commercial radio on kids schoolbuses
BusRadio is a new Massachusetts-based company created to force children to listen to commercial radio broadcasts on school buses around the country.
BusRadio boasts that it will “take targeted student marketing to the next level” and provide companies with a “captive audience” who, unlike listeners to commercial radio, are unable to change the station during ads.
See, the real issue here isn’t the radio being forced on kids, it’s that the school district probably gets revenue for deploying such a system.
When is America going to wake up and start putting things together: Government cuts funding of schools (to fight wars, fund tax cuts, etc, etc), so the school district doesn’t have the money to provide the services one would expect. So they seek alternative funding: soda machines, radio on buses, naming rights, etc.
Now obviously the bottom line must still be good for companies that offer such things, even if they do pay the school district for the rights to place them in the school/bus. Otherwise they wouldn’t be in business.
So we’ve cut the personal taxes of employees, executives, officers and directors of the company (but tilted towards the more well-off), cut the corporate taxes of the company, cut the dividend taxes of the shareholders (again, vastly held by other companies, executives, officers and directors), and we’ve cut the estate taxes so that those who are the most well off can keep that money soley within their families.
So now an institution that serves the public interest needs to be subsidised by the private sector to pay for the tax cuts which benefit the private sector.
It’s why Jefferson University Hospital tried to sell precious artwork to a Walmart heir. It’s why states like NJ and PA are considering selling rights to turnpikes and parkways (they call it ‘leasing’, but they give up toll revenue over a mutil-decade span for a big lump sum upfront). Hell, Mayor Street tried to lease off the Free Library of Philadelphia a few years ago, but the uproar killed that deal.
Soon the private sector will own, lease or have rights to nearly everything outside our homes (and a good bunch inside the homes, too!). And all the money flows upward towards the uber-rich. And don’t even get me started on the privacy issues when the private sector knows where you drive, what you spend, where your kids are, what your health issues are, etc.
After everything is sold off, where do we turn to get the next round of funds we’ll need?