I have a crazy idea: let’s save millions of dollars by not spending money to build broadband networks where they already exist. The insanity of so-called “broadband stimulus” projects has been covered quite nicely here at BigGovernment by Seton Motley, but my good friend Dave Williams of the newly-formed Taxpayers’ Protection Alliance wrote about a part of this debate that hasn’t been covered enough: loan guarantees given out by the Rural Utilities Service, a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

With a budget deficit that is as large on its own as the entire federal budget of 1998, the folks in Congress who’d like to avoid a crippling debt crisis (those crazy kids!) are looking for ways to trim the fat. Luckily for legislators there is an area of “USDA prime” waste they can carve out: the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s desperate dash for taxpayer cash in the form of superfluous subsidies for rural broadband efforts.

USDA’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS) is an outdated agency whose roots go all the way back to FDR’s New Deal-era Rural Electrification Administration. Originally meant to help bring electricity to farmers in remote areas, its mission was expanded in 1949 to include telephone service and, half a century later, Internet service. Ostensibly, its goal is to subsidize the construction of broadband networks in sparsely-populated areas that do not have them.

But in its ham-fisted attempt to bring high-speed Internet service to areas where there is none, RUS has consistently given money to organizations which build over existing private broadband networks. A 2005 report from the USDA Inspector General found that “RUS has not maintained its focus on rural communities without preexisting service.” The same report determined that “in one of the more highly publicized cases, RUS issued loans to a company providing broadband access to affluent suburban communities a few miles outside of Houston, Texas.”

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Few fiscal-policy terms these days seem as elastic as the word “subsidy.” In a strict sense, it means a direct payment from government (i.e., taxpayers) to influence economic behavior.

So it was with great interest that I read Robert H. Schell’s thoughtful post that recently called to “End the Subsidy!” for all forms of U.S. energy. Schell perceptively and forcefully argued that,

I hate all subsidies.  In every case they are welfare-reducing for the whole population in the current time period; and I am unconvinced – against all claims – that they are welfare-increasing as a present value of future benefits.

Despite Schell’s making an exception for subsidizing kittens (only a maniac would argue for not subsidizing puppies instead, BTW), his line of reasoning – returning federal fiscal policy to a more economically rational and neutral plane – has plenty of merit. If only the post didn’t cite a flawed report from National Public Radio that has more to do with politics than economics.

According to a September 22 report on NPR’s Marketplace, “[T]oday, federal fossil fuel subsidies in all run about $10 billion a year, more than double those for renewable energy.” This contention seems to assume that renewable energy remains at a federal policy disadvantage – one that’s loaded with half-truths.

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Last week, I wrote here at BigGovernment about Ben Scott, Policy Director for the liberal advocacy group Free Press, being outed as the true author of a pro-net neutrality letter supposedly written by Representative Jay Inslee (D-WA).

Soon after, The Hill’s technology blog “Hillicon Valley” ran a story with an explanation from Inslee’s staff:

“But Inslee’s office told Hillicon Valley on Tuesday that Scott did not, in fact, draft the letter on behalf of the congressman. Rather, as Inslee’s staff scrambled to put out something last week in support of the FCC’s goals, it consulted old documents and industry talking points for ideas. A staff member ultimately typed the new letter on top of the Word document that Free Press previously sent Inslee — the date of which was May 7 — meaning the meta-data still reflected Scott as its author.”

At first glance, this sounds halfway plausible. While I’m not an expert on meta-data as it relates to documents like this, my understanding is that it’s possible that writing over top of another person’s original document could lead to a situation where the content is attributable to one person (or organization) while the meta-data suggests authorship by another. This led me to a couple of questions. Did the National Journal, which originally reported the story, get it wrong? Did Inslee’s office legitimately make a mistake by overwriting talking points from Free Press with their own letter, leading to this confusion? Was I, then, wrong to point out the potential conflict associated with a group that decries “astroturfing” allegedly writing a letter for a Member of Congress? To help answer those questions, I decided to reach out to Representative Inslee’s office directly to clarify exactly what happened. The result was…not encouraging.

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You’ve no doubt heard liberal Members of Congress and other interest groups calling the Tea Party movement “Astroturf,” a play on the term grassroots.  Like our good friend Nancy, for example…

Or the liberal pro-net neutrality group Free Press, which has an entire section on its site devoted to “outing” so-called Astroturf operations.  This page includes a handy-dandy widget with a graphic of large corporations pulling the strings of Congress. Pretty clever, really.

They claim that the whole movement is the invention of a bunch of Beltway insiders backed by piles of corporate cash.  For them, it simply does not compute that ordinary Americans could be fed up with trillions of dollars in debt, tax hikes, and runaway regulation.  It MUST be the orchestrations of rich puppet-masters in DC, right?  Instead of spending hours debunking those claims, I’ll point to a post I made on the National Taxpayers Union’s old blog after the massive 9/12 March on Washington.  Several hundred thousand people from all across the country, none of whom were paid, will do a better job of dismissing these silly claims than I could here.  Instead, let’s focus on liberal activists employing exactly the kind of shady strategies that they accuse us of using.

So, that group I mentioned, Free Press?  The ones that have a page on their site to expose “Astroturfing?”  Last week, they were outed as being the true authors behind a letter supposedly written by Congressman Jay Inslee (D-WA).  The letter is being passed around to various Congressional offices to solicit support for FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s radical effort to thumb his nose at the limits of his regulatory authority, which I blogged about here recently.  But the properties of the electronic file itself show that the real author of the letter was not Mr. Inslee or a member of his staff, but none other than Free Press Policy Director Ben Scott!

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After decades of flourishing beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, the internet may soon be forced under a draconian regulatory regime created for monopoly telephone services in the 1930s. Last week, the Wall Street Journal broke the news that Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski plans to thumb his nose at virtually every precedent on the books and “reclassify” regulation of the internet under Title II of the Communications Act in order to pursue so-called “net neutrality” rules.

For the uninitiated, net neutrality regulations would allow federal officials to determine how internet service providers could manage the networks they built and own, ostensibly in the “public interest.” In reality, it’s been the cause du jour of lefty activists and major content provider companies like Google for years now. The activists want to have the government own and run the internet like a public utility, and the big content providers want the feds to force internet service providers (ISPs) to supply all the bandwidth needed for the applications without any barriers. A match made in heaven, if you ask me.

This announcement comes on the heels of a U.S. Court of Appeals decision which stated, in no uncertain terms, that the FCC does not have the authority to impose net neutrality regulations under the current regime. In the case of Comcast v. FCC (PDF), the court stated that the Commission does not have the necessary authority and even went so far as to say that their legal defense was “flatly inconsistent” with previous case law. My favorite line from the decision, though, came when it stated that the FCC’s argument would effectively “shatter” the existing limits on their authority. I might be reading into it too much, but it doesn’t sound like the court left much wiggle room there.

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Last month, Phil Kerpen wrote an insightful piece here at BigGovernment.com about “The Stimulus Bill’s Hidden Attack on What We Eat, Drink, and Smoke.” In it, he detailed yet another absurd (and angering) use of so-called “stimulus” funds to help lobby for restrictions and higher taxes on the nanny state’s favorite targets: unhealthy foods, sweetened beverages, tobacco, and other disfavored products that your friendly bureaucrat doesn’t think you ought to enjoy. Digging through the Health and Human Services Department’s stimulus website raises some serious questions about the $650 million in taxpayer money being spent on this program, called “Communities Putting Prevention to Work” (CPPW).

Several grant descriptions suggest that this funding may be in violation of guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control, through which the CPPW program is administered. The CDC’s lobbying restriction guideline states in part that, “no part of CDC appropriated funds, shall be used…to support or defeat legislation pending before the Congress or any State or local legislature.” And yet, that’s exactly what several of the grantees plan to use the money for.

For example, Jefferson County, Alabama plans to spend $7 million on a “tobacco use prevention and cessation initiative [that] will promote changes in policies to reduce smoking opportunities and reduce access to tobacco products.” Pretty straightforward, that. They plan to lobby for more smoking bans and restricting access to legal tobacco products.

New York City, for its part, plans to spend $15.5 million “work[ing] to set policies and create environments that reduce consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages and overly salted foods.” One New York legislator is already trying to “create an environment” where restaurants are prohibited by law from using SALT in their food. Yes, salt, the substance without which virtually every food on Earth would be inedible.

Perhaps my favorite, our nation’s capital is spending $4.9 million on a program called “LiveWell DC,” which will “explore limiting tobacco access through zoning/license restrictions, restrict point-of-purchase advertising of tobacco products, support the elimination of price discounts, and provide social support through quitline and other cessation services.” Quite the laundry list there.

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The Politico ran a story this weekend pointing out a very inconvenient truth for proponents of the House version of big government health reform legislation: contrary to its goal of “bending the cost curve downward” over time, the bill would actually INCREASE health care costs by $289 billion.

The report issued by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services estimated that the “Affordable Health Care for America Act” would increase health care costs from the current level of 20.8 percent of GDP up to 21.1 percent a decade from now. It also adds yet another voice to the chorus now showing that preventive care and wellness programs do NOT decrease long-term costs.

In a fascinating development, the White House has now actually admitted, apparently for the first time, that the House bill would increase health care burdens despite President Obama’s repeated assertion that he seeks a health care bill that would reduce costs. In response to the CMS study, Obama aide Nancy-Ann DeParle said, “the good news was that, despite extending coverage to 36 million people, health care spending would rise by only by 0.8 percent.”

The CMS findings could make it very difficult for Congressional Democrats and other proponents to follow through on what might be the central argument for their plan of massive tax hikes, subsidies, and regulations: that it would reduce crippling health care costs.  Several Members, particularly those facing tough re-election fights, have committed themselves to only voting for a plan that would cut long-term health care costs.

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