Digital TV
I’m so glad the government is looking out for my best interests. I mean, as someone who’s never had cable in his life and who currently owns the cheapest TV Wal-Mart sells, HDTV obviously means a lot to me. Since I know the market would never provide me with HDTV, I’m glad the FCC is making sure that my TV will soon be useless.
But wait! The government is doing me another favor, by handing out coupons to buy a converter to make my TV able to receive HD signals!
Leave aside for the moment whether it’s wise or moral for the government to use tax money for this purpose, and consider that right now you can get a standard-definition TV for less than $100 at Wal-Mart. The coupons will cover up to $80 toward the purchase of converter boxes “expected to cost between $50 and $70 apiece.” It doesn’t seem too outlandish to assume that by early 2009 a low-end HDTV will cost about the same as a low-end non-HDTV now. So the projected cost of a converter box is only about $30 less than what it would cost to buy a new TV. Without the coupons, who’d buy a converter for $70 instead of spending $100 to replace your old non-HD TV? It’ll break soon enough anyway, and then you’ll throw out the useless converter box and buy an HDTV after all.
So in the end you’ll spend your $100 on a new TV, and the taxpayers will be out the $70 you spent on your converter box. Only the converter box companies win, since they’ll have made $1.5 billion off of devices no one would buy except for government subsidies.
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