5 ms·

If the funds come out of the general fund, but we already can't afford existing government spending to the tune of trillions per year, wouldn't the project be r

If the funds come out of the general fund, but we already can't afford existing government spending to the tune of trillions per year, wouldn't the project be refunded before it even gets started? The idea of adding more and more spending to an already broken budget is nothing new, but its also extremely confusing to me. Why bother with a budget when we just borrow/print our way out of any budgetary limits we don't like?

verall 3y ago
There is no broken budget, the US government isn't a household, it controls its own fiat currency. Projects which increase economic activity (like rural broadband) can be revenue positive without fees or anything. Now if the money all gets swallowed up by a huge ISP that doesn't actually give underserved people broadband, then everyone loses and its just corporate sponsorship.
- dclowd9901 3y ago
  Like what happened last time, you mean.
  - verall 3y ago
    Yeah, I know, it sucks
  - idiotsecant 3y ago
    I hear this on reddit-like social media all the time but I am disappointed to see it here. This is a low-effort and reductionist take. According to the GAO from 2009 through 2017, private ISPs made about $800 billion in capital investments and federal contributions for rural broadband in that period totalled about $50 billion. What would success look like for that 50 billion? Broadband to everywhere? America is very big and infrastructure is slow and expensive. That doesn't mean we can't ever do useful work by subsidizing the deployment on infrastructure. We can and should spend public money to improve broadband infrastructure. I have seen quite a few hugely successful subsidized broadband deployments from PUDs and small municipal power distribution companies in even lightly populated counties. For my money, continuing to subsidize these organizations and empowering them to sell broadband access direct to consumers is a huge value for the money.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - deprecative 3y ago
      I, too, am disappointed that funding the government provides to a for profit entity to provide minimal service to an area is used to pay for an exec's bonus or salary.
- _heimdall 3y ago
  > Projects which increase economic activity Do you know if there's any way we could really track this?Deficit spending increases the money supply which itself will increase economic activity. I'm not sure how we could know whether an increase in economic activity is due to broadband access or the new cash, especially when the project would likely take years.
michaelt 3y ago
Theoretically speaking, it's broadly the same money taken from broadly the same people. If society decides to take $6/year from every citizen to fund Rural Digital Access, it doesn't matter if they do it by raising broadband prices by 50 cents per month, or by raising income tax rates by 0.01%. They both mean the same thing: You, the average citizen, handing over $6 per year. The only differences are sleight of hand, where politicians "haven't raised taxes" and yet have more of your money at their disposal; and whether it's applied progressively, so the rich pay a bigger share.
- koolba 3y ago
  > The only differences are sleight of hand, where politicians "haven't raised taxes" and yet have more of your money at their disposal; and whether it's applied progressively, so the rich pay a bigger share. There's also the difference of exactly which people are paying. It's not uniform across everybody, not even across everybody with internet access. A more extreme example of this same picking of winners and losers is student loan bailouts. The winners are clearly the minority of people who get their loans repaid / forgiven and the losers are all the tax payers getting the tab added to the national debt.
  - throwway120385 3y ago
    Why not allow forgiveness for the only debt in the entire US that legally cannot be discharged through bankruptcy? As a homeowner I can discharge all of my debt in bankruptcy with the consent of a court, but if I spend $20,000 on a degree at the start of my life I must forever be in service of that debt. If you're anti-loan-forgiveness then you need to allow people to discharge these things in bankruptcy.
    - opinion-is-bad 3y ago
      Student loans used to be eligible for loan forgiveness as well, but we ran into a situation where every new doctor in America was immediately declaring bankruptcy. Unlike a house, the gains from education cannot be repossessed.
    - 3y ago
throwway120385 3y ago
> Why bother with a budget when we just borrow/print our way out of any budgetary limits we don't like? I think this is the wrong question to ask of the government. At least notionally, when I borrow as a private individual it's to provide some quantifiable benefit in the future. For example if I'm starting a business, I might draft a business plan, conclude that there is money to be made and an opportunity that will dissolve if I try to save, and borrow money to buy equipment to start the business. What we should be asking is "what tangible benefit for our society is this thing going to have, and do we want to be on the hook to pay for it for 30 years?" I think to the degree that broadband access gives people in rural areas direct access to a market and to knowledge and ideas that they can't access locally, there is a lot of value in the rest of the country paying for this so that they can have the same options that the rest of us have.
- _heimdall 3y ago
  > what tangible benefit for our society is this thing going to have, and do we want to be on the hook to pay for it for 30 years? That's really key to the question though. The federal government doesn't have to risk any collateral and they aren't held to any repayment schedule. Arguably, once the the debt is created they are actually incentivized to not pay back the debt. The new debt creates new money in the system, removing it later would decrease the money supply and at any meaningful scale would risk deflation. When governments can create their own money on demand and have no tangible downsides to doing so unless they somehow trigger massive inflation, when does a budget really create much of a barrier to them? When would a government turn down or cancel a program, assuming the money spent isn't going to trigger inflation?
  - _3u10 3y ago
    I don't know when, but I can tell you where, Argentina. It's been operating under the premise that their borrowing won't create inflation for the last 100 years. The recently departed government still claims that their borrowing wasn't the cause of the problem.
    - 3y ago

verall 3y ago

There is no broken budget, the US government isn't a household, it controls its own fiat currency. Projects which increase economic activity (like rural broadband) can be revenue positive without fees or anything. Now if the money all gets swallowed up by a huge ISP that doesn't actually give underserved people broadband, then everyone loses and its just corporate sponsorship.

dclowd9901 3y ago
Like what happened last time, you mean.
- verall 3y ago
  Yeah, I know, it sucks
- idiotsecant 3y ago
  I hear this on reddit-like social media all the time but I am disappointed to see it here. This is a low-effort and reductionist take. According to the GAO from 2009 through 2017, private ISPs made about $800 billion in capital investments and federal contributions for rural broadband in that period totalled about $50 billion. What would success look like for that 50 billion? Broadband to everywhere? America is very big and infrastructure is slow and expensive. That doesn't mean we can't ever do useful work by subsidizing the deployment on infrastructure. We can and should spend public money to improve broadband infrastructure. I have seen quite a few hugely successful subsidized broadband deployments from PUDs and small municipal power distribution companies in even lightly populated counties. For my money, continuing to subsidize these organizations and empowering them to sell broadband access direct to consumers is a huge value for the money.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - deprecative 3y ago
    I, too, am disappointed that funding the government provides to a for profit entity to provide minimal service to an area is used to pay for an exec's bonus or salary.
_heimdall 3y ago
> Projects which increase economic activity Do you know if there's any way we could really track this?Deficit spending increases the money supply which itself will increase economic activity. I'm not sure how we could know whether an increase in economic activity is due to broadband access or the new cash, especially when the project would likely take years.

michaelt 3y ago

Theoretically speaking, it's broadly the same money taken from broadly the same people. If society decides to take $6/year from every citizen to fund Rural Digital Access, it doesn't matter if they do it by raising broadband prices by 50 cents per month, or by raising income tax rates by 0.01%. They both mean the same thing: You, the average citizen, handing over $6 per year. The only differences are sleight of hand, where politicians "haven't raised taxes" and yet have more of your money at their disposal; and whether it's applied progressively, so the rich pay a bigger share.

koolba 3y ago
> The only differences are sleight of hand, where politicians "haven't raised taxes" and yet have more of your money at their disposal; and whether it's applied progressively, so the rich pay a bigger share. There's also the difference of exactly which people are paying. It's not uniform across everybody, not even across everybody with internet access. A more extreme example of this same picking of winners and losers is student loan bailouts. The winners are clearly the minority of people who get their loans repaid / forgiven and the losers are all the tax payers getting the tab added to the national debt.
- throwway120385 3y ago
  Why not allow forgiveness for the only debt in the entire US that legally cannot be discharged through bankruptcy? As a homeowner I can discharge all of my debt in bankruptcy with the consent of a court, but if I spend $20,000 on a degree at the start of my life I must forever be in service of that debt. If you're anti-loan-forgiveness then you need to allow people to discharge these things in bankruptcy.
  - opinion-is-bad 3y ago
    Student loans used to be eligible for loan forgiveness as well, but we ran into a situation where every new doctor in America was immediately declaring bankruptcy. Unlike a house, the gains from education cannot be repossessed.
  - 3y ago

throwway120385 3y ago

> Why bother with a budget when we just borrow/print our way out of any budgetary limits we don't like? I think this is the wrong question to ask of the government. At least notionally, when I borrow as a private individual it's to provide some quantifiable benefit in the future. For example if I'm starting a business, I might draft a business plan, conclude that there is money to be made and an opportunity that will dissolve if I try to save, and borrow money to buy equipment to start the business. What we should be asking is "what tangible benefit for our society is this thing going to have, and do we want to be on the hook to pay for it for 30 years?" I think to the degree that broadband access gives people in rural areas direct access to a market and to knowledge and ideas that they can't access locally, there is a lot of value in the rest of the country paying for this so that they can have the same options that the rest of us have.

_heimdall 3y ago
> what tangible benefit for our society is this thing going to have, and do we want to be on the hook to pay for it for 30 years? That's really key to the question though. The federal government doesn't have to risk any collateral and they aren't held to any repayment schedule. Arguably, once the the debt is created they are actually incentivized to not pay back the debt. The new debt creates new money in the system, removing it later would decrease the money supply and at any meaningful scale would risk deflation. When governments can create their own money on demand and have no tangible downsides to doing so unless they somehow trigger massive inflation, when does a budget really create much of a barrier to them? When would a government turn down or cancel a program, assuming the money spent isn't going to trigger inflation?
- _3u10 3y ago
  I don't know when, but I can tell you where, Argentina. It's been operating under the premise that their borrowing won't create inflation for the last 100 years. The recently departed government still claims that their borrowing wasn't the cause of the problem.
  - 3y ago