November 15, 2005

Congress Wants to Spend $3 Billion to Help You Watch TV

Here's something that's sure to cause an uproar among taxpayers. According to the Washington Post:

The Senate's budget bill, which passed last week, contains a $3 billion subsidy for owners of televisions that are not ready to handle the eventual transition to digital television.
The subsidy would go to pay for converter boxes, which would take the digital signal from the broadcasters and convert it so that it can be displayed by analog TVs. Televisions hooked up to cable or satellite would not need the converters, nor would televisions capable of receiving a digital signal.

"There are enough low-income Americans that would have difficulty coming up with the $40 or the $50 for a conversion box, so we want to help them out on a one-time basis," said House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Joe L. Barton, Texas Republican, who is pushing for finishing the transfer to digital broadcasting.

"Since it's a federal law that we're saying you have to broadcast digitally, and we have lots of TV sets in this country that are still good that aren't digitally capable, I think it's reasonable to have a modest subsidy on a one-time basis," he said.

I'm not against some subsidy to help people, especially in rural areas, but $3 billion? Let's just put the subsidy towards making HDTV even cheaper so everyone can buy one!

At WashingtonPost.com