More Propaganda Please

I had the Olympics on pretty much all the time this weekend, mostly tuned to Canadian coverage on CTV. I've noticed an interesting ad in heavy rotation. Its a Canadian government ad that simply and appealingly lays out the various services available to help laid off workers get help during this recession. It includes a simple title to cover all the programs discussed ... "Canada's Economic Action Plan". The ad is well-produced and not at all what you'd think a government ad would be like.

You could see the ads as propaganda for the Conservative Party of Canada, but it still seems like a worthwhile thing to do. To my knowledge, there is no such ad campaign here in the US, laying out the basics of Unemployment Insurance, education / retraining grants, payroll tax reductions ... not to mention TANF, HEAP, Food Stamps, and the like. I think an ad campaign like that would be a good idea. For one thing, most people don't have a good grasp of what's available to them, and an ad like this might help change that. Plus, it might help dispel the general feeling that "nothing's being done" that helps get people down.

One could still debate the pros and cons of specific programs, or even reject the whole thing as too much deficit spending, but at least we'd be debating something people more or less knew about. I think one reason why we don't see this kind of publicity is that in the United States, we are deeply ambivalent about anything that looks like "welfare". Even those who advocate and push through such initiatives seem vaguely embarassed by them, and it seems to have not occurred to them to spend a modest amount of that money telling people about the new help they've made available. What we get instead is a situation where there's really quite a bit being done to help people hurt by the recession, but people have to be especially savvy, organized, or well-connected to know about it.