Congress has recently passed two pieces of legislation that together really challenge my commitment to keep this site non-partisan. The negative effects of TV are independent of political views. However, Republican and Democrats, while they may fight over Food Stamps for the poor, have shown unanimous support for TV for the poor. During this time of Thanksgiving, the House passed a bill cutting the $700 million from the Food Stamp Program. Debate over this issue has been fierce and the voting close:

"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives voted on Friday to cut $700 million from the food stamp program, despite objections from antihunger groups complaining that estimates show some 235,000 people would lose benefits.

The House bill, which also trimmed other social programs for the poor in an effort to reduce federal spending by $50 billion, was narrowly approved 217-215."

House votes to cut $700 mln in food stamps by Charles Abbott

Ironically, while the debate of how much to cut from assistance to the poor rages, there has been bi-partisan support of the bill to give money to poor families to help them convert to digital TV:

"House lawmakers also voted Nov. 18 to set aside $830 million to help millions of Americans with older, analog TV sets pay for converter boxes so they'll continue to get service in the digital era.
...
The Senate measure calls for a hard date of April 7, 2009 -- after the March Madness college basketball playoffs. The converter box subsidy is significantly larger -- $3 billion."

"Plan would move all-digital TV closer" (source: www.mercurynews.com, now deleted)

To support TV's over food is incomprehensible to me. No longer is it a 'chicken in every pot'. It's a 'TV in every pot'. At least Marie Antoinette let the poor eat cake. In the US, they get to eat HDTV. 'March Madness' for all!

Why is Congress doing this? They almost seem worried what might happen if the poor can't watch four hours of TV every day. If these viewers can't afford digital sets they probably can't get TiVo's either. Is this to protect the advertisers? Or something else?

Supposedly, the argument is that the money will come from the sale of the airwaves, and it ok to use this money to support the networks. This is still PUBLIC money and should be used to benefit the public.

If the Democrats really wanted to feed the poor, they could designate the public money from the sale of the airwaves to maintaining the Food Stamp Program. If Republicans really believed in fiscal responsibility, they could use the money from the sale of the airwaves to reduce the national debt. In no instance should this PUBLIC money be used to support a private industry, network TV.

It is insane. And yet, no one has noticed this. Is everyone too busy watching TV?

Happy Thanksgiving America!

edit 11/25/05: I've researched this a little further, mostly to see if anyone else had picked up this HDTV/Food Stamp angle. They haven't. However, I did discover that there may be a lot more money involved in the transition to digital TV.

An article from 1997 on the website for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees claims:

"in the midst of the effort to develop HDTV, scientists found a way to make one ordinary channel do the work of six or seven by "digitalizing" data -- by breaking it into tiny pieces, like granulated sugar. Digitalizing compresses data so much that one analog channel can become six or seven digital TV channels, or 72 high-quality radio signals, or can be mixed and matched to carry phone service, cell phones, computer data, faxes and more.

License-holders quickly realized they were sitting on diamond mines. Lobbyists for the broadcasters and consumer electronics manufacturers salivating at the prospect of the market for expensive digital TV sets swarmed all over the Gingrich-Dole Congress. The fruit of their efforts was the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which requires the FCC to award licenses for the new digital channels only to -- guess who -- current holders of TV broadcast licenses. ...

The FCC held hearings which were about as open as a CIA strategy session, and now it plans to let the big boys keep what the government lent them, and not pay a nickel for it. ...an auction would bring the government up to $100 billion."

HDTV Spells Ripoff by William Lucy

So, the value of this conversion to HDTV may be closer too $100 Billion for the government. Yet there for SOME reason there is not enough money for the feed the poor in the US.