Had to post this before bed. The New Deal created jobs for the masses of unemployed which helped build the national infrastructure. Barney Frank made some interesting comments recently when he suggested that we "take some of the wealth that is being created by this wonderful thing, this increased productivity, this new technology and the ways of using it, and all this innovation, and let us use it for our own undisputed public purposes. Let us give cities and states more money so they can have more people policing, fighting fires, cleaning up the environment, repairing facilities that need to be repaired, enhancing train transportation, building highways, helping construct affordable housing in places where that is a crisis, helping pay for higher education for students."

He talks about building highways. I'm assuming he meant roads but the over used term "information super highway" would be an even better use of the labor. Most phone calls are now routed over the Internet by the major phone companies. Most of us don't know it's even happening. We do know that long distance have become much cheaper over the last few years. You can now bypass the entire phone system and make calls only using your broadband Internet connection Vonage.com Hong Kong--2¢ /min London--2¢ /min

That is a beautiful thing in my opinion because it frees up disposable income. The same thing is going to happen with video. We're going to simply pay the $40 a month for our connection to the Internet and phone calls will be free. Video will probably be a subscribe per channel fee. You might pay $2 a month for ESPN and $5 a month for HBO. The point is that you'd only buy what you want and the bill would be much lower.

I think the Internet should be a utility in the U.S. We could put the unemployed to work building and maintaining it and it could be used to improve education, commerce, as well as drastically reducing our Internet, cable and phone bills.