Stimulus Stirs Debate Over Rural Broadband Access

Presumably Mr. Katz doesn't have any issue with the people who grow his food paying taxes to upgrade AMTRAK in the northeast corridor instead of paying for the medical care necessary to combat infant death.

Strange an FCC economist and anti-trust policy analyst considers himself an expert on infant health care to begin with.

A "Greatest Good" argument would have had the last administration buffering farmers from the rise in diesel prices last year since rising fuel prices impacted the ability to feed his city dwellers.

Presumably Mr Katz wants child health care so there will be more poor farmers to feed his precious cities - or maybe he thinks we should all move to a city and buy our produce elsewhere. Brazil maybe.

But as for the costs rural life imposes on society - every study I have seen has shown rural dwellers to be the least served, most self-reliant members of society. Repeatedly absorbing the costs for whatever served the majority of the population best. Suffering lesser healthcare, social "services", and generally absorbing the costs of rural life from our wallets, not tax revenue sharing. Mr. Katz is not standing in line to help with the fact that there is only one grocery in town and they never have a sale, instead of the marketplace competition available in a city; one fuel source in town with a premium to be paid for hauling it out to your little town.

Nor does Mr Katz acknowledge the problems city life has imposed on the rest of us, many small towns cannot get a GP physician because they cannot afford the malpractice insurance for the money we can pay. But was malpractice and the attendant lawsuits a rural problem? We just died; hungry lawyers in the cities invented this problem, but imposed the solution everywhere.

Need more examples?

Well, this little bit of fury-inducing idiocy certainly made my day get off to a great start. Please pardon my rant below:

I too live in a rural area. Fortunately I'm on the fringe of it. There are folks living way up in the hills not far from here who barely get electricity. They're lucky to even get daylight.

This idiot doesn't recognize that it's not just about commerce. But let's go ahead and talk commerce for a moment. Apparently giving such areas the ability to sell their goods and services to a wider area isn't sufficient economical motiviation for Mr. Katz. Nor is their ability to occasionally (for many are impoverished) buy non-local products from them thar high-falutin' city dwellers what that use fancy eatin' forks when they go down yonder to the singin' opera shows ever night.

More importantly by far, it will provide a much-needed educational resource to those areas. Education of old and young alike is dismal. Schools in those areas are pitiful. You'd be hard pressed to tell some of these schools from their 1940's counterparts. Don't get me wrong - they do their best with what they have. But they have next to nothing.

The influx of knowledge for child and adult alike would be a godsend to these folks. True, we won't see a return on that $7.2 billion overnight. But we WILL see it down the road. All it takes is a few individuals - perhaps even just one - who take some tiny scrap of knowledge they glean from the "outside world" and turn it into something wonderful. And profitable in Mr. Katz' eyes.

Danged moron. Managed to turn a perfectly awful Monday into a terrible one.

*grumble*