I wish it were as simple as Cloward-Piven.
This is more like “Corporate America allowing itself to be co-opted by government in order to gain more business”.
I’m sure that T-Mobile, Cricket, Verizon...all of them lobbied for a program like this to sell phones to people who had no money. They had, after all, pretty much maxed out market share of people who could afford them. So from where is the next growth spurt to come?
Not unlike how the health insurers were not too unhappy to get 50 million new paying customers at gunpoint (the joke may be on them though)
I call it the big-government/big-corporate continuing criminal enterprise.