Jobs Bill Funds Safety Network With Spectrum Sale 147
CWmike writes "President Barack Obama's American Jobs Act would allow the FCC to conduct so-called incentive auctions, in which the agency would share the proceeds of a spectrum auction with television stations that voluntarily give up their spectrum. The goal would be to raise $6.5 billion to fund a nationwide voice and data network for police, fire departments and other emergency responders. Lawmakers and other groups have called for a nationwide public safety network since emergency responders had trouble communicating with each other during the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorists attacks on the U.S."
Don't need more spectrum (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm an EMT, there are 5 radios in my ambulance. I don't need more ways to talk to people. I need policies, documentation, good equipment, and most of all consistent interoperability training between multiple departments and jurisdictions. I really don't think the fix is more spectrum.
It's all good. (Score:3, Insightful)
The jobs bill is a joke. It's not going to be passed. It exists so that Obama can say "Look, I did a jobs bill, and this obstructionist do-nothing Congress wouldn't pass it!" You could say it's the kickoff to the Obama 2012 campaign.
(I make no comment here on the value of the actual policies contained in the jobs bill, merely on the motives of those proposing it and its chances in Congress.)
Spectrum should be leased, not sold (Score:4, Insightful)
This also prevents companies from buying up spectrum to stifle competition. If they lease large amounts of spectrum which they then don't use, the bid price on the remainder will go up. The government can then use that bid price to raise the lease price for all spectrum in subsequent years, making it too expensive for companies to continue sitting on that spectrum. It's the same concept behind property taxes in real estate - by raising the price to own property in a highly desirable area, you force the owners to do something useful with the property rather than sitting on it as a speculative or anti-competitive move.
Re:It's all good. (Score:4, Insightful)
Herein I will criticize the jobs package.
There are going to be some tax breaks starting Soon (late 2011) for small businesses and workers. At the end of 2012, these tax breaks will expire. Also, the Bush tax cuts will expire (increasing tax on the bracket from 35% to 42% and the tax on long-term capital gains from 15% to 20%). There will also be another 0.9% Medicare tax on income over $200,000, and a 2.9% surcharge on investment income. Also, the government will raid charity for ~$400 billion (lesser tax deductions). Also,
So a small business owner is supposed to see these 16-month tax breaks and go "Yay! I'm going to create some jobs!"
Also, job training. Do me a favor. Go look up some former job programs like MDTA, CETA and JTPA and see how well they worked (and the current program, WIA) and tell me with a straight face that this is going to help the economy.
Also, more stimulus-style spending. Because the last round worked so very very well, and we know that paying it back in the future isn't going to be a problem at all nosiree Bob.
So the jobs act is a joke, but it would be worse if it were serious.
So said C.S. Lewis (Score:5, Insightful)
Jobs are made by new businesses (Score:5, Insightful)
Obama and everyone else in the government have it wrong.
Giving money to existing businesses will not create jobs. Existing businesses already have the employees they need to create their product, and if you give them money in a bad economy they will hoard it waiting for the economy to get better. (This is not 100% true in all cases, but as a general rule it works very well.)
You get jobs from new businesses. New businesses grow to accommodate production - once a business can meet demand for it's product or service, growth essentially stops.
New businesses come from innovation on top of infrastructure.
Most innovation is an incremental improvement in an existing product. Your company makes perfusion pumps. If you can make the same pump but 5% smaller, or 5% lighter, or 5% cheaper, or lasts 50% longer - that's generally good enough to start a business.
Innovation:
Patents are largely impossible for the small business right now. They are expensive and don't afford any sort of protection. Patent descriptions are so broadly written and subject to so much interpretation that it is likely that any innovation you make is covered by numerous patents. There are trolls out there ready to take everything away once you've done all the hard work.
Any similarities between your product and an existing product will net you a copyright violation.
Infrastructure:
The criminal laws are so broadly written and subject to so much interpretation that enforcement has become largely discretionary. Local prosecutors are not held responsible for bringing merit-less cases to court, so be sure not to piss anyone off in the government.
The regulatory laws are broadly written and subject to interpretation, and again enforcement has become largely discretionary (viz: Gibson and Martin [slashdot.org])
The cell phone network only covers metropolitan areas, and is so unstable that Apple can come out with a popular product (IPhone 1.0) and overload the system, making it impossible to make calls. In Manhattan (!)
High speed internet is only available in metropolitan areas, and is so overloaded that the carriers are implementing rationing (aka data caps).
Our electric system is old and outdated - by some estimates 20% of the generated power is wasted because we can't route it efficiently.
Our postal system is expensive and somewhat unreliable, yet we can't let more efficient companies (UPS and FedEx) deliver mail.
Our air travel rules are so invasive and abhorrent that people refuse to use it. Good luck getting your sales people to other cities, or sending an engineer to work out problems with a vendor.
Our tax structure is so complicated that it requires expert advice and constant vigilance for compliance. With Amazon giving in [slashdot.org] to external states demands to collect sales tax, expect this to get a lot worse before it gets better. Every cash-strapped state, county, and local town will be all over the net looking for their cut.
About the only piece of infrastructure in the US that seems to be OK is the interstate highway system.
Any single one of these can be considered minor, or could be ignored or dealt with by accommodation. Allocate some funds to hire a CPA, or a lawyer, or patent searcher, or whatever.
Taken in concert, the whole package puts a severe chilling effect on business growth in the US. That's why we don't have jobs any more, that's why the economy is taking so long to turn around.
We just don't have it any more.
Re:It's all good. (Score:2, Insightful)
Businesses hire people when they NEED more people.
Did you come up with that all by yourself? I notice one little flaw with it. It doesn't tell us why businesses don't hire people. OTOH, my explanation covers that. Businesses that are sitting on money need more people, but they aren't willing to hire them. My observation explains why. Yours doesn't.
And oh, regarding your condemnation of ARRA. The problem with ARRA was that it was not big enough to get a positive feedback loop going as described in the previous paragraph. It created a couple of million jobs but the spark was too small to turn into a big bonfire, it just kind of fizzled. If ARRA had been big enough to help close the output gap, it could have done much better.
Let's not get hasty here. We don't have any evidence other than highly biased claims from organizations like the CBO that the ARRA did anything positive at all. I'd say that the outcome over the past few years points to the contrary, that ARRA didn't create jobs. This matters because making a much larger effort would in my view crater, while you seem to think there would be a "positive feedback" which didn't happen with the ARRA.
I don't buy that there's a magic tipping point threshold for the ARRA that wasn't achieved. In other words, the claim that we didn't try hard enough. There have been mostly unregulated recessions in the past, before the Great Depression, that caused unemployment at the current scale or worse. They all bottomed out and recovered without much help at all. I find it incredible to believe that spending $800 billion (plus a few additional trillion here and there) wasn't enough, when that should have generated a strong measurable difference from the default case of sitting on our duffs.
And, how can the demand be increased in a recessed economy?
Even the simplest of questions hides remarkable complexity. Why should we want to increase demand in a recessed economy? In my view, there is a remarkable ignorance of the benefits of recession, deflation, etc. The US government is not an unbiased party in this either.
For example, deflation means that the massive US debt increases significantly. So even if it were a better strategy for human society or the US, it's not a better strategy for a large debt holder like the US government.
As I see it , the bottom line is that stimulus is temporary and not necessarily productive while the structural problems that currently plague the US economy are more long term. Merely throwing money at businesses doesn't fix the problems with society or the economy.