Change the system? One would think so. Get rid of it! Yet the Hill states:
The plan comes one day after a bipartisan group of lawmakers called for reforming the $8 billion fund, which subsidizes phone service for low-income and rural residents. The FCC proposed reforming the $4.5 billion high-cost portion to focus on broadband deployment in the National Broadband Plan.
Namely they want to move it from the left pocket to the right and may very well increase the costs to the telco users in urban areas. It continues:
The plan unveiled a day later by the telecom firms, including AT&T, Verizon and CenturyLink, attempts to achieve those ends by re-directing the high-cost USF funds to deploy broadband access where there is currently no business case for carriers to provide service.
If there is no business case then why do it! This is another "tax" we could cut and we should cut now. Also it would eliminate almost half the FCC as well. That of course is another issue. The FCC was set up originally to do two things: (regulate spectrum, and (ii) manage the monopoly. Well the monopoly is gone and they have turned spectrum management into a fund raising mechanism. But if we managed and taxed spectrum on a real time basis then this would be no problem. I suggested how to do that a few years ago as well. That would totally eliminate the need for the FCC, from a pragmatic sense as well. It would eliminate a lot of plum jobs however and that is something Washington cannot do.
In a sense the USF is the Deficit/Debt crisis in miniature. Namely we could save money and make things more efficient except for the politicians.
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