"without a single penny spent of tax dollar money. We've been fortunate to get enough grant money from both state and federal to get this off the ground."
How are state and federal grants not made up of tax dollars?
How are state and federal grants not made up of tax dollars?
OP is bragging that the municipality is paying for a service without increasing local taxes to pay for it. Increasing local taxes is the obvious way that municipalities typically pay for something like this. But increasing local taxes also generates predictable and often persuasive complaints from old cranks who never want to increase local taxes. OP's muni is thus circumventing those complaints by using grant money for the rollout.
While it's true that state and fed grants use tax dollars, it's irrelevant to the OP's brag. E.g.,
Old crank at meeting says, "I don't want to pay more money for a service I don't need." Applause break.
Old crank at meeting says, "I don't think it's right to take a grant created with state and federal taxes which I don't believe in paying." Awkward silence.
Edit: clarification
Grants are paid for by taxes.
Many tax pennies were spent.
Just because it didn't come out of the city council pot makes no difference.
Could be a good use of taxes but I don’t think it’s correct to say “not a penny of tax revenues spent”.
He literally said 'no tax pennies were spent'.
They obviously were, what he wrote is factually incorrect, taxes are taxes, just because they didn't have to rise council tax is totally irrelevant.
He also claimed "There is absolutely nothing about this service that is a hand out from the government".
That is also completely WRONG if as he claimed they received state and federal grants. A lie. It is subsidised.
i.e. You're completely wrong, the original poster woefully misunderstands taxes and grants if he's claiming no handouts and and taxes, please stop now.
I think broadband should be a public utility, this has got nothing to do with my politics, it's simply pointing out the original comment is factually incorrect in its claims.
His town's broadband was subsidised, it was built using tax payer pennies and it did require a handout.
If you want to go down that road, however, grant dollars are already allocated and could thus be considered already spent.
Do you really want to be having an argument about what spend means?
> municipalities and electric cooperatives in the state do not have access to the proposed $250 million broadband expansion grant program that will be established
"without a single penny spent of local tax dollar money. We've been fortunate to get enough grant money from both state and federal to get this off the ground."
That will get local support as local anti-tax people know that if they don't spend the state/fed money, other towns will. They won't get lower state/fed taxes.
If the tax dollars aren't necessary & the vision is profitable, why does it need to be municipal? Can't these people just start their own company? Something here seems a bit weird.
State is different because the funding situation of state and federal governments are not equivalent, but marginal federal spending is not tied to marginal increases in tax revenue even in principal, so quite literally changes in federal spending do not come from tax dollars.
If you assume that (1) the lifespan of the federal government is finite, and (2) the federal government will have no unpaid, transferred, forgiven, or externally covered debt from now until and including the eventual final shut-down, then it follows that any spending must eventually be covered by taxes, but while (1) is a reasonable assumption, (2) is...less clearly justified.
Because federal government spending doesn't depend marginally on taxes.
> If it comes from the government, it's tax payer funded.
This would be true if changes in government spending were tied to changes in taxes, but it isn’t because they aren’t.
For state government operational spending its closer to being a general truth.
If most money nowadays is calculated digitally (which it is, most transactions are spreadsheets and databases instead of actual cash or goods) and the way most new money that is created is created in similar fashion (it is). Then the constrains of money creation are limited to faith in the system, value speculation (mostly by other countries for what they can trade it for) and inflation. Most monetary systems crash due to overprinting of money and excess inflation which causes a lack of faith in the system. Having something akin to "Gold Sinks" is part of keeping things running, taxes are a perfect way to do that, though the distribution could use some tweaking to get better results, especially if one cares about wealth redistribution.
In aggregate, to offset, to the extent viewed desirable, the money supply effects of the creation of money in spending, and in terms of specific distribution of taxes to effect a desired (re)distribution of net income.
Also, though the above would be sufficient on its own, because prior to the abandonment of commodity-representational currency for pure fiat, the metaphor of the fisc, a finite purse (from which we get the adjective “fiscal”) was a reasonable model of government finances, and there is a lot of inertia in popular models of the world. So, even though it is no longer an apt model, lots of people — both in the electorate and even in government — still view the world through a framework in which that is exactly how things work, which affects their decisions as electors or government decision-makers.
Even if this is all true and it's effectively free - we're saying the tax payer isn't paying for it. However isn't there still an unfairness when it comes to who BENEFITS from said broadband?
US Federal Taxes go to the Treasury[1][2], which then spends it on Federal government programs. If spending is more than receipts, the US Federal Reserve issues securities (ie, sells bonds) to raise money[3].
Quantitative Easing by the Federal Reserve does cause money to "appear", but this is different to the general process for funding federal government programs[4] (Note that the money can disappear if/when the Reserve chooses to resell those assets).
[1] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/monthly-treasury-st...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-taxes-revenue-e... ("Of the $3.46 trillion in receipts taken in by the U.S. Treasury during fiscal 2019")
[3] https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2019/november/where-fe...
[4] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/quantitative-easing...
The shortfall between Federal government spending and tax receipts is the deficit. The government has to borrow that money, which it does by having the Treasury issue debt securities.
Not sure where these claims come from either.
There are numerous examples of this. Your water supply might be one of them.
Municipal broadband is also usually pay-for-use, and you could fund it with bonds, which is also common.
You could argue against how a municipality decides to implement their own broadband service. But saying that no municipality should be able to provide any service - or even particular services - seems a bit odd. Since that's the majority of what local governments do...
The police, education, water, roads, parks, etc...