The National Tax Limitation Committee slammed California’s LifeLine...
The National Tax Limitation Committee slammed California’s LifeLine program and the idea of the state’s high-cost subsidies overall, in a filing at the CPUC, which it publicized in a news release and media call Thursday. “Our cash-strapped State has spent…
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nearly half-a-billion dollars over the past five years on High Cost subsidies,” the filing said (http://bit.ly/11Z2BYm). The California fund, administered through the California Public Utilities Commission, “wastefully duplicates federal programs to subsidize service to poor people,” referring to California’s LifeLine program, it said. California’s program is “in a class all its own” compared to some other “modest” state programs, the committee said. It criticized the fact that California’s program only subsidizes landline service, which it purported was losing ground to wireless. It said low-income and rural residents of California wouldn’t be hurt if California’s universal service program were cut. Prominent California legislators have proposed expanding the state’s broadband funding for both rural areas as well as low-income residents, citing needs that California has yet to serve with its current funding (CD May 30 p7). “The federal Lifeline program is wireless and the state LifeLine program is landline only,” a CPUC spokeswoman said. “You can’t be enrolled in both. So there is no duplication.” She defended the state programs and said they're “designed to help people obtain phone service, which keeps them connected to their jobs or to potential job opportunities, to friends and family, and also for receiving and placing emergency calls.”