Most states in America ban municipal fiber. They saw EPB (Chattanooga) and said, no, we must make sure that doesn't ever happen again. That is how 'free' market is done in US, all the rules are to make sure the richest people become richer.
In all fairness, we put an awful lot of effort into making the poor poorer as well.
Yes, sometimes this is medical debt or other unavoidable things. But its also true that the consumtion rate is incredibly high and the savings rate is incredibly low, with US credit card industry making it easy to create huge debts.
So its simply a fact that a huge amount of people live in self imposed risky situations. Instead of an emergency fund, they think they can just open a new credit card.
So its of course not what is causing people to be poor, but what is does is that it makes many, many more people 'living on the edge' then there should be based on their actual incomes.
You sound like you are single no kids and on here with a cushy tech job and be like "those poor people just don't know how to manage their money!"
Car costs don't have to be insane. If you are smart about buying a small second hand car. Its just a reality that almost all american insanely overspend on their cars. And even reasonably poor people refuse to use buses or public transport even in places where it is possible.
> Healthcare costs are insane. Daycare costs are insane.
A huge number of people who are both healthy and don't have kids, or don't use daycare also live paycheck to paycheck.
> "those poor people just don't know how to manage their money!"
Its simply a well document fact that people insane overspend on consumtion. There is a reason the term 'house poor' exists. US culture tells everybody you need buy a house or you are failure, and that traps a lot of people. Same for cars, the overspend on cars is insane, the amount of 'poor' people that drive F-150 is off the charts, when you could get a second hand Honda Civic for 1/3 cost.
There are 1 million+ large F-150 like trucks sold in a year in the US. And we know for a fact that many of those are sold to people who will end up having payments mich higher then the recommended monthly acccount. And we know for a fact, that most people don't need these trucks.
We also know that people who have a pattern living paycheck to paycheck very often continue to do so, even as their income increases. Partly because they life-style inflated helped by the fact that as your income grows, your ability to add debt increases as well and many people see this as an oppertunity, rather then a trap.
Changing those things doesn't turn you from poor to rich, but it would mean that instead of living on the edge paycheck to paycheck with constant use of credit cards, instead you could have no credit card, an emergency fund and a savings rate of a modest 5%. There are plenty of people you can find who do this, who are worse off in terms of income then people who live paycheck to paycheck.
Its a fair argument to make that the US make this to hard, specially for people with kids or people who are sick, but those don't account for 30%+ of the population. But to ignore all individual choice is equally silly and infantilizing. People prefering F-150 over retirment savings is just a fact of life, and its not elitist to point it out.
It’s from 2023 but says 16 to 19 states.
16 states having restrictions while two go explicitly pro-municipal broadband doesn’t seem like a lobbyist’s panacea. Skimming the list of states with restrictions, they look like red states trying to bridle their blue cities. Partisanship seems the more-parsimonious explanation.
Never disagreed.
But yeah, it's not only easy it's very cheap. This is why you need a workers party so workers can effectively collaborate together to either primary the politician or convince them otherwise.
Oh and you can't just do this once either, it takes an entire life's worth of work and it never ends.
It doesn't really damper anything, Tennessee has among the highest rural FTTH coverage in the US. There are tiny companies you've never heard of running 8gbps symmetric to houses on acreage!