Poor Californians to Get Free ‘Obama Phone’

Program is funded by ‘tax’ on telecom customers

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
December 11, 2012

Although the infamous ‘Obama phone’ meme was savaged by many liberals as a mischaracterized Republican talking point, a program to provide poor people with taxpayer-funded cellphones is about to be rubber stamped in California.

A YouTube clip uploaded in late September featured an Obama supporter at a rally in Cleveland advocating to “keep Obama in President,” primarily because the government provided people with free phones if they were on low income, food stamps, or had disabilities.

The video was cited by critics of big government as a reflection of the typical Obama supporter – someone lazily dependent on government hand outs whose vote could be easily bought with free stuff.

The clip emerged in the same month that a video was leaked of Mitt Romney telling campaign contributors at a private dinner that 47 percent of Americans would never vote for him because they believe they are “victims,” and are “dependent on government.”

The ‘Obama phone’ video soon went viral, spawning a number of musical parodies which also attained millions of views on YouTube.

Leftists and other media outlets responded by pointing out that the subsidized “free” phone for welfare recipients was in fact started under George W. Bush, that the program applied to land lines not cell phones, that the costs were covered by the Universal Service Administrative Company, not through taxpayer revenue, and that the phone service was not “free,” only slightly discounted.

However, something akin to the fabled ‘Obama phone’ is set to be rubber stamped in California and it will apply to cellphones.

In an article entitled PUC set to OK free phones for homeless, the San Francisco Chronicle reports, “Homeless and other poor people in California are on track to soon get virtually free cell phones and service so they can keep in touch with family, potential employers and others crucial to improving their lives.”

The cell phones will be distributed via the “federally funded Lifeline program,” run by Assurance Wireless, which is already operational in 36 other states and is set to get the green light to hand out the phones by the California Public Utilities Commission.

“Until now, California’s PUC rules only authorized Lifeline service for “wireline” phones, meaning traditional phones wired into residences – and those rules didn’t authorize anything for free,” states the article.

Indeed, discounts under the previous incarnation of the program were only up to $10 dollars a month and only applied to land lines.

Under the new program, the customer will have to pay an initial $20 fee to receive the cellphone but will then be immediately rolled into the Lifeline plan that will give them 250 free minutes of talk time and 250 free text messages per month. The $20 fee is then refunded as a credit that can be spent on extra talk time and texts, meaning the program is virtually free for the user.

As FactCheck highlights, “Lifeline is funded by telecom customers who pay a universal service fee as part of their phone bills,” a charge some have complained represents a tax. Given that the majority of people who actually pay for their own cellphone service are likely to be working Americans who pay taxes, characterizing the ‘Obama phone’ program as taxpayer-funded is by no means a stretch.

Rest assured, now that the free ‘Obama phone’ program has been extended to cellphones, that “tax” may be getting a whole lot steeper should a rush of welfare recipients seek to obtain their complimentary cellphone.

Of course, for poor people that did vote for Obama primarily because they thought he would increase government handouts, the horrific irony is that Obama has screwed the poor at every turn during his first four years in office.

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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a host for Infowars Nightly News.

This article was posted: Tuesday, December 11, 2012 at 6:48 am

Tags: economics, financial

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