The cost of Super Bowl ads should sound familiar to taxpayers

On Monday morning, you can bet that a lot of the chatter in your workplace will be about the Super Bowl commercials from the night before. One political group has cleverly figured out a way to intertwine those super-expensive Super Bowl ads with their pet issue – cutting the debt and deficit.

At bankruptingamerica.org, they discerned that the cost of this year’s ads for the big game is very similar to the price tag for our overall federal government, 30 seconds at a time.

Here’s a portion of what they wrote:

“We will be watching the game, the half-time show and subsequent ‘wardrobe malfunctions’ and, of course, those really expensive ads, which cost an average of $3.8 million per 30 seconds this year. Some ads are funny, a few have you scratching your head, while others leave you thinking, ‘They just flushed their money down the drain.’

“But what if you saw a 30-second ad touting the successes of Washington and the federal government?  Maybe it wouldn’t be so shocking. Consider this: Every 30 seconds the government spends almost as much as a 30-second Super Bowl spot costs -- about $3.4 million -- just to keep our country running.

“If you think about it, that means the entire fiscal year is just one big, expensive but not-very-funny Super Bowl ad bought by the American government and paid for by you, the American taxpayer. Washington buys a Super Bowl ad every 30 seconds of every day of the year, and we have to pay the bill.”