Why do we want to give rural america broadband? If you live in rural america you're more likely to be pro "free market"/anti government. If the free market can't bring them broadband then maybe they need pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
When you get really rural where the main internet option is provided by microwave, you start seeing prices drop and bandwidth limits go up. I have a friend with faster speeds and no cap on microwave, while I'm stuck with a single choice by the government granted cable monopoly who's free to gouge me all they want.
But that's the difference between a free market and a heavily regulated one.
You seem like a nice person.
I think these conversations tend to get dragged into "think of the farmers" because their work necessitates that they be spread out; accordingly we think of the beneficiaries of these programs as not needing to be held responsible for the hardships of living far away. The problem is, most people living so far apart are there by choice, because they see cheap space to build a big house and have a big yard. They're seeing low prices because we so often supply them with sewage lines, water pipes, paved roads, and other infrastructure, at costs which vastly exceed the receipts from their property taxes.
The people paying for these expensive infrastructure projects are the ones who live in places that pay for themselves, and then some. In many parts of the US, that's the poor people. They can't afford to own big houses outside of town, so instead they get stuck subsidizing those people.
This is particularly painful in transportation, where we take money away from cities who need that money to fund decent transit. Then we send it out to suburban areas to be spent by town leaders who just see easy money for building roads, rather than seeing that putting a 45mph, 5-lane road through downtown is suicide for the finances and vitality of a town.
It's also true that there are some advantages to (near) universal service for many types of utilities, as we did historically with electricity and POTS. That said given existing alternatives to broadband fiber like satellite, I'm not convinced there's a pressing need to provide universal broadband even where it doesn't make financial sense.
Bear in mind that many of these residences were built before consumer access to the internet was widespread. You're better off with a terrestrial wireless, as satellite internet has severe latency and bandwidth limitations. Fortunately many rural households in the U.S. otherwise out of economic range of fiber are within rage of local WISPs, line-of-sight allowing.
1) BEK does 200M fibre connections with no data cap in rural North Dakota. Plenty of these companies exist and are profitable.
As opposed to the Republicans who want a worse life for their children and grandchildren?
The basic idea is that people who have different political opinions to you aren't necessarily stupid or greedy or bad actors, they just have different morals and therefore a different set of rationales.
The differences come about as to how to get there. If you have different foundational beliefs as to how things work, of course you'll disagree as to what needs to be done to fix things.
First you say you're not going to generalise, then you do. Then you negate your next point by saying that democrat voters are just as bad. What are you trying to say?
To your last point, people who complain about paying taxes while being the beneficiaries of government largess aren't idiots. I'd posit they're probably smarter than I am, at least financially because I only ever pay tax.
Or, quite likely, a mix of all of the above.