Free Phones for Freeloaders

The federal Universal Service Fund, a tax attached to your phone bill each month, is being used to pass out free cell phones and cell phone minutes to allegedly poor people each month.  You pay the bill and anyone who fits the administration’s profile of the poor and needy (i.e. black, brown or likely to vote Democratic) gets a free phone. 

In St. Louis a local film crew showed a car parked on the street in an urban area, its passengers calling to people on the street to, “…come get your free phone!”  The phones were passed out indiscriminately to anyone who came over to the car—as long as they fit the predetermined profile.  The news crew interviewed one woman who already had two such phones, each with minutes left on them.  There was no information asked of these people.  No one asked about their income, their need, their current status vis a vis a cell phone.  Information was being entered on a computer, but it had nothing to do with any questions being asked of the recipients.  Instead, the worst kind of reverse discrimination was used.  The community and the people being served were black, so ipso facto, they had to be poor.  If you were black you got a phone, passed through the car window like a drug sale.    I have a feeling if I had walked up to that car with my blond hair, blue eyes and very Norwegian looking hand out I would have been treated much differently than the other customers.   

            Here is our federal government at work.  This is also the reason I do not want these inept wastrels in charge of health care.  It simply will not be done efficiently, carefully or honestly.  The larger the organization, the less oversight, less feeling of personal responsibility and the less compulsion there is to operate ethically.  There is no organization bigger than the federal government and we need look no farther than the GSA scandal to see what happens when you give bureaucrats money that doesn’t belong to them.  They misuse it and smile the whole time. 

            The federal program that allows this theater of the absurd to play out is the Telecommunications Act of 1996.  Please notice, this mockery of good intentions was not instituted under the Obama administration; it was simply perfected by them.  Like all of the roads to Hell, it was paved with good intentions.  Among the laundry list of, “good works” designated by this legislation, was providing free or subsidized coverage for poor families so they have access to emergency and governmental services.  It wasn’t even going to be taxpayer funded.  The Congress did an, “end around” play of that bugaboo by creating a mandated Universal Service Fund (USF) to which all telecommunications providers are required to contribute.  So when you see that dollar something USF added to your phone bill each month you are paying for free phones for freeloaders. 

            No piece of legislation passes Congress by stating publicly all of the ways that the law and the tax money supporting it will be misused.  You always couch the law in terms of what it does for the needy.  Anyone who questions the, “whats,” “ifs” and “hows” of the law are branded as cold hearted social Darwinists.   So if you are paying a phone bill, you are also paying for free phones, not for people who need one, but for anyone walking down the street in the middle of the city—as long as they look the part.

             Hang up the phones and keep the faith.