Miss Wilke is an advertising writer.
Guess who spends more on advertising than AT&T and Chrysler and Lever Bros. and General Electric and Gi1lette and Coca Cola.
Guess who spends over twice as much on advertising as Kodak, Du Pont, Kellogg’s, Pi1lsbury, Greyhound and Volkswagen.
Guess who spends over three times as much on advertising as Heinz, Schlitz, Mobil Oil,
Guess who spends more on advertising than Shell Oil, Scott Paper, Mazda, Delta Airlines, Eastern Airlines and American Airlines put together.
You do.
The U. S. Government is now the 10th largest advertiser in the
Actually, that ranking is misleading since the government has an advantage other advertisers don’t have. It doesn’t pay for radio and television time. That costly item is donated to the government free as a public service.
Just imagine how much they’d be spending if they had to buy their own broadcast time !
You won’t have to imagine it for long. They are now pushing for permission to pay for their own messages so they can pick better time slots.
While the rest of government was reportedly tailoring budgets in the past year, advertising expenditures increased 10%.
What are they selling you may well ask.
Well, uh — there’s the Post Office. But they don’t have any competition, you scream.
Silly, you. Where there’s a bureaucrat, there’s a way.
The Post Office spent $8 million in 1974 and is currently spending $13 million a year.
A $4 mi1lion campaign is budgeted to tell people to give forwarding addresses when they move. The Post Office says it spends $300 mi1lion a year in avoidable forwarding labor costs. They must spend a lot of time staring blankly at those letters before returning them to the senders or putting them in the Dead Letter bin.
Most recently it has been producing television spots for the purpose of “promoting letter writing to increase the use of first class mail.”
This may seem strange to you, especially since the Post Office continually uses increased volume of mail as an excuse for inefficiency and the need for increasing postage rates.
Thus we taxpayers are in the position of paying our money to persuade ourselves to write more letters and thereby increase the mail load so the Post Office can charge us more for their expanded services.
Such is the absurdity that is inevitable when a government agency gets involved in marketable services.
And this campaign wi1l double the Post Office’s ad expenditures to almost $30 mi1lion a year. All because postal authorities, with stunning buffoonery, want and expect people to use mail more frequently at the 13¢ rate than they did at 10¢ . . . even though use declined greatly with the last rate increase.
Or, maybe they don’t really expect it. The Postmaster General concurrently is requesting Congress to double Post Office subsidies to almost $2 billion a year for the next few years.
If the postal service were in the private sector where it belongs, along with all other non-protection services, advertising would not be purchased out of deficits and in spite of losses. It would be paid out of the same costs that would transform the service into a smooth-running, efficient and economical system … a condition which can be assured only by competition in the private sector. And the taxpayer/ consumer would not be spending money to work against his own interests.
We taxpayers are spending another $16 million to tell ourselves to put out our matches, stay physically fit, get exercise, stop smoking, join car pools and so forth.
We spend millions to tell people about the welfare they should be getting. People who don’t need welfare often don’t know they’re entitled to it anyway. So the taxpayer pays out of his own pocket to tell people to come and take his money whether they need it or not.
The bulk of government’s advertising budget is used for military recruitment.
The Army alone spent $35 million on recruitment advertising in the last year. This may very well be the most invisible $35 million in the history of advertising. It strains the imagination to think of how so much advertising money could possibly be spent so unobtrusively.
The cost breakdown in Ad Age (August 18, 1975) reveals $71/2 million spent in magazines, about $11/2 million in outdoor and less than $1 million in newspaper supplements. The other $25 million is not accounted for except in a rather miscellaneous way as direct mail, displays, transit posters and promotional materials. And next year’s budget has been upped $5 million to $40 million.
Where is the money going? One can only wonder.
When the government spends money, there are not the restraints of profit/loss statements. We are not told how many were recruited — or what the goal is. We do know, of course, that we already have servicemen populating countries all over the world.
If, as one branch says, they’re “just looking for a few good men,” the recruitment cost per man is astronomical. But tax money is like a mountain — it’s just there. You can go to it any time and if you’re a bureaucrat, it will even come to you.
Some questions persist:
What great need for recruitment advertising can there be when virtually all youngsters are exposed to recruitment through school ROTC programs?
Why is so much advertising necessary when the services all have big recruitment staffs?
What better officer recruitment could there be than our military schools and the academies?
If recruitment is so difficult why are appointments to the academies always in such demand?
What other organization’s benefits are so well known as the military’s 20-year retirement, medical and dental care, clothing, housing, training, travel and the like?
The Army is at least as well known as the Hershey Bar which spends no more than a whisper in advertising and for many decades found it unnecessary to advertise at all.
If anyone has the temerity to inquire why the Army budget is being increased to $40 million for recruitment at a time of unemployment when the Army should be more attractive than ever, the response is that the Army doesn’t want just anyone. It must compete with industry for high quality personnel.
So, now it becomes clear. All this expense isn’t the cost of a volunteer military as opposed to the draft. The draft was never so persnickety. We’re simply paying the cost of another federal boondoggle.
Judging by the budget, the Army must want to recruit the Chairman of General Motors.
The taxpayer now finds himself in the position of paying money to hire people he can’t get while turning down the most likely, willing candidates for military service. Once again, his tax dollars are working in opposition to his best interests.
These expenditures simply represent another form of the draft . . . another uncalled for drain on the creative sector.
We are not only drawing millions of dollars out of the market coercively through taxes . . . money that would otherwise be used productively. We are also drawing away skills — or attempting to. If we are paying these sums to lure high caliber people into non-creative, protective jobs, we are losing more than money. We are losing productive ability. By turning down the unemployed we are paying to keep the less skilled in the market where they are contributing minimally or collecting unemployment compensation, which we also pay.
The military is trying to attract the least-suited for service while turning down the best-suited. Our tax dollars further compete with each other by pitting the services against each other. In addition to the $40 million Army budget, the Navy spends $23 million, the Air Force, $16 million and the Marine Corps, $8 million. The Marines quite understandably support the idea of an umbrella campaign for all the major services. But while paying to bring people into the military branches, we are also paying to keep them out.
The government is seeking to pay for radio and TV time in order to reach younger people, its prime prospects, without depending upon the free public service time availabilities. But at the same time, the government is spending our tax money to tell these same young people to go to college — and at government expense.
Unemployment compensation also helps pay people to stay out of the military. All welfare programs are in competition with our military recruitment programs. We are using our tax dollars to bid up the cost of protecting ourselves.
The public and private sectors of the economy can never mix without the overlap being in many ways unjust and disadvantageous to everybody.
It is absolutely right to have a volunteer military, but wasteful tax expenditures, unrealistic aims and unnecessary encroachment in the market are merely a more indirect method of drafting resources from the creative sector.
These budgets are typical of the way in which bureaucrats enlarge their responsibilities via ridiculous expenditures and self-perpetuating waste. This is not what’s needed for a volunteer military. It can only defeat the whole idea.
The government should happily accept its public service status for broadcast time and should depend on voluntary help or its own personnel for any other publicity needs. It should not be bidding up prices in the market.
The Advertising Council, through volunteer agencies, prepares public service advertising for many causes, none of which is so important as the military protection of the country. Their help would probably be forthcoming if the agencies didn’t have $110 million in budgets waved at them.
Even if volunteer aid were not forthcoming, it is difficult to see the need for recruitment advertising for services that have military academies, ROTC programs, information officers, recruitment personnel and the Government Printing Office at their disposal.
Whenever the government mixes in the private, creative sector of the economy we find we’re fighting ourselves with our own dollars. All objectives become self-defeating.
It happens when welfare competes with wages, when laws control prices and salaries, when subsidies push up prices, when tariffs raise the cost of imports, when government-protected unions disrupt production, when government waste bids up prices of scarce materials and services — many ways. The military, among others, could take a lesson from little Pogo who once uttered that immortal line, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
