Is taxpayer money well spent warning us about problems in TV and radio ads? I just heard an ad about “over-use injuries” (google it, you will be amazed) such as cheerleading and swimming laps that are putting our school age athletes on surgery tables. I don’t believe it. But surely I am paying for the ad with tax dollars.
CTEnergyInfo.com is mentioned in an ad from CL&P customers (or which I am one) which says we save resources by replacing energy efficient light bulbs before they blow out. I don’t believe that either. CL&P and my government are so tightly entwined that my electricity amounts to a tax based on energy useage. More about that later.
Our government supports spending so much money on educating us to things that are often not even true. Sometimes eggs are good for us, sometimes not, and taxpayers help pay for both good egg and bad egg education campaigns. How much does a radio ad cost which tells us people go to jail for giving children alcohol at home? We have laws to regulate or stop us from or compel us to do or not do just about everything we do (or don’t do). And we pay for ads to tell us about myriad laws. It is a good idea to wear seat belts, but how many laws do we need to compel us to wear them? And how much do we need to spend to remind us that the law compels us to wear them? How many studies do we pay for to show us that it is a good idea to wear them?
But the bigger question is what all these tax-payer dollars used to educate the taxpayer does to our economy. If we use deficit spending to pay for our own education via radio and TV advertising, isn’t that just a Ponzi Scheme? Will our children pay for us throwing away working, energy efficient light bulbs because we listened to CL&P advertising? How much time and energy and insurance and doctor costs be devoted to checking our children for “over-use injuries” because our children want to pitch baseball? Is borrowed money used to pay for an ad to tell us about jail for parents who let their children drink at home making those children pay for the education of their parents? Is that the new American Way?
Connecticut has a law against robbing a liquor store with a gun. Isn’t it enough to have laws against robbery in general? Do we need specific laws about what kind of place we are robbing with what kind of weapon? Who besides the lawmakers who make such laws benefit from them?
Don’t get me started on zero tolerance laws. Soon we will have people killing police because they don’t want to go back to jail for not wearing a seatbelt. The dynamic is this: Someone does something stupid and politicians make laws against that specific stupidity as though making something illegal will stop it.
In the US we imprison more people than the next five nations combined, excluding China. But China has five times our population, and two thirds our prison population. Our prison systems cost us $39 billion a year.
How many people die per 100,000 from violence in the US? Take a city the size of Waterbury Connecticut, and you know that about five people per year are murdered there. Perhaps six people might die from a food born illness there in a year. I think more people die on police and hospital shows on television each year than die in reality that same year. Our wild imagination about the dangers we might face are certainly exaggerated. About 84 people per 100,oo0 die per year, so if you die in Waterbury there is a 6% chance you were murdered, or a 94% greater chance that you will die in Waterbury from something other than murder.
But we must protect ourselves, and our legislators must educate us on locking doors and reporting suspicious activity to the police. I saw a recent interview with “snack man” a guy videoed interfering with a fight on a New York subway. He calmly stood between two people who were fighting and continued to eat nachos. When I saw people fighting on the street yesterday I took inspiration from snack-man and calmly walked between the fighters. They paid no attention to me. I stood between them and talked calmly to the louder of the two: “go home, come on home, go home”. I walked with him up the street a few feet. Then he thanked me.
So should we pass a new law? NO! We have enough laws. We just need to make sense. But not much chance of that if our congress costs us $5 billion and our prisons cost $39 billion. We are SO invested in our way of life. So many people make their living from our tax payers that the system is topsy turvey. Our government is just a mechanism to extract money and then inject money back into the system. And since we borrow the money we inject into the system, our system is a Ponzi Scheme.
Every time you hear public service announcements about school lunch or inland waterways, or lead paint, or eating healthy, or fracking for natural gas just remember you are paying for those announcements with money you don’t have for purposes you may not agree with, without your approval, often announcing things that are not true. And that is, sad to say, the new basis for our economy. It is, now, the American way and stopping it is a fight Against Goliath.
Copyright 2012 Kent Johnson
