Trump puts so much importance and emphasis on TV broadcast ratings.
If traditional broadcast media wasn't dead already, this might put it over the edge. Though I don't like the majority of media people actually watch being broadcasted from a corporation like Youtube either.
I don't feel sorry for the US broadcasters who received free airwaves for HD broadcast and instead shipped 4 channels of SD instead during the Digital Television Transition. They need to be reminded. It's as bad as a government where you pay them money that's supposed to be earmarked for retirement only to find the account empty at retirement time.
It was earmarked for retirement. It just wasn't earmarked for your retirement.
It was earmarked for the retirement of the Baby Boomers. They're taking it now. It will run out around the time that the majority of baby boomers are dead.
That was the plan all along. They knew that the Baby Boom would be followed by a Baby Bust, so the Boomers set aside a retirement fund for themselves. They didn't exactly publicize that, but there's no point in a Trust Fund that goes on forever. If that had been the goal they would have stuck with a pay-as-you-go plan.
Oh, and it's so much worse than that. They didn't actually set the money aside. They spent it, which is why government spending has tripled. (That's in inflation-adjusted terms. It's 12 times as much in nominal terms.) And they gave themselves tax breaks, which don't benefit younger people who haven't had time to accumulate wealth to tax.
All in all, it was very explicitly a scam to transfer money from young people to the wealthy. That wasn't a secret.
The "secret", such as it is, is that they wanted you to believe that those wealthy people would use that money build factories and create jobs and otherwise increase the economy. Which it did, a little -- barely better than inflation. So now it's "oops, we borrowed a bunch of money on the promise to pay it back with interest, except there's no interest and we can't really pay all of it back". The "secret" is that they knew it was a lie all along, but it was a pretty open secret.
> No broadcaster has a 'right' to use the pubic [sic] spectrum,
(Last line on page 5: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-26-530A1.pdf )
The lack of any proof-reading seems pretty emblematic of the thought process of this "threat".
Trump puts so much importance and emphasis on TV broadcast ratings. If traditional broadcast media wasn't dead already, this might put it over the edge. Though I don't like the majority of media people actually watch being broadcasted from a corporation like Youtube either.
I don't feel sorry for the US broadcasters who received free airwaves for HD broadcast and instead shipped 4 channels of SD instead during the Digital Television Transition. They need to be reminded. It's as bad as a government where you pay them money that's supposed to be earmarked for retirement only to find the account empty at retirement time.
It was earmarked for retirement. It just wasn't earmarked for your retirement.
It was earmarked for the retirement of the Baby Boomers. They're taking it now. It will run out around the time that the majority of baby boomers are dead.
That was the plan all along. They knew that the Baby Boom would be followed by a Baby Bust, so the Boomers set aside a retirement fund for themselves. They didn't exactly publicize that, but there's no point in a Trust Fund that goes on forever. If that had been the goal they would have stuck with a pay-as-you-go plan.
Oh, and it's so much worse than that. They didn't actually set the money aside. They spent it, which is why government spending has tripled. (That's in inflation-adjusted terms. It's 12 times as much in nominal terms.) And they gave themselves tax breaks, which don't benefit younger people who haven't had time to accumulate wealth to tax.
All in all, it was very explicitly a scam to transfer money from young people to the wealthy. That wasn't a secret.
The "secret", such as it is, is that they wanted you to believe that those wealthy people would use that money build factories and create jobs and otherwise increase the economy. Which it did, a little -- barely better than inflation. So now it's "oops, we borrowed a bunch of money on the promise to pay it back with interest, except there's no interest and we can't really pay all of it back". The "secret" is that they knew it was a lie all along, but it was a pretty open secret.