Your tax dollars at work- Super Bowl style

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_census_super_bowl

How we stand by and let these fools stay in office? A friend of mine works in the census office and he says they've had nothing to do for 3 months so they remodeled, re-tiled the floor and had a catered open house with a grand opening ribbon cutting celebration. Nobody came so they all took the food home. On the days they aren't spending our money they play video games all day long. Where is the oversight? Where is the personal responsibility? Accountability? If I ran my business like that I'd be out of business and broke.

Time to fire EVERYONE in office before we are all bankrupt and socialists.

And again, a colossal waste of tax payer money. I could have swore Obama promised to go through everything line by line to make sure things like this don't happen.

Yup: Sounds about what you can expect. Everything the goverment has ANYTHING to do with you can bet is being run in the worst way. Can wait for goverment health care. YEEEEAAAA We are gonna spend our way out of debt. "OBAMA NOMICS"
FIGHT: Our president said he was gonna do alot of things to get elected. Like end the war, Close Gitmo, ect. Thanks to all the idiots who voted for this kind of goverment.

Yeah, i think Im gonna go out and run my credit line up and max out my credit cards because that will definitely help me down the road

This is one of those subjects that burn my azz. Remember when the US Postal Service was really competing with FedEx and ran commercials during the Superbowl?

I take it no one even read the article.

I bet you're right A.P.

I read it and I'm not too upset about it. A lot of people love to believe that corporate business executives always know what they're doing and that public administrators never do, despite the same educations. The Super Bowl may be a method to communicate their message to more Americans than any other single action. That's what the "smart" private corporations are thinking anyway and why they're also paying these high marketing fees.

$2.5M to the U.S. Government is about like me spending 50 cents. Maybe it beats spending .44 cents each to mail a flyer to every family in america, many of which will just throw it in the trash anyway. If you assume 300M people in America, with 2.5 people to a family, that's 120M families.... mailing a flyer to them at .44 cents is over $5M. I know these numbers are not accurate but just making a point that maybe an entertaining commercial during the Super Bowl is not the worst allocation of Census dollars for communicating their message. Look, it hasn't even aired yet and we're already talking about it.

Why read the article when I can just make assumptions and ignorant comments?

Wes: from the article. "Plans for the Super Bowl commercials come after the House voted Thursday to increase America's debt by $1.9 trillion — to $14.3 trillion — or over $40,000 for every man, woman and child the Census Bureau hopes to catch in its count.
I guess my comments are ignorant.

It's not the 2.5 million by itself, it's that magnified by 10's of thousands of these types of ridiculous wasteful decisions which of course leads to financial disaster. So much for writing ignorant comments. Little by little, step by step our everyday choices will have long term effects and some will be catastrophic.

Wes, My thoughts exactly when I read your posts regarding God and the Bible.

Oh Brucie, I prefer to read the bible rather than hump it. But - to each his own! I know you're upset that Yahweh gets off on killing babies, but take heart. Just remember, they all went straight to heaven so it's all good!

Chad pretty much nailed it. Doesn't seem like a bad buy considering the potential audience and the scope of the project. There are plenty of valid criticisms of the spending that has been going on the last 20 years - and I imagine most agree that Obama's budget is not aggressive enough re: curbing the deficit - but why grasp at this straw? Grant - subtract 1.9 from 14.3 and see what you get. How the heck did Obama create over $12 trillion in debt in just one year? Incredible!

What about the Census commercial that aired during the Superbowl? Who paid for that and what did that cost?

"few events can match the Super Bowl's reach of 100 million TV viewers. That's because for every percentage point increase in the mail response rate, it saves an additional $85 million to find and count those people."

So I guess you guys would rather spend more money for the census instead of advertising.

(Message edited by bigdad on February 07, 2010)

AP stop clouding the issue with facts. Spending is always bad!

Anyone have a link to the ad? My DVR blew out this morning, and the website I found seemed to have just about every ad available but this one.

lack of oversight just started with Obama, right?

Where do they get the 85 million number? Last time I heard a large number like that coming from Washington they followed it up by saying we just wanted a really big number. There was no rhyme or reason behind it. You can say anything you want to justify anything and even make it sound legit, but I highly doubt anyone will be moved to do anything different because that commercial aired. There must have been 50 commercials or more during the game. The only one I can really remember with some degree of clarification were the E-trade commercials. Give it another week and they will be a distant memory from everyone.

By the way, I could care less if George Bush was still in office, I would still be saying this was money being flushed down the toilet. It's not about who's in office, it's about absolute waste from an administration who said they would clean this kind of nonsense up line by line. Quit trying to make it a left or a right thing, it's a Washington thing.

http://2010.census.gov/news/releases/operations/2010-census-ad-campaign-positioned-to-save-taxpayers-millions-helping-boost-mail-back-participation.html

This is more thorough explanation of why the Census paid for advertising. If you assume that these Super Bowl commercials do not have a positive affect on returns, then you also have to assume that the corporate executives for Audi, godaddy.com, Coca-Cola, Bud, E-trade, Dockers, Denny's, Snickers, etc, etc all wasted their money too. I doubt that's the case.

"The Census Bureau projects for every one percentage point increase in the national mail back participation rate for the 2010 Census, the federal government saves $85 million in taxpayer money - it costs substantially more money to send census takers to households that fail to mail back their short 10 question form than it does to receive it by mail.

Facing a three-decade decline in the national mail response rates 10 years ago in the 2000 Census, the Census Bureau launched its first ever paid advertising campaign to increase public awareness levels about the once-a-decade and Constitutionally mandated population count. Prior to that, the Census Bureau relied on public service announcements that aired whenever television stations and print media could fit it into their schedules as a pro bono advertisement. The end result was a 2000 Census that turned around the three-decade decline in response rates and exceeded the 1990 Census mail response rate of 65 percent. At the same time the 2000 Census reduced the differential undercount of minority groups compared to the rest of the nation.

Because of the higher response rate the Census Bureau saved at least $305 million and returned that money to Congress following the census. The advertising campaign in the 2000 Census cost about $100 million, a $205 million return on investment."

I read the article and I still maintain that it is not money well spent. It is primetime and the most expensive time (on TV) money can buy. When folks see that it is not a funny Doritos commercial, they'll either head to the can or to get another cool one.

The truth is that this money will make very little, if any, difference. It is kind of like the digital conversion. There were millions spent to educate the public and even coupons given to provide the new devices. In the end, the date was pushed back because of a lazy public. What is needed are bigger prods.

If your a citizen of this country and you don't know what a census is or that you have to fill it out then you fail. And once again our government run schools have failed, wasting yet more of mine and your money.