No Television Left Behind: Will Washington Subsidize Your Basement TV?

While debate rages over what to do with the frequencies soon to be vacated by broadcasters (see the last post), another debate is raging over what to do about those using them now. At issue: whether to subsidize converter boxes for millions of old TVs in basements and kitchens that will be made obsolete by the February 2009 analog cut-off.

In late 2005, Congress authorized up to $1.5 billion for such converter boxes. Last year, the Department of Commerce proposed rules for the program, concluding that households with cable TV should not be eligible for assistance (on the sensible ground that they will not lose access to TV). Now there’s word that the Department of Commerce is planning to reverse itself, and let cable households get in on the program. The rationale: many of these households have third and fourth television sets that are not hooked up to cable.

Commerce has been under pressure from–among other places–Congress to include these forgotten basement televisions in the program. In particular, a November letter from John Dingell and 19 other members positively waxed poetic about the issue: stating that millions of consumers would be “disenfranchised” and that the original Commerce plan “disadvantages the poor, the elderly, minority groups, and those with multiple analog television sets in their home.”

Maybe it’s just me, but I had never thought of “those with multiple television sets in their home,” as an oppressed minority. And “disenfranchise”? This isn’t voting rights, it’s television. In fact, its not even that–its the right to a third TV in your basement. In fact, its the right not to have to pay $50 (the expected price of a converter box) to get that third TV in your basement to work.

This is the sort of thing that gives Washington a bad name. I fulminate more on this in a just-released Heritage paper.

Stay tuned (well, at least until February 2009).

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