Trump team votes to cut poor people off from cell phone service to help fund rich people’s tax cut

kp777:

By Alan Pike

Think Progress

November 16, 2017

From the article:

Poor people would be cut off from their communities and from potential employers under a proposal approved Thursday to dramatically shrink a program Ronald Reagan created to subsidize phone service for the destitute.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai won a party-lines vote to contract the FCC’s Lifeline program in a variety of ways, ultimately by capping the amount of agency revenue from telecom companies that can be spent on the modest subsidies. Such a contraction “could completely cut off those still in need,” Reps. Gwen Moore (D-WI), Gregory Meeks (D-NY), and 56 other members of Congress warned Pai in a let“If your newly proposed changes were implemented, they would jeopardize access for countless individuals who use the internet to look for employment and educational opportunities, to access social services, or to find crucial health information,” the members wrote.

Pai’s move makes little substantive sense. The chairman has himself acknowledged the value of recent reforms to the program, the letter-signers wrote. The Lifeline system was built by Reagan, then modernized and expanded under Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama.

“30 years ago when Ronald Reagan put the Lifeline program into law, prior to that…it was considered a luxury to have a phone in your house,” Moore told ThinkProgress. “But then people started recognizing telecommunication services as literally a lifeline. Under Republican president George W. Bush they expanded this beyond landlines, into cell phones, recognizing that if you’re looking for a job and an employer wants to offer you a job, how can they get back to you?

”When disaster strikes, as it has repeatedly this hurricane season in Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere, people of means can more easily get out of harm’s way. For the roughly 7.3 million people who access the cell phone system through Lifeline, though, a dire situation could fast turn deadly without the ability to make a phone call.ter Wednesday.

“This doesn’t bother you if you just flew out of Miami-Dade up to Chicago with your relatives until they came in and fixed it,” Moore said, noting that the Bush-era expansion of Lifeline followed his administration’s disastrously bungled response to Hurricane Katrina.

Pai’s scheme is marketed as a cost savings. But Lifeline funds come from phone, TV, and internet providers themselves, not from taxpayers. Shunting the “savings” from Pai’s scheme off to Treasury would effectively mean diverting money currently spent on helping lift people out of poverty into funding the GOP’s push to cut taxes for the wealthy at the expense of everyone else, Moore said.

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Trump team votes to cut poor people off from cell phone service to help fund rich people’s tax cut