Big Frick Dot Com

Only $670 million tax dollars, plus expenses, so grandma can see how happy Bob’s wife is now that he uses male enhancement. What a deal!

With the signing of the Obama “stimu-lies” package an additional $650 million in taxpayer dollars will be granted to the digital television converter box program. The original $20 million appropriated to the FCC last September to fund this program was spent before year’s end. So far the only thing that this bureaucratic nightmare has produced was a $20 million debt and a new form of currency in the already captive welfare communities.

According to the U.S. Commerce Department an estimated 70 million televisions exist in this country that will need to be converted to receive the new digital signal from the current analog broadcast. Like most government estimates this has a margin of error of about +/- 80%. The additional money appropriated increases the total program expense to over 300 times the amount originally proposed and it is still unclear exactly what taxpayers are getting for their money.

Television broadcasters around the country not only successfully lobbied Congress to allow them to switch exclusively to the new digital broadcasting system due to the expense of running both analog and digital broadcasts, but also to have the taxpayer pick up the expense of upgrading their consumers.

With the mind numbing tripe that is being sent into American homes these days it should come as no surprise that broadcasters make their money from advertising rather than providing entertainment. The larger the target audience, the greater advertising revenue the station can garner. Broadcasters know that the old analog sets, which receive their signal through an antenna rather than cable or a satellite dish, are owned by folks that are poor or elderly or rarely watch television anyway. They are not what would be considered a target for advertising revenue. Broadcasters were willing to lose this market demographic because the cost of operating the two different broadcasting systems didn’t make financial sense as there was no money to be made off these folks with analog sets anyway. Broadcasters also understand, unlike congress, that these old analog televisions are probably not worth the $40 upgrade and that their users are probably more likely to just not watch the television than they are to get the converter box and hook it up.

The Democrat Congress however felt it was incumbent upon government to provide access to emergency information and current events to this group. Somebody probably forgot to mention to these learned scholars in Washington that this same information is available on the radio, so they decided the taxpayer should foot this bill. It was decided that the FCC would provide coupons worth $40 each to pay for the needed converter box, with a limit of two coupons per household. While the original $20 million is a lot of money, in the big budget picture it was easily passed as a service to the poor and elderly. But at over two thirds of a billion dollars and still counting, maybe congress may want to reconsider who is getting the biggest bang from this taxpayer buck.

According to the National Telecommunications and Information Agency there are currently 9.5 million coupons worth $40 each which have already been distributed. Most of them have not been used to buy a converter box. There are an additional 4 million requests for coupons which will now be honored with this latest infusion of cash. Even with my limited math skills, that totals to fewer than 15 million coupons. One needs to also take into account the fact that some households got more than one. But even if every one of these coupons is cashed the total outlay for the actual converter box is still only $120 million. That leaves over a half of a billion dollars and still counting to administer this program. And not a single penny of it coming from the industry that will benefit the most, the broadcasters themselves.

Television broadcasters may not be able to increase their revenue stream through advertising to the recipients of these converter boxes but they will in fact see a great benefit to their bottom line by shutting down their old analog equipment. As all broadcasting rights are sold and controlled by the government it would seem that a provision could be made to allow the broadcasters and their advertising partners to share in the joys of technological advancement.

It could be argued that in fact all the money appropriated for this program will not be used if the full numbers of expected coupons are not redeemed. But seeing as a government program comes in under budget far less frequently than the sighting of Haley’s Comet, I am not holding out much hope of that.

The president is scheduling his latest publicity stunt in holding what he is referring to as a “Fiscal Responsibility Summit”. He may want to invite the broadcast companies and some folks from the FCC to sit in for a special session.

Otherwise taxpayers should be invited as it seems we are then only ones responsible for climbing the fiscal summit.