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The $100,000 Obamaphone for Millionaires

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Photo Credit: National Review The Obamaphone lady is moving up in America: She isn’t a rabble-rouser in Cleveland anymore, but a real-estate developer in Maui, a ski-resort owner in Breckenridge, and a dedicated golfer in Scottsdale — and, more important, the telephone companies that serve them. And she isn’t costing taxpayers a couple hundred bucks a year in subsidies, but more than $100,000 per household.

That’s the finding of a new study released by economists Thomas Hazlett of George Mason University and Scott Wallsten of the Technology Policy Institute, who have turned their attention to the aptly named “high-cost fund” administered by the Federal Communications Commission and supported by the 16 percent universal-service tax levied on everybody from landline users to voice-over-IP customers. The fund has spent some $64 billion on carrier subsidies since 1998, and while there is some dispute about how many additional households have phone connections thanks to those outlays, the highest estimates run around 600,000, meaning a cost of more than $100,000 per household.

The program was originally developed to help extend basic communications to poor people in remote rural areas without telephone service. But the United States ran out of poor people in remote rural areas without telephone service a good long while ago. The administrators of federal programs fear nothing so much as looking for a job in the private sector, so the program found new products to subsidize, such as broadband internet, and new places to subsidize them: No more dirt farms in the sticks, but high-end developments — “mansion-lined gated golf communities” in the words of Dave Herman of the Alliance for Generational Equity, which sponsored the study.

According to Hazlett, the $4.5 billion-a-year program has connected at most 0.5 percent of U.S. households to telephone service.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama’s Approval Hits All-Time Low Among Poor, Says Gallup

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A week that began with President Barack Obama going on national television to pitch his vision for a debt-limit deal in terms that pitted “millionaires and billionaires” against “everyone else,” ended with the president receiving his lowest-ever weekly approval ratings in the Gallup poll from the poorest Americans (those earning less than $2,000 per month) and from one segment of the middle class (those earning between $5,000 and $7,499 per month).

In fact, according to Gallup, Obama enjoys no more approval among the poorest Americans today than he does among the richest—and he enjoys significantly less approval among middle class Americans earning between $5,000 to $7,499 than he does among the richest Americans as measure by the income brackets reported by Gallup (those earning $7,500 per month or more).

Over the last seven weeks, Obama’s approval rating has dropped 11 percentage points among the poorest Americans—and 14 points among middle-class Americans earning between $5,000 and $7,499.

Among the poorest Americans, the president’s approval started at 54 percent in the week of June 13-19 and dropped to a record low of 43 percent last week (July 25-July 31). Over the same period, Obama’s approval dropped from 52 percent to a record low of 38 percent among those middle-class Americans earning between $5,000 and $7,499 per month.

Seven weeks ago, according to Gallup, Obama was doing far better among the poorest Americans and those earning $5,000 to $7,499 per month than he was doing among the wealthiest (those earning more than $7,500), who in the week of June 13-19 gave Obama a 44-percent approval rating.

 Read More at CNS News  By Terence P. Jeffrey, CNSNews.com