The Inalienable Right to a Remote [63% of households in "poverty" have cable TV or satellite dish]

Feeling, evidently, flush with (other people's) cash, the Senate has concocted a novel way to spend $3 billion: create a new entitlement. The Senate has passed -- and so has the House, with differences -- an entitlement to digital television.

If this filigree on the welfare state becomes law, everyone who owns old analog television sets -- everyone from your Aunt Emma in her wee apartment to the millionaire in the neighborhood McMansion who has such sets in the maid's room and the guest house -- will get subsidies to pay for making those sets capable of receiving digital signals.

by April 2009 broadcasters must end analog transmissions and the government will have auctioned the analog frequencies for various telecommunications purposes. For the vast majority of Americans, April 2009 will mean . . . absolutely nothing. Nationwide, 85 percent of all television households (and 63 percent of households below the poverty line) already have cable or satellite service.

All Americans -- rich and poor; it is uncompassionate to discriminate on the basis of money when dispersing money -- will be equally entitled to the help.

The $990 million House version of this entitlement -- call it No Couch Potato Left Behind -- is (relatively) parsimonious: Consumers would get vouchers worth only $40 and would be restricted to a measly two vouchers per household. The Senate's more spacious entitlement would pay for most of the cost -- $50 to $60 -- of the converter boxes. But there is Republican rigor in this: Consumers would be required to pay $10. That is the conservatism in compassionate conservatism.

Yet Americans have such an entitlement mentality, they seem to think that every pleasure -- e.g., digital television -- should be a collective right, meaning a federally funded entitlement.

Since I got a DVR from my cable company and use a DVD for all recorded stuff, my TV set is really nothing more than a monitor now. I won't ever buy another TV set...just a monitor.

That seems to be where things are going, anyhow. I haven't received a TV signal over the air for years. My suspicion is that all over-the-air broadcasting of TV will end within 20 years, anyhow.

That's not necessarily a good thing, since local news is going to be hard to pay for under those conditions, but something will get figured out, I have no doubt.

"Again, its one thing when technology obsoletes.. its another when its forced to halt by government fiat."

Well, you're right, of course. The thing is that the technology is already obsolete. Analog broadcast television has been with us since 1946, and is still using the same frequencies.

One of the reasons that digital television has not been broadcase is the long line of old analog television sets still out there. I have a 1949 Crosley 7" B&W set in my rec room, and it still gets the local stations, when I bother to turn it on to show kids what television once was.

Digital broadcast television will never be able to happen as long as there are all those analog receivers out there. The thing is, though, that cable and satellite has pretty much obliviated the need for the tuner in your TV.

The broadcast industry wants to go digital, but won't if their viewers can't see their broadcasts. The cable companies are neutral, since they have to provide some sort of receiver to their customers anyhow. They'd like to do it digitally, though.

So, what to do with the obsolete TV sets? The answer is an inexpensive digital to analog converter. That's what's being proposed here. It's a necessary stage.

Remember when color television first appeared? I certainly do. One of the things that limited it was the necessity of making color broadcasts compatible with B&W sets. It was kind of unfortunate, really, because we'd all be watching high-definition television now if that hadn't been the case. But it was, so we have the mediocre NTSC standard.

So, who watches over-the-air broadcast television these days? Not many folks. Most of them are rural, poor, or not served by cable. So, we give them a little converter box and they go on with their viewing. It'll be a one-time thing.

Broadcast television is about to go away entirely. Count on it. But, it can't just yet.

Let me try that one more time, if we still had draftees I would exclude them, since we have a voluntary military I would INCLUDE them in the group to be denied voting rights. I would have no objection to allowing first term military to vote but once they decide to become career people, they should give up voting at least until retiring from the military.

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