Projects which increase economic activity (like rural broadband) can be revenue positive without fees or anything.
Now if the money all gets swallowed up by a huge ISP that doesn't actually give underserved people broadband, then everyone loses and its just corporate sponsorship.
Do you know if there's any way we could really track this?Deficit spending increases the money supply which itself will increase economic activity. I'm not sure how we could know whether an increase in economic activity is due to broadband access or the new cash, especially when the project would likely take years.
That doesn't mean we can't ever do useful work by subsidizing the deployment on infrastructure.
We can and should spend public money to improve broadband infrastructure. I have seen quite a few hugely successful subsidized broadband deployments from PUDs and small municipal power distribution companies in even lightly populated counties. For my money, continuing to subsidize these organizations and empowering them to sell broadband access direct to consumers is a huge value for the money.