DTV Conveter box coupons are now live! [Cross-posting to PLUG and SLLUG]

[Charles Curley]

On Wed, Jan 02, 2008 at 12:03:53PM -0700, Steve wrote:
> >On Jan 2, 2008 11:51 AM, Wade Preston Shearer <lists at wadeshearer.com> wrote:
> > Why is there a budget for this at all? Television is not a necessity.
> > It angers me that my tax dollars are being used to buy home theater
> > components for the masses. A coupon wasn't available a few years ago
> > when I purchased my HD tuner.
> >
> 
> This is NOT a home theatre equipment subsidy, all these boxes do is
> down convert ATSC to NTSC.
> There are only a small handful of different models of boxes being
> subsidized here and they are really nothing more than tuners.

It's still a subsidy. I agree with Wade; subsidies for TV are wrong.

> 
> Regardless of all that though, the fact remains that there are
> millions of elderly and/or home bound people who may be left without
> TV service for such vital things as Emergency Broadcasts and even
> mundane niceties like the evening news.
> 
> Personally I wouldn't want my mother who is quite elderly and not
> really very technical at all, to lose her TV service just because she
> can't afford a new set.  This is for people like that, not for people
> like you and me, to whom the purchase of a new TV doesn't require a
> choice between buying  food or medicine or paying rent.

Then feel free to buy her one. I think that would be a much kinder and
more caring act than forcing some third party at the point of an IRS
agent to buy her one. We -- including the folks for whom buying a new
TV would be very difficult -- pay too dang much in taxes already
without this nonsense.

-- 

Charles Curley                  /"\    ASCII Ribbon Campaign
Looking for fine software       \ /    Respect for open standards
and/or writing?                  X     No HTML/RTF in email
http://www.charlescurley.com    / \    No M$ Word docs in email

Key fingerprint = CE5C 6645 A45A 64E4 94C0  809C FFF6 4C48 4ECD DFDB
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
Url : http://plug.org/pipermail/plug/attachments/20080102/82672116/attachment.bin