Comment by TrueGeek
3 years ago
From the article: he had $2.6MM in help from the "American Rescue Plan's Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds".
He's being paid by the government to bring Internet access to homes in the state that aren't currently wired for it.
Gotta pay your fair share, so it can be granted out for someone elses gain
This is literally how societies function - you contribute a small amount to the general pool, you use small amounts from the general pool. In some cases bigger chunks go for bigger works like ISPs or bridges. I certainly hope you don't want a world where every road, bridge and traffic light is independently owned.
Yeah, wait until you find out that some of your tax dollars go to pay for bridges you never use or to bomb people who never personally insulted you.
Well, there is a lot of legal graft in society
4 replies →
Today you help finance someone’s fiber, tomorrow they help finance your hospital/fire dept/etc, that’s the whole idea of public works.
Sounds more like how crony politics for personal gain works. Alternatively, you could finance the hospital, fire depart, or whatever without an middle man siphoning off "their fair share"
8 replies →
Are you also concerned about your tax dollars paying for roads in the next neighborhood over?
The neighborhood developer paid for that. The roads connecting, donated many many years ago by the landowners at that time
5 replies →
This is also why USPS is crucial for rural areas. The Government should be subsidizing this work because if they don't people in rural areas are left behind.
That bill and these types of projects are basically why we have 10% inflation now.
Inflation isn't at 10% but it seems like investing in infrastructure is a good idea. If we needed to pinch pennies we could start at the bloated military budget
Right, in the middle of war with Russia and with war with China on the horizon. Great idea.
9 replies →
How does spending a lot of government money make goods and service more expensive?
EDIT: At least here in Western Europe, we mostly have a supply side inflation, because energy got a lot more expensive, not because the government has been "printing" a lot of money. I suspect it's the same in the US.
Yes, inflation is currently a world-wide issue, and explanations at the world level lead somewhat obviously to the pandemic and Russia's invasion of the Ukraine.
But here in the USA, people like to believe it must be political and local, completely unrelated to the totally-coincidental worldwide issue that happens to be very similar.
2 replies →
It does not unless that money is spent competing with businesses and citizens for resources. However, in this case the money had already been earmarked for rural internet service and is not being used to purchase goods and services that citizens would be buying instead.
Actually Europe has been printing a lot of money by having less than 0% interest rate for loan. Current inflation is due to many factor, some estimate it has been slowly growing since 2008, plus covid where we printed money to just to keep business alive, plus negative interest rate that allowed countries to loan too much, etc...
But I suspect that subsidies for infrastructure is one of the least impactful factor for inflation.
Damn, this project is even hurting me in the UK then because we're also at 10%. Curse you Jared.
Yeah I'm sure this is the exact US "government waste" driving the global inflation right now.
That doesn't make any sense.