said by Karl Bode:Reduce the amount of International bases from 850 to 475, stop pouring money into nation building, use the several trillion dollar windfall to build a national fiber backbone, then employ a wholesale model over that and ultimately migrate the government out of the role of wholesale operator and shift wholesale operations to a private operator?
That might only be a temporary solution. When we no longer have the ability to control and police the vast amounts of resources our nation uses, and we lose our position as a threat to those looking to take these resources for themselves, those trillions of dollars will drop off significantly. It's not that we are really all that powerful, as has been shown on several occasions, it's merely the projection of our perceived power that allows us to dominate many of the international markets and generate such a disproportionate amount of the world's income. We don't manufacturer anything nowadays, and our military might has become increasingly more important to our economic stability. Our dominance has already waned a great deal, and in the end we will most likely be fighting for our survival on someone else's terms if we drop our guard too much. Brush up on your Mandarin.
I do agree that we have reached the point where we really need to seriously consider providing high speed communications services throughout the nation. Currently, the best option for any infrastructure that could endure the test of time would be a fiber network. We are nowhere near the point where we should be trying to make all rural points across the country have the same level of service as in the middle of a thriving metropolis, but these folks should not be expected to pay taxes and be completely shut out of the loop. There could be other means to compensate rural areas, such as with tax cuts and discounted wireless options, as an example. Perhaps a national Internet tax model based on population density would be appropriate?