Congressional Oversight Panel Chair Elizabeth Warren speaks at the Women in Finance Symposium, March 29, 2010. Photo provided by the Treasury Department.
Elizabeth Warren has released yet another plan to spend your tax dollars. This time she wants to use your money to subsidize the expansion of high-speed internet services to people who live in far off places in the United States. WIRED’s Klint Finley writes (abridged):
Wednesday, presidential candidate and senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) unveiled a plan to spend $85 billion to bring internet service to unserved and underserved areas.
Warren proposes creating an Office of Broadband Access within the Department of Economic Development to run the program and would set aside $5 billion of the $85 billion specifically for tribal nations and expand the FCC’s Office of Native Affairs and Policy to provide additional training and funding.
As for net neutrality, Warren says she will appoint FCC commissioners who will restore the Obama-era regulations.
According to the FCC, only 6% of Americans lack access to fixed broadband service at threshold speeds. Warren wants to spend $85 billion to roll out the internet to that small number of people (19 million). That’s as much as the Department of Transportation spends on the entire country in a year.
Meanwhile, of the 298 million Americans who do have access to high-speed internet, 100 million Americans don’t even subscribe to it. If they don’t think it’s a necessity, spending a fortune connecting far-flung Americans to the internet seems like a waste of funds to any rational person. Elizabeth Warren has gone absolutely crackers.
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