Surely, a people so dumb as to justify the Ad Council's preaching cannot be assumed to exercise good judgment when voting for government officials. David Harsanyi explains.
Vox Dummies?
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You have got to be kidding me; the government runs a website called mymoney.gov? The "About Us" page states the following:
I wonder if from this site I can learn: about how Social Security really works; what deficit spending is; what the term "crowding out" means; why moral hazzaeds exist and what they are; what dead-weight losses are?
Just one of the interesting things that I learned by reading and using the links of Harsanyi's piece.
I did not know drugs were bad until I was informed my brain is an egg on MTV.
Of course, after years of dealing with an alphabet soup of regulatory bodies my brain is now a scrambled egg. Government, it turns out, is more damaging than drugs and I may very well need drugs in the future to undo the damage.
Gret quote picked up a LRC:
"When you let people do whatever they want, you get Woodstock; when you let governments do whatever they want, you get Auschwitz."
– Doug Newman
For the first time I find myself disagreeing with the premise, but not the specifics.
I concur that ads along the lines of "don't post topless photos" are silly.
On the other hand I'd rather the government used advertising to effectively get across the message that saving and planning for retirement is a necessity. You and I see this as common sense, but there is obviously a great swath of the population who doesn't (hence the near zero savings rate), and who more than likely has little interest in going online or to the library to educate themselves on the matter. Given the effectiveness of advertising in general, I'd much rather resources be spent conveying this meme (as an example) than simply giving that same swath of the population a portion of my tax contributions. "Teach a man to fish …" and all that.
Granted I have no idea what incentive will lead government to advertise the memes that matter.
J
You and I see this as common sense, but there is obviously a great swath of the population who doesn't (hence the near zero savings rate), and who more than likely has little interest in going online or to the library to educate themselves on the matter.
"Savings rate" is a misleading stat; it does not measure investment in equities or real-estate. And it's no wonder that the "savings rate" is near zero; the tax treatment on those assets that count as a 'savings' do not yield enough, after taxes and inflation to make it worth while.
LowcountryJoe,
You are probably right about the "savings rate" measure. However, the BEA lists "Personal Savings" as DPI (Disposal Personal Income, ie. after tax income) minus "Personal Outlays" (Personal Consumption Expenditures, interest payments, transfers, etc.). Personal Savings has been less than 5% for some time. [1] I don't see how equity investments or real-estate are excluded (rental income is included in DPI, and it doesn't appear that equity purchases are included in PCE).
This seems to indicate that there are many people who haven't heard of the "save at least 10% of your take home pay" 'rule'.
J
[1] http://www.bea.gov/briefrm/saving.htm
Why save? Savings means suffering the pain of forgone consumption and the Fed will simply inflate away your savings in an effort to spare the people who borrowed too much from the consequences of their actions.
So, I'm here with Bozo the Clown to tell you savings is okay when you live in a real country, but not when you live in a Banana Republic.
But leading economic "exerts" say saving is bad for the economy.
And just think about how much money these things cost once they're all added together.
Spending on defense or highways is debatable, but having dozens of websites that represent however many agencies employing thousands of people all for the purpose of chiseling away at the population so that we are eventually pliable enough to fit the new socialist state, well that's just wrong.
Jeez. Some people have a LOT of time on their hands. The Ad Council – to say nothing of all the govt agencies named here – have been around for decades with no ill effects. There are actually no extermination camps. Hell. We don't even have socialized medicine yet! What is this paranoia really doing for you?
By the time we have extermination camps and socialized medicine, it'll be too late.
I have many people laugh when I say this, but I want a V-chip in my TV that blocks not mature shows, but any propeganda pieces by the Ad Council. 60 years ago, eh? I wonder if Herr Goebbels snuck out of Germany before the end and lent his considerable talents to this worthless garbage.