Say Anything Blog

Sure.  Why expect these people to go out and work and become prosperous enough to buy their own gadgets when we could just give them phones funded by our bankrupt government?

Thousands of low-income Coloradans reliant on public assistance could get a free cellphone under a plan before the state Public Utilities Commission.

If approved, the plan by TracFone Wireless in Miami would make Colorado the 17th state it has settled into with free cell service for the indigent, a form of wireless welfare that proponents say taps into one of the last untapped markets for the telecom technology.

“Taps into one of the last untapped markets for the telecom technology.”  Who sees welfare cases who can’t afford phones as a market?  Why, rent-seeking telecoms who want some of your tax dollars, of course!

“Our hope is to have it up and running by September,” said Jose Fuentes, TracFone’s director of government relations. “Historically, it’s a very underutilized service, and we’d like that to change.”

The program is a twist on Lifeline, a long-standing federal subsidy that provides low-income families with a break on their land-line telephone bill in order to ensure emergency 911 service.

In Colorado, it’s called LITAP — the Low Income Telephone Assistance Program — and is available to anyone receiving aid from any of six welfare funds: Colorado Works Assistance (TANF), Supplemental Security Income, LEAP, Aid to Needy Disabled, the Old Age Pension Fund and Aid to the Blind.

Statewide, about 65 percent of those eligible participated in Lifeline last year.

The money — more than $800 million in subsidies were paid last year for low-income phone service across the country — comes from the Universal Service Fund, a tax on all telephone lines. Of that amount, Coloradans received nearly $3.2 million in low-income subsidies.

Our federal government is bankrupt.  We are trillions of dollars in debt and sinking faster every day as our political leaders spend, spend, spend.

And now we’re subsidizing cell phones for the poor.

What really bothers me is that a cell phone isn’t a necessity.  It’s a luxury.  It’s something people who are successful enough to afford it buy for themselves.  If we take nice things like cell phones which are incentives to work for a living so that you can afford them and we simply give them to people who don’t work for a living then what impetus do they have to get a job?

That’s the problem with the welfare state.  I won’t say that it’s fun or even all that easy to live on the government dole, but that doesn’t mean we should be making it more fun or easier.  It shouldn’t be pleasant at all to live on the backs of other people’s productivity.  It should be hard so that there is a reason to become independent.