There's a significant difference between having to replace your TV (or get a converter device) and turntables v. CDs, Betamax v. VHS VCRs, Blu-Ray v. HD DVD players, and all of the other technological changes. The first is government mandated obsolesce, the others are the market at work. How about an economic stimulus package that required the demolition of all houses built prior to 1990? That'd sure take care of the housing bubble.

I'm not advocating the subsidy as most action by Congress, directly or indirectly, costs (some) taxpayers money. However, in this case the cost to the taxpayer is very clearly linked to Congressional action and the Congress Critters are worried. It's not like the ethanol scam where the higher costs of food and gasoline can be laid-off on Big Oil and Big Milk. Oops, sorry, we just blame Big Oil, we never blame Big Milk or Big Government.

I'm also not surprised that The Wall Street Journal, which is unable to distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants, can't tell the difference between government mandates and market forces.

"Hey, a few pairs of my boots are a little past their prime, style-wise. Come on, taxpayers! Fork over!"

Boots, shmoots. My car is eleven years old and has more than 146,000 miles on it. I'm sure there are things on new cars this one does not have, and dammit, they are expensive. Well, at least the ones *I* like are expensive.

Of course, as a Middle Aged White Guy, I've been cast is the role of Supporter, not Supportee, but it would be nice if someone would give me about ten grand. Just to help out, you understand, I don't expect society to pick up the whole tab.

Just because I work in public ecucation doesn't mean I shouldn't have a Audi, don't you think?

Federal law also mandates that I, as a self-employed person, pay more tax, and also, I pay for my health insurance out of my taxed dollars. $40, schmorty. There's some real equalization that should be done, and it's not in the coupons for TV sets department.

ah, the unintended consequence of an uneeded law. Who knew? This is why you don't mandate stuff... Do you imagine networks and stations might pony some money up to make sure you keep watching their station? Well except for the part where they were the ones who wanted a law, because, they wanted the changeover to be as painless as possible for them... network TV sucks anyway...

"Do you imagine networks and stations might pony some money up to make sure you keep watching their station?"

That didn't happen last time. Back when the UHF channels were
released for commercial use, you had to buy a converter box in
order to receive them. No subsidy from the UHF stations to
encourage you. You either bought a converter or you didn't get
those stations. Eventually, the FCC mandated that new TVs must
be able to tune both UHF and VHF, so those converter boxes faded
by attrition.

We've got the same thing happening again with digital, but
with a harder cutover: it's not just some stations that you'll
miss without a converter box or a new TV, it's all of them.

It makes some sense that the government-mandated obsolescence
of perfectly good TV receivers be ameliorated by a discount
coupon for the necessary converter box. Those who use it end up
with about the same thing they started with: a conventional TV
picture. Those who can afford it (and wish to afford it) end up
with something else: a new TV with a much better picture.

Sorry, a TV is not a necessity. Your TV doesn't work, get a book out of the library.

Here's why going digital is good, and why the way they're going about it is really, really dumb:

http://money.cnn.com/2006/01/04/technology/pluggedin_digitaltv/index.htm

And, of course there's a Hollywood-benefiting downside:

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=2226

I moved into my place three years ago and realized very quickly that without cable, I wasn't going to be able to get ANY stations, not even the local ones. Not sure why it is, but even with rabbit ear antennae, I get mostly snow for the local channels.

So ... (drumroll) ... I decided to go without TV altogether! I only use my lovely 50-inch LCD TV to watch movies, and that's it. I am simply not paying that kind of money every month so I can watch TV, which I think is largely stupid and not something I want to spend more time doing. It's annoying enough that I have to spend $60 a month just to have a high-speed internet connection, but I don't have a land line phone, so I guess I am saving money there to offset it.

It really irritates me that I have to pay taxes so other people can watch more TV, when I don't get TV in my place myself. What the hell, fork over money that *I* earned, just so a bunch of lardasses can sit around on their couches and get even more lardassed? Since when is watching the Super Bowl an entitlement, anyway? I don't give a flying frack about the Super Bowl.

I have a 12-foot wall lined with books, though. Hey, maybe someone should buy them for me!

I'll just make the admittedly unscientific and totally anecdotal observation that people with far lower incomes than mine always seem to own far nicer (read: more expensive and up to date) TVs than I do. Their cars are often newer than mine, too. Odd, that. I think they'll do just fine, even without the coupons.

Amy -

The problem is that the feds stuck their noses where they most certainly don't belong with this one. There is absolutely no conceivable reason they needed to pass a law requiring that broadcasters change to a digi only signal. The industry was moving in that direction anyways and had they let "nature" take it's course this would have happened anyways, with no reason for making this subsidy available.

But no, they had to come up with this stupid little law. And because they mandated it, we have to pay for it. I am pretty damned certain, that in the interest of ensuring that no one would miss out on their great advertising, the broadcasting industry would have come up with a solution all on their own. Apparently the solution they came up with was to get the fed to enact this stupid mandate, then to pay for digi tuners. I don't believe that this is anything more or less than a rather interesting twist on corporate welfare.

By and by, I also have issues with the tax rate on the self-employed. It seems to me that this is nothing less than a disincentive for entrepreneurship. Ultimately what really gets me about that, is that it is largely driven by larger businesses, to stem competition from smaller contractors. Which is silly, because, for example, I take the jobs that larger companies aren't keen on touching. I take the small jobs, because that's my niche.

The insurance gets me the worse though. At the least, I shouldn't be carrying the tax burden for the income I spend on healthcare. Grr, it pisses me off.

Ultimately what really gets me about that, is that it is largely driven by larger businesses

I think it's actually driven by the labor unions who work for the big industries. The "health care" benefit started as a way to compensate union workers without it showing up as taxable compensation. It expanded to other non-union members working for large companies but small business owners, the Subchapter S corporations, are excluded because they and their employees don't belong to the unions. It's an easy fix for Congress but it's unlikely to change for obvious reasons.

> Their cars are often
> newer than mine, too.
> Odd, that

While admiring all the gleaming Caddies and Lincolns as we rode through slummy Indianapolis forty years ago, my mother ran down the math: If you're poor and without prospects (in 1967), $2,500 will do a lot for your selection of automobiles, but it won't take your family into an appreciably better neighborhood.

Ditto the TVs. It's an opiate for the impoverished. It's not like they're choosing between a weekend in the Keys and Must-see Thursday. TV is how they spend their lives.

The federal government has bungled every innovation in broadcast technology since the Reagan administration, but I don't honestly know what they could have done to make this particular changeover go better. As an industry, broadcasting is circling the drain... Ever notice how a Youtube clip looks three times as good as it did three years ago, while using about the same bandwidth?

It's a tough call. It might be best if we took all that broadcast spectrum and gave it to the computer guys. But poor people deserve television, too.

See this.

Of course you are correct, Crid. So I guess all I'm saying is, Exactly to whom are these coupons targeted??

Err... Um.....

The US economy is based on poor and working class people accumulating massive amounts of debt. That's going to be hard to do if they can't watch teevee and learn about all the "everyday low prices" available at WalMart.

Besides convincing people to buy crap they don't need, television is also quite useful for perpetuating the climate of fear that has served this nation so well the past six years or so.

Amy, you just don't get it.

We need the corporate media screaming at us 24x7.

How else will we know what we should worry about and which country to hate? It's your duty as a rube to watch the boob tube. Every American should know more about their favorite TV show than the details of the Patriot Act.

Add that $1.5 Billion to the $1.6 Billion set aside for domestic propaganda in the Federal budget, by the way, if you want to get an inch closer to the reality of it all.

i have 7 tv's in my house. utterly ridiculous, i know, don't actually know how it happened except that i paid for all of them. 2 of them are digital. (and, by the way, i don't really see much difference in the picture with my blu-ray movies, but maybe i'm just blind) it's going to be extremely expensive if i decide to replace or convert the other 5. but i'm not going to have the government pay for it. that's why i work overtime. ok, so i really work overtime to pay the cable bill, but still.

Well the first thing I though when I heard about the mandated change over was, "That's stupid, everyone who can afford a digital TV already has one, the only people who will have to go out and buy one are poor people who can't afford them."

So I'm glad that they are doing the coupon program, because I hardly think it is fair to mandate that millions of people's equipment is out of date and just tell them to STFU and deal.

However, I think this mandate was incredibly stupid and costly to the american taxpayers.

Really, though, before granny's right to a working TV, how about my right not to be taxed senseless for being self-employed? How about my health care dollars, which come out of my taxed income, unlike those of people who work for The Man?

This is a bit like putting a bandaid on a blister on a cancer patient, while ignoring his need for a course of chemo.

If you're poor and without prospects (in 1967), $2,500 will do a lot for your selection of automobiles, but it won't take your family into an appreciably better neighborhood.

But it will, if invested early enough, provide part of a college education, some money for retirement, money to cover a medical expense or job loss, even a nice trip to Italy in your dotage. Using it to buy a nicer car than needed or a big screen tv is an example of the types of decisions poor people make that keep them poor - no long term outlook, opting for immediate gratification over delayed gratification.

As for the TV law:

Notice how the price of digital televisions has not come down at all (like the price of DVD players did). Why not? Because several million people are going to buy one in the next year to comply with a government mandate. If I didn't know any better, I'd say someone in the digital tv industry had some naughty pictures of a government official or two.

If the market had been allowed to operate with its usual ruthless efficiency, the price of digital televisions would have declined over time, more people would have bought them at the lower price - saturating the market with digital televisions and creating more demand for digital signals, and the broadcasters would have switched to solely digital since the expense of maintaining two signals would have become prohibitive and the small number of analog sets left would have belonged to the extremely poor (those too poor even to afford $10,000 spinning rims for their $2,000 cars), the institutionalized, and those "off the grid" - none of whom are major target for advertisers.

Amy -

I agree with you, but I think the real culprit here is the mandate on broadcasting to switch, not the coupons for digi tuners. Without the mandate, there would exist no need for the coupons. With a federal mandate for broadcasters to switch, there also comes a responsibility to help cover the cost of updating equipment.

Like I said, I strongly suspect that this was the broadcasting lobbies way of dealing with the crossover to digital broadcasting. They pushed to get the taxpayers foot the bill for keeping everyone with a tee vee in the loop, as it were. This is nothing more or less than corporate welfare. Probably also a good way of further consolidating broadcast media, as there are likely more than a few small local stations in the U.S. that will be unable to comply and who's network broadcasting will be taken over by the larger regional affiliates.

I guess I'm not disagreeing with you, so much as I am thinking you're missing far more important aspects of this whole scenario. There are simply much worse problems with other aspects of this paradigm, than giving people vouchers for conversion equipment.

To build briefly on what Conan said...

$2,500 in 1967 is roughly $16k today (inflation calculator here: http://www.bls.gov/cpi/)

That same $2,500 would have paid for about 2/3rds of my college education in the late 70's, which would have meant me only working 1 job instead of 3. It's not a good comparison for today as college costs have vastly outpaced inflation (by something like a factor of 4).

However, that money invested in one's self in 1967 could have moved the poor out of the slums BUT it would have required accepting responsibility for the future and a commitment to hard work. It's a lot easier to buy a TV or car and eat government cheese. Hmmm... cheese....

> But it will, if invested
> early enough, provide

As if such families ever had an hour in which to pour some coffee and think casually about mutual fund options discussed in the wall street journal.

> I'd say someone in the digital
> tv industry had some naughty
> pictures of a government
> official or two.

Why bother extorting? People are horny for TV on their own. The Bush tax rebates early in the decade did more for the development of flat-panel technology than could any tech lab.