5 ms·

I could be wrong, but I believe the issue is not that 34% of households can't afford Internet, but that the eligibility requirements for this problem are so lax

by csallen 10y ago

I could be wrong, but I believe the issue is not that 34% of households can't afford Internet, but that the eligibility requirements for this problem are so lax that they cover 34% of households, despite the fact that many of them can afford Internet on their own. From the linked document: "The average annual household income of those eligible for Lifeline support is roughly $38,000. Numerous families with incomes at that level already subscribe to broadband."

yewhdriof 10y ago
You could be wrong.
aianus 10y ago
$38k to support a whole household sounds pretty poor to me.
- csallen 10y ago
  I agree, but the question at hand is not whether or not $38k is "poor", but whether $38k is "too poor to afford the internet".
  - bluejekyll 10y ago
    I grew up in a family of 6 on 38k a year, I can guarantee that's too poor, even in the country. That was in the 80's, it must be even worse now. At those incomes all your financial decisions are about food and housing, and hopefully getting clothing donations. Let alone trying to think about educating your kids to try and get them out. This is a lifeline to people, and helps educate their children. We should be doing more as a society to help those at the bottom.
    - nugget 10y ago
      I was raised in similar circumstances and I wouldn't even consider it poor, let alone ''too poor''. $38k in 1985 is around $80k today. Sufficient to cover 4 kids in most rural and inland suburban parts of the US. This is Dave Ramsey's middle class, middle America audience. For these families it's not what they make, it's what they spend that determines the outcome.
      - gowld 10y ago
        1985 dollars are not relevant to a 2017 program.
        luck_fenovo 10y ago
        He is responding to someone who claimed that 38k in the 1980s was too poor to raise a family on period, it's a tangent but you're complaining to the wrong person imo
      - guelo 10y ago
        You got it backwards, $38k today is $16k in 1985. Basically poor people.
        csallen 10y ago
        Actually bluejekyll got it backwards, and nugget provided an accurate response.
        bluejekyll 10y ago
        No. I didn't get it backwards. Someone raising a family today on 38k is is roughly equivalent to somone making 16k in the 80s. Which is exactly my point. In the 80s on 38k a year it meant that we could not afford many of the things that others had. New shoes/clothes etc. my parents luckily focused on education, and other quality of life things, rather than spending on frivolous things, like cable. I'd say cable was roughly equivalent to internet today. So that was a choice that they made to go without. And I say Internet would probably have been the same type of decisions. So while 80k today may be equivalent to 40k from the 80s, I would say 80k for a family of 4 kids would be hard, 40k would be exponentially harder.
        nugget 10y ago
        I think your parents may have made a conscious choice to keep cable out of the home for other, non-financial reasons (as did mine). By the mid 1980s only about half of households had basic cable.[1] In Chicago, there were complaints about a price hike to $13/month.[2] Housing costs are the problem. The move to dual-income households, the drop in interest rates, and the population boom caused certain real estate markets to appreciate at a level far above incomes and inflation. The coastal home my parents purchased in the early 1980s has appreciated 10x in value. A similar home in the mid-western state capital of their youth has appreciated 3x over the same period. This is why I called the scenario with 4 kids doable in some (most) parts of the country, but certainly not all. [1] http://www.tvhistory.tv/Cable_Households_77-99.JPG http://www.tvhistory.tv/Cable_Households_77-99.JPG [2] http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1985/12/30/page/15/article/cable-tv-service-going-with-basics http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1985/12/30/page/15/articl...
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - deelowe 10y ago
      $38k in the 80s was a pretty decent wage. Hardly poor. $38,000 in 1985 would be roughly $87,000 today. That's solidly within middle class. http://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0912/which-income-class-are-you.aspx http://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0912/which-income...
      - bluejekyll 10y ago
        I did not intend to imply that my family was poor, only that we struggled with that income in suburban PA. The reason I posted that is because I find it very difficult to believe that any family of 1 or more children on an income of 40k a year today would have a comfortable life, and affording broadband Internet would be difficult.
- gowld 10y ago
  > average ~half of those households earn more
  - Adverblessly 10y ago
    Sorry for nitpicking, but "~half of those households earn more" would have been true if they were talking about median income, not average income. While many of the commonly seen distributions have median==average, income usually follows a more exponential distribution with the average exceeding the median due to a "heavy tail".
icantdrive55 10y ago
There's two ways to become eligible. A. Program based (enrolled in Medi-cal, SSI, Food stamp program. (These programs are not easy to qualify for.) B. Income based (1-2 household: can't make more than 25,900. That includes all income, including gifts. If you have 10 family members you can make $74,900. I don't think it's "so lax". They credit a little under $10 bucks a month. So it's a landline, or a lousy cell phone. You still end up paying the rest of the bill. It's not free. (The cell phone providers take the subsidy hoping/praying the customer will go over their credit. "Then we can bill the lousey service!" I can't imagine a internet provider service for that less than $10 credit. (There must be a catch?) People complain about the free phones some poor poeople get. It's a horrid cell phone. If you qualify, get the landline, and it's only for local calls. These days government programs know a lot about households. The Internet has stopped a lot of the fraud. People are very poor, but so many Americans believe the poor are cheating in some way? Those days are kinda over. Big brother knows everything--yea! The Rebublicans stil believe the slackers are cheating the system. Sad.
- jacobolus 10y ago
  There are some folks cheating the system like those right-wing militia ranchers who “adopt” dozens of orphaned children and then make them do hard labor, while collecting state support for it.
  - enraged_camel 10y ago
    This sounds about as real as the "welfare queens driving Cadillacs" myth.
    - jacobolus 10y ago
      e.g. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/get-the-government-s-hands-off-my-foster-kid-subsidies http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/get-the-government-s-han... Obviously this isn’t a widespread problem though, and should be dealt with on a case by case basis.
- hermannj314 10y ago

by csallen 10y ago

yewhdriof 10y ago

You could be wrong.

aianus 10y ago

$38k to support a whole household sounds pretty poor to me.

csallen 10y ago
I agree, but the question at hand is not whether or not $38k is "poor", but whether $38k is "too poor to afford the internet".
- bluejekyll 10y ago
  I grew up in a family of 6 on 38k a year, I can guarantee that's too poor, even in the country. That was in the 80's, it must be even worse now. At those incomes all your financial decisions are about food and housing, and hopefully getting clothing donations. Let alone trying to think about educating your kids to try and get them out. This is a lifeline to people, and helps educate their children. We should be doing more as a society to help those at the bottom.
  - nugget 10y ago
    I was raised in similar circumstances and I wouldn't even consider it poor, let alone ''too poor''. $38k in 1985 is around $80k today. Sufficient to cover 4 kids in most rural and inland suburban parts of the US. This is Dave Ramsey's middle class, middle America audience. For these families it's not what they make, it's what they spend that determines the outcome.
    - gowld 10y ago
      1985 dollars are not relevant to a 2017 program.
      - luck_fenovo 10y ago
        He is responding to someone who claimed that 38k in the 1980s was too poor to raise a family on period, it's a tangent but you're complaining to the wrong person imo
    - guelo 10y ago
      You got it backwards, $38k today is $16k in 1985. Basically poor people.
      - csallen 10y ago
        Actually bluejekyll got it backwards, and nugget provided an accurate response.
        bluejekyll 10y ago
        No. I didn't get it backwards. Someone raising a family today on 38k is is roughly equivalent to somone making 16k in the 80s. Which is exactly my point. In the 80s on 38k a year it meant that we could not afford many of the things that others had. New shoes/clothes etc. my parents luckily focused on education, and other quality of life things, rather than spending on frivolous things, like cable. I'd say cable was roughly equivalent to internet today. So that was a choice that they made to go without. And I say Internet would probably have been the same type of decisions. So while 80k today may be equivalent to 40k from the 80s, I would say 80k for a family of 4 kids would be hard, 40k would be exponentially harder.
        nugget 10y ago
        I think your parents may have made a conscious choice to keep cable out of the home for other, non-financial reasons (as did mine). By the mid 1980s only about half of households had basic cable.[1] In Chicago, there were complaints about a price hike to $13/month.[2] Housing costs are the problem. The move to dual-income households, the drop in interest rates, and the population boom caused certain real estate markets to appreciate at a level far above incomes and inflation. The coastal home my parents purchased in the early 1980s has appreciated 10x in value. A similar home in the mid-western state capital of their youth has appreciated 3x over the same period. This is why I called the scenario with 4 kids doable in some (most) parts of the country, but certainly not all. [1] http://www.tvhistory.tv/Cable_Households_77-99.JPG http://www.tvhistory.tv/Cable_Households_77-99.JPG [2] http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1985/12/30/page/15/article/cable-tv-service-going-with-basics http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1985/12/30/page/15/articl...
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - deelowe 10y ago
    $38k in the 80s was a pretty decent wage. Hardly poor. $38,000 in 1985 would be roughly $87,000 today. That's solidly within middle class. http://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0912/which-income-class-are-you.aspx http://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0912/which-income...
    - bluejekyll 10y ago
      I did not intend to imply that my family was poor, only that we struggled with that income in suburban PA. The reason I posted that is because I find it very difficult to believe that any family of 1 or more children on an income of 40k a year today would have a comfortable life, and affording broadband Internet would be difficult.
gowld 10y ago
> average ~half of those households earn more
- Adverblessly 10y ago
  Sorry for nitpicking, but "~half of those households earn more" would have been true if they were talking about median income, not average income. While many of the commonly seen distributions have median==average, income usually follows a more exponential distribution with the average exceeding the median due to a "heavy tail".

icantdrive55 10y ago

There's two ways to become eligible. A. Program based (enrolled in Medi-cal, SSI, Food stamp program. (These programs are not easy to qualify for.) B. Income based (1-2 household: can't make more than 25,900. That includes all income, including gifts. If you have 10 family members you can make $74,900. I don't think it's "so lax". They credit a little under $10 bucks a month. So it's a landline, or a lousy cell phone. You still end up paying the rest of the bill. It's not free. (The cell phone providers take the subsidy hoping/praying the customer will go over their credit. "Then we can bill the lousey service!" I can't imagine a internet provider service for that less than $10 credit. (There must be a catch?) People complain about the free phones some poor poeople get. It's a horrid cell phone. If you qualify, get the landline, and it's only for local calls. These days government programs know a lot about households. The Internet has stopped a lot of the fraud. People are very poor, but so many Americans believe the poor are cheating in some way? Those days are kinda over. Big brother knows everything--yea! The Rebublicans stil believe the slackers are cheating the system. Sad.

jacobolus 10y ago
There are some folks cheating the system like those right-wing militia ranchers who “adopt” dozens of orphaned children and then make them do hard labor, while collecting state support for it.
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  This sounds about as real as the "welfare queens driving Cadillacs" myth.
  - jacobolus 10y ago
    e.g. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/get-the-government-s-hands-off-my-foster-kid-subsidies http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/get-the-government-s-han... Obviously this isn’t a widespread problem though, and should be dealt with on a case by case basis.
hermannj314 10y ago