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With an eye to saving his unsalvageable legacy, the president proposes his latest New Dole: let's give every welfare household a computer! (I can see Gore's new campaign slogan now: 'An email in every pot!')
Never mind that American business is already offering computers for practically nothing (I've seen deals where computers could be gotten for free with a 2 or 3 year commitment to an Internet service provider). And let's forget about the study made by the Stanford Institute for the Qualitative Study of Society which states, "By far the most important factors facilitating or inhibiting Internet access are education and age, and not income, nor race/ethnicity or gender, each of which accounts for less than a 5 percent change in rates of access and is statistically insignificant," and going so far as to label the so-called 'digital divide' a myth.
According to CongressVote.com's Update for April 21, 2000: "The initial sum to administer ClickStart [Clinton's proposed program; catchy title, isn't it?] is only $50 million and will cover just 300,000 of the nation's households on the food-stamp rolls. However, the program's backers hope to eventually reach all 9 million households receiving food stamps." Except that many of those households that want Internet access already have it; it was and still is provided by the private sector. So why should the government institutionalize it?
The problem isn't a lack of access nearly so much as a lack of education, which is unlikely to be fixed by free government computers. While the Internet is a great information resource for those who know how to find that information, it is not currently a substitute for the classroom. Wait...I have a novel idea...why don't we make sure we have enough computers IN classrooms before we start handing them out to welfare recipients?
Let's see...this has all the qualifications of a Clinton program: we don't need it, it's based on false assumptions, and it will cost large sums of money. Sounds more like a $50+ million band aid for the history books (and the current Presidential campaign) to me.
-- The Watcher (It's the education, stupid.)
