From the linked document: "The average annual household income of those eligible for Lifeline support is roughly $38,000. Numerous families with incomes at that level already subscribe to broadband."
At those incomes all your financial decisions are about food and housing, and hopefully getting clothing donations. Let alone trying to think about educating your kids to try and get them out.
This is a lifeline to people, and helps educate their children. We should be doing more as a society to help those at the bottom.
Which is exactly my point. In the 80s on 38k a year it meant that we could not afford many of the things that others had. New shoes/clothes etc. my parents luckily focused on education, and other quality of life things, rather than spending on frivolous things, like cable. I'd say cable was roughly equivalent to internet today. So that was a choice that they made to go without. And I say Internet would probably have been the same type of decisions.
So while 80k today may be equivalent to 40k from the 80s, I would say 80k for a family of 4 kids would be hard, 40k would be exponentially harder.
By the mid 1980s only about half of households had basic cable.[1] In Chicago, there were complaints about a price hike to $13/month.[2]
Housing costs are the problem. The move to dual-income households, the drop in interest rates, and the population boom caused certain real estate markets to appreciate at a level far above incomes and inflation. The coastal home my parents purchased in the early 1980s has appreciated 10x in value. A similar home in the mid-western state capital of their youth has appreciated 3x over the same period. This is why I called the scenario with 4 kids doable in some (most) parts of the country, but certainly not all.
[1] http://www.tvhistory.tv/Cable_Households_77-99.JPG [2] http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1985/12/30/page/15/articl...
http://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0912/which-income...
The reason I posted that is because I find it very difficult to believe that any family of 1 or more children on an income of 40k a year today would have a comfortable life, and affording broadband Internet would be difficult.
~half of those households earn more
While many of the commonly seen distributions have median==average, income usually follows a more exponential distribution with the average exceeding the median due to a "heavy tail".
A. Program based (enrolled in Medi-cal, SSI, Food stamp program. (These programs are not easy to qualify for.)
B. Income based (1-2 household: can't make more than 25,900. That includes all income, including gifts. If you have 10 family members you can make $74,900.
I don't think it's "so lax".
They credit a little under $10 bucks a month. So it's a landline, or a lousy cell phone. You still end up paying the rest of the bill. It's not free. (The cell phone providers take the subsidy hoping/praying the customer will go over their credit. "Then we can bill the lousey service!"
I can't imagine a internet provider service for that less than $10 credit. (There must be a catch?)
People complain about the free phones some poor poeople get. It's a horrid cell phone. If you qualify, get the landline, and it's only for local calls.
These days government programs know a lot about households. The Internet has stopped a lot of the fraud. People are very poor, but so many Americans believe the poor are cheating in some way? Those days are kinda over. Big brother knows everything--yea! The Rebublicans stil believe the slackers are cheating the system. Sad.
Obviously this isn’t a widespread problem though, and should be dealt with on a case by case basis.
Many who make claims of poverty can be disengenuous. Income generally excludes non-cash payments from other government programs. You "make" 25,900 a year and get to keep claiming poverty after free healthcare, free housing, free food, free daycare, free internet, free bus transit, etc.
It is the way it calculated, but most of these "poor" live very good lives significantly in excess of their paper poverty. Sometimes far better lives than those making just enough to not qualify for government assistance at all.
This happens in my midwest suburb commonly. It is an unfortunate side effect, more for the middle class than for the poor.
When you are forced into the bottom tier of the medical system you're competing with every other patient with a complaint from constipation to gunshot wounds. These hospitals do not have unlimited resources and triage patients based on need.
The result is someone like me who had an upper respiratory infection slowly getting worse and turning into pneumonia can sit for a day or two in the emergency room waiting for a shot.
I don't know if you're ever had a full blown case of pneumonia but as someone who did and still has scarring in their lungs it's no joke. You slowly drown from the buildup in your lungs and there's nothing you can do but hope the antibiotics outrace the infection before you can no longer breathe.
Does sitting around Ben Taub Hospital in a plastic chair for more than a day sound like "living a pretty good life" to you? I assure you, it is not.
I am not claiming free healthcare is of equal quality to any other healthcare, and I am sorry your experience was so shitty.