On Monday, the Washington Post ran a story about Medicare’s new prescription
drug program. The government will spend $300 million over the
next three years to advertise the benefit. By Thanksgiving,
Americans will be exposed to over $7 million worth of TV commercials
about it.
This is a continuation of a long honored Washington policy: Instigate new programs and then do extensive “outreach” and advertising to encourage participation.
Politicians and bureaucrats
join together in this endeavor. The more people they can sign
up, the more evidence that the program was absolutely, positively
necessary to begin with.
The pols take bows for munificently
providing essential human services. The bureaucrats expand their
territory, increase their influence and protect their jobs.
A
classic win-win situation. Except for taxpayers.
The Agriculture
Department’s Food and Nutrition Service is responsible for outreach
services for the Food Stamp Program (FSP). Go to its Web site
and you can download or order a variety of promotional materials.
In
addition to informational brochures, there are flyers and posters
targeted for specific audiences. You can get a poster or a flyer
with kids, of course. But if you want one with senior citizens,
blacks, Hispanics, or women in wheelchairs, your government’s got
you covered.
A common theme of the materials is “Food Stamps
Make America Stronger.” You can order magnets, bookmarks and
even flying disks (sorry, a limit of 200 per order) that say so. And don’t forget the 200 food stamp pens that can be requested.
Not
everyone speaks English, of course. So the government provides,
for download, information in almost three dozen languages other than
English. These include questions and answers about food stamp
eligibility, what documents are required to apply and “a notice to
reassure immigrants that receiving food stamps will not make them
public charges, so that it will not affect their immigrant status.” Like you, I was worried about that.
As you would expect, government’s
efforts to pump up the rolls go further. Millions of dollars
in grants are issued every year by the Agriculture Department for
the purpose of increasing awareness and availability of food stamps.
The
Nevada Department of Human Resources was awarded almost half a million
dollars last year to “install 10 kiosks in 8 grocery stores and in
2 welfare district offices so individuals can be screened for eligibility
and apply for food stamps on-line (the kiosk application would be
in both English and Spanish).”
But citizens will get even more. There will be an “outreach worker in each grocery store for 3-4 hours
each week to promote use of the kiosks, answer questions, and assist
in filling out applications. Finally, the DHS would undertake
a marketing campaign to promote use of the kiosks.”
The New Mexico
Association of Food Banks scored even more dollars from Uncle Sam
than Nevada. One of their innovative strategies is “training
food stamp champions who will be located in the food stamp offices
and who will communicate the value of the FSP to both customers and
staff.”
That’s interesting. They need “champions” to persuade
those administering food stamps of their importance? I’d think
a paycheck on alternating Fridays would suffice.
Whenever Washington’s
hands out bucks, we know that the Land of Lincoln will elbow its way
to the front of the line. The Illinois Department of Human Services
received just under a million dollars to “build a data bridge that
would permit information collected through web-filed applications
and from automated telephone interviews to be transmitted directly
into the DHS database and processing systems.”
The Agriculture
Department’s mandate is clearly to sign up as many participants as
possible. One has to wonder if there is an equal emphasis on
making certain that those getting food stamps are eligible for the
benefits they receive. Streamlining and computerizing to make
it easier to access benefits open new opportunities for fraud.
And
we’re looking at merely the tip of the iceberg, just part of one program
of one federal department. We’ve not even examined federal grants
for socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers and no, I’m not making
that up.
Tax dollars spent for outreach, promotion, public information
and other forms of advertising by not just agriculture, but by commerce,
defense, education, health and human services, housing and urban development
and all the other departments are astronomical.
Mark Twain wrote
that “Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of
advertising.” That appears to have become official government
policy.
This appears in the October 13, 2005 Oak
Lawn (IL) Reporter. Mike Bates is the author of Right Angles and Other
Obstinate Truths.
