Yet more evidence of rural America’s ruggedly independent self-sufficiency:
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski on Monday unveiled a plan to overhaul a much-criticized program that helps provide phone service to far-flung rural areas, proposing to focus it on expanding high-speed Internet access to those same locations.
The $8-billion Universal Service Fund is paid for by telecommunications companies, who must contribute a percentage of their long-distance revenue, often passing those fees on to their customers. The decades-old program has successfully spread phone service to residents in hard-to-reach areas that often are unprofitable for companies to serve…
That’s right, when angry, rural teabaggers call each other up on the phone to strategize ways of getting government off their backs, they’re doing it on our dime. Well… not our dime, exactly. It’s more like 200,000 dimes.
But the fund has become highly inefficient, [Genachowski] said. In some cases, it pays more than $20,000 a year to provide a single home with phone service.
I just checked my phone bill and see that I paid $0.89 last month into the USF, at a rate of 15.5 percent. (15.5 percent of what, I’ve no idea, as phone bills are largely indecipherable to all but the most expert phonebillologists, which helps explain how a $13.50 a month residential line ends up costing me $22.93, only $2.78 of which is attributable to “tax.”) And I don’t really mind paying a little extra to help keep rural America connected to the rest of the world. No “thank you” required.
But what does kinda piss me off is the way so many rural Americans are totally clueless as to how much of their lifestyle—little things like irrigation, electrification, transportation, education, and yes, basic fucking phone service—is made possible by godless, urban liberals like me subsidizing the “real America,” 89 cents at a time. Almost makes me want to get government off my back.
Backwoods telecom providers also take advantage of subsidies by promoting phone banks for psychic hotlines and free conference calling providers, who set up out in Iowa and Kansas cornfields because the small telecoms who service the them can charge the bigger carriers 10-20 times the going rate to connect calls there. The higher the incoming call volume, the more they make.
The reason rural Americans are clueless is that once they get a clue, the move to a city. Most of said clues arrive to the youth of rural America via a subsidized clue train. Telephones, TV, radio, schools. Now broadband.
Hence, the ones left behind are rightfully pissed. We’re enlightening their youth and turning them into the future liberal urban America, and leaving them only a handful of dense dead enders like themselves.
So chill. It’s all going according to plan.
We should let the teabaggers have their way and cut all this stuff. No more roads subsidies, no more levy equalization, no more USF, nothing. Let them go it on their own.
Keep a list Goldy. A long list. We’ll use it the next chance we get.
Over 60 years ago, Bernard DeVoto described the rural West’s attitude toward the federal government in these words: “Get out, and give us more money.”
Not much has changed.
Teabaggers should be seen and not heard, kind of like those Verizon commercials.
They should also stop living off us hardy urbanites.
If the ‘baggers want to live in the 17th century, then they should only be allowed to have phones like this one
If you read DSLreports.com, you’ll find that many of the large phone companies profit off the USF fund as they use the money to provide entry level service with minimum maintience, only to sell off the property once it no longer becomes obscenely profitable. Often these small towns get fed up with the phone company and decide to run their own fiber using tax money, but the majority are sued and local politicians cave in quickly.
But yeah, its just one more thing that proves how the free market isnt free.
Sounds like Socialism to me! Down with it, I say
Way back in 2000, when the internet was still kinda new, and most people were still using dial-up to access the internet, I studied the economics of the telecom industry as a sort of activist pastime.
One of the great ironies was, even as residents of Redmond, WA such as myself were paying fees on our copper wire POTS (that’s plain-old-telephone-service) lines to subsidize phone service in rural Washington, residents of Grant County had 50-megabit fiberoptic lines right to their homes courtesy of the Grant County PUD. And there I was, barely a mile from Microsoft, paying hundreds of dollars a month for 384-kilobit DSL.
If rural america could get broadband, they might be able to read slog instead of watching fox news on satellite.
Incidentally, I used to live out in the boonies, and plotted moving back. one of the drawbacks: the only broadband available was Satellite internet, which is twice as expensive for half the service as any city in America.
So assisting people in rural areas so they can communicate with each other is the same as taxpayers funding a 16-year-old girl with 2 kids from 2 dads that will never work a day in her life because taxpayers will feed, clothe and house her? Great analogy.
@12 – Both sound like rural America to me.
@13- Nice burn. And supported by the facts, unlike all of Basehead’s posts.
You know, with a name like Basehead, he might just be trolling and not believe a word he says.
12, Rural America is dealing with poverty that is worse than urban America’s and a drug problem that is just as bad. So, yes, it speaks to all parts of our dying nation. But, per capita, it’s the ghetto dwellers who use up much more of our money than the trailer park ridden white trash.
13, What facts? Per capita, certain groups strangulate our welfare state more than others. And it aint the crackers.
@15: links or you’re just another bigot.
Stupid troll is stupid.
What the hell is ‘strangulate our welfare state’ supposed to mean anyway? Your truthiness is suspect.
Basehead @15,
Um… but it is the crackers. And I’ve got the DSHS data to back me up.
@16: Even if Shithead provides links, he’s still a bigot. Much like the anon racist troll, he quotes data points stripped of context to promote his racist world view.