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When you create perverse incentives you attract systematic cheaters. We literally conducted this experiment in Germany. Now the government is trying to roll out a restricted benefits card instead of giving out cash, because people come from overseas just to get on the benefits system and send the cash back home.
Is this anything more than a right-wing talking point? There is no proof that this is actually happening in any meaningful scale.
My neighborhood didn't get wired for cable until 1988 and my family never had it until 1997. We had four stations and then a fifth when Fox started. It was pretty normal for people to experience dead channels if you didn't live in a city where CATV had been deployed. Even then you could tune to unused channels when the cable tuner was too primitive to maintain an active list or you miskeyed a number on a remote.