Yes of course. That's how the large majority of people became rich - producing what poor people want in the way they want it better and cheaper than anyone else.

The idea that government or bureaucrats know better what the poor need and want is farcical. Its like you're living in 1917 before we actually ran the experiment of government taking care of the economic system on behalf of the poor, and disbanding the rich capitalist power. The experiment was literally run in multiple countries, and billions of poor people had their lives ruined by it, suffering oppression and worse poverty, while well over 100 million died, most from famine caused by governments and bureaucrats knowing better than selfish rich capitalists.
It's been done already; the lot of the poor has been massively improved by capitalism and these rich people.

I think what you don't understand is that the fate of the poor is not caused by the rich; it's caused by two things:

- Their own incompetence and behavior
- The limits of human efficiency and knowhow

These are fundamental problems, not trivial ones. They have nothing to do with politics. There are 7.7 billion people in the world; meanwhile, the world produces $88.5 trillion in GDP. That's $11,500 per person in yearly output, far below the US poverty line. That's the best that all of human effort can achieve in output per person - a level far below the US poverty line. The problem of poverty is a fundamental one, it's not a redistribution one. In fact, redistribution to the poor hurts the growth of that number.

So Jeff Bezos is a slave to an underpaid school teacher in Arkansas?

You do realize that a social contract needs to bear in mind morality, right?

You're basically saying the rich and smart pay for everything, and the poor and not so smart are leeches. I just don't understand why you think so harshly of those who've been chewed up and spit out by capitalism, to the point of literally saying they are worthless scum, lazy, and stupid...Do they have a right to live?

By your logic, we should eliminate something like, say, social security. But that would throw more people into poverty rather than keep them out of it, would it not?

The feature in capitalism leads to the weak left to fend for their own...That is why the US has a mixed economy, not some lassez faire utopia that hyper-proliferates productivity

Do you think the infrastructure plan is crap in its entirety, or just the broadband part? We kind of need infrastructure investment here in the US. I dunno exactly what's in the bill, but I do know we have a nation full of deteriorating bridges in serious need of renovation

"The top 1 percent paid a greater share of individual income taxes (38.5 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (29.9 percent)."

"The top 50 percent of all taxpayers paid 97 percent of all individual income taxes, while the bottom 50 percent paid the remaining 3 percent."

https://taxfoundation.org/summary-of...a-2020-update/

Even after the rich people's tax breaks that supposedly everyone is paying for, it seems like the rich are still paying quite a bit. We have a highly progressive tax system.