In a Web piece up today at Reason, I look at the DTV transition and our spectrum policy, which doesn’t seem to get much attention when you consider how insanely wasteful and inefficient it is. Among the most appalling ironies here: For the amount they’re proposing to spend to subsidize converter boxes for old TVs to allow them to receive digital broadcast TV ($3 bn), they could hook up every disconnected household to cable or satellite and auction off that TV spectrum to higher-value uses. That they don’t constitutes a deadweight loss on the order of tens of billions annually.