Every now and then I get stuck in a budget meeting for a marketing department and, lately, the process makes me think wistfully of applying Direct Marketing budget logic to governments.

Maybe we need a 28th Amendment to our Constitution, something like this: “Every law, regulation, earmark, in fact anything at all involving money, incoming or outgoing, shall be approved by a majority of direct marketing planners with 10+ years of experience before going into effect.”

Direct marketers learn exactly what works and what doesn’t pretty quickly. As a result, most direct marketing costs aren’t costs at all. They’re investments, as close to blue chip as you can get. Our governments should spend money like that.

Direct Marketers do not throw money into bottomless pits; we’d never get close to one trillion in debt never mind trillions and trillions. (For one thing, we’d wind up in the slammer if we even talked about it.)

DMers spend money where it will do the most good and work hard to find where that is. They also know how to choose price points for what they’re selling (this is analogous to taxes).

Once upon a time, our governments handled money more or less the same way. That’s why we paid low taxes, had a much smaller civil service and still got the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System, bridges, libraries, parks, airports, schools, the world’s best-equipped armed forces and outstanding civil services like the NYFD. Most of the money (taxes) went into the actual work. In direct mail terms, that would be the equivalent of lists, postage, creative, printing, etc.

If direct marketers spent money the way government does nowadays, we’d spend most of it internally, in the marketing department, with little useful output. The New York City school department is a simple example; it employs more non-teachers than teachers. Some of them, like property managers, janitors and auditors, are useful but most of them are worse than useless; they’re counterproductive. Imagine a DM agency or a client marketing department with 10 supervisors, 10 theoreticians and a half dozen political commissars for every copywriter and you’d have a pretty good handle on the problem.

Direct Marketing operations have no useless departments. We can’t afford them. The Federal Government has two completely useless cabinet level departments – education and commerce – that do, literally, nothing useful and they eat up billions of our tax dollars and get in the way. (Apparently we have recently multiplied the number of useless, obtrusive and shockingly expensive government departments such as 33 new czarships avec staffs – at last count.)

We almost never have even one useless employee in DM. Every legislator in the country has at least one and a lot have dozens of them.

Collectively, all of our governments have hundreds of thousands of people in sinecures “working” for thousands of useless but obstructive boards and commissions.

Every non-vital branch of the civil service could lose half its employees without affecting what it euphemistically calls services.

Direct Marketers are the world’s greatest followers of Occam’s Razor which, essentially, says that of two competing explanations the simpler is probably right.

Government is, by nature, anti-Occam.

For instance, there is a simple way to improve health care enormously without raising taxes, creating huge bureaucracies or ripping off young people. It’s called the One-Page Health Care Bill and it’s here: RedState.com

Then there’s the government way.

The one-page way would probably work pretty well; the government’s 2,700-page way has no hope of working and comes with a 100% no-money-back guarantee of morphing into an abyss of national debt not unlike the Sarlacc sand monster in Return of the Jedi.

With our new 28th Constitutional Amendment, Direct Marketers would be able to insist that we give the simpler version a shot before we feed the whole country to the Sarlacc.

As soon as Cash for Clunkers clanked to a stop, I bought a new Ford Explorer.

It came with built-in Sirius satellite radio and a free subscription for a few months after which I had to pay for the service or lose Sirius in my new Explorer.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? And, since it’s such a good idea for both Ford and Sirius, you wonder what could go wrong.

Well, something could. And did.

Apparently it never occurred to anyone at either company that someone might already be a Sirius subscriber, someone like me.

I’ve been with Sirius for years. Then, suddenly, I had two accounts. Sirius automatically renewed my old one for a year and started sending me letters and emails about my new one expiring any day now. For some reason, I’d thought the Ford dealer would handle all this.

Foolishly, I started by writing back to Sirius with all the details: dates, account numbers, what I wanted them to do, etc. No response.

I emailed them a few weeks later. Nothing.

Finally I bit the bullet and called them. It’s like calling hell. Wait, wait and wow, how those fifteen minutes flew by. Didn’t feel like more than four or five hours. Finally, a young lady took my credit card info to save my about-to-expire new account.

Great. Now how about cancelling my old account and refunding my money? “Oh, you have to talk to billing about that. I’ll connect you.”

“Wait!”

Too late. She was gone. (You’d think Sirius would have music on their wait lines, wouldn’t you?) Three years later, I hung up. A few weeks after that, another letter arrived reminding me that my free trial Sirius account – the one I’d already paid for – was about to expire.

If it wasn’t for the 24-hours jazz channel, Sirius 72, and Larry the Cable Guy on 103, I’d have cancelled the whole mess. Despairing, I wrote another letter and asked Sirius to call me. A week later, a guy did call and he amazed me by straightening everything out and arranging the refund.

I think. I hope.

The “customer experience” reminded me of the farmer watching the single track railroad out back of his yard. A train came from the east and another came from the west. Head-on collision. A reporter asked the farmer what he was thinking when he saw the trains heading for each other. “I was thinking that’s a hell of a way to run a railroad.”