Often I am thankful for folks such as Stimulating Broadband who look at the national broadband scene. I am also thankful to generous readers, such as Sam Osborne who give me the heads up on good articles – beucase lately it’s all I can do to keep up on Minnesota-specific issues. But obviously there are national issues that have a big impact on MInensota and this is one of them.

Stimulating Broadband reports…

The full amount of $700 million in rural broadband loan authority slated to be used this year by the U.S. Department of Agriculture has been cancelled as part of the budget compromise reached Friday evening.

I won’t rehash the details here. Stimulating Broadband has done a good job pointing out what this means and what it doesn’t, although I’ll include one of their observations…

Said accurately, the denial of the $68 million in federal funds means that a figure over ten times that amount will not flow to credit worthy wired and wireless service providers for eventual repayment to the government. The RUS broadband loan portfolio has a default rate of less than one percent.

But as I pointed out last week, I don’t know how much those details matter when the main issue at hand is taxes – not investment, economic development or broadband.