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IRS Spent $60,000 Producing Star Trek Parody
An anonymous reader writes According to the AP, the IRS is being "scolded for spending $60,000 dollars on an elaborate parody video that played at a 2010 conference. 'The video features an elaborate set depicting the control room, or bridge, of the spaceship featured in the hit TV show. IRS workers portray the characters, including one who plays Mr. Spock, complete with fake hair and pointed ears. The production value is high even though the acting is what one might expect from a bunch of tax collectors. In the video, the spaceship is approaching the planet 'Notax,' where alien identity theft appears to be a problem.' You can find the hilarious and/or nausea-inducing video on YouTube."
Well, this is better than some of the things our government spends our tax dollars on...
They spent all that money, and they still couldn't get the right uniforms.
Yeah, have we seen the US's military contracts and cost overruns? Shit, I'm glad they only spent $60k on this!
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
The IRS decided to produce videos in house instead of spending more money to hire outside contractors. Before they could start producing actual videos for use in training, public information, etc., they had to get up to speed with using their new video production facility. They had to make some dummy video during that checkout/internal training phase, so they chose to make parodies of Star Trek and Gilligan's Island. Big deal.
My girlfriend works at a library. A patron throw a hissy fit the other day because she thought they had used way to much salt on the sidewalk (this is snow country) and threatened to call the Mayor.
It costs about $1500 per day to run that library branch. Yet people freak out because they might use $1 more salt than necessary once a month to keep the City from being sued by somebody slipping and falling. This is how people think.
had a good screen presence. With a little training, he might be as good as William Shatner.
Look at the Star Trek cosplay, not the firearms we're stocking up on!
(not that it's much compared to the DHS)
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The cost of the video is so high because they haven't achieved a scale of production. We need them to produce entire series of Star Trek, then IRS Voyager, Next Generation Income Tax... then Star Wars, Mission Impossible, etc If enough auditors spend enough time producing enough of these videos, the cost per video will go down, which means the "rate of increase" of IRS spending on videos could go down.
At least until the auditing period for the 1040 I'm working on today is expired. Then pull the plug.
Gently reply
Assuming you have an unlimited amount of time, yes.
But in reality, making mountains out of molehills is a clever form of filibuster. It gives you a "tough" image even while you distract debate from the real mountains.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
The US govt budget in 2012 is, roughly, 3.5 trillion dollars
That is 3.5 e12
And congress upset about 6e4 ???
simple math: assume there are 200 working days per year.
IF congress investigated the ever popular waste fraud and abuse every single day, how much would they have to save each day, to equal 1% of the budget ?
well, the answer is
step one 3.5e12/100 = 3.5e10
step two 3.5e10/200 = 1.75e8
That is, if congress found *one hundred and seventy five million dollars of waste, EVRY SINGLE DAY, it would be 1% of the us budget.
tell me again why we are even thinking about 60K ???????
Sorry, 60K really is a tiny amount of money for a government agency. Maybe the video was a bad idea. Maybe it was a morale booster. Maybe it distracted thousands of employees from their miserable pay checks. I don't care. The money wastage in the government is the multi-billion dollar unnecessary, or overdone projects (TSA, F35, etc), not a few tens of K spent here and there on entertainment for thousands of people.
If your income is low, then you are right, the $2 coffees add up. If you are making payments on a $20M house, and traveling by biz-jet, then coffee is not the place to try to save money.
Companies often spend money to entertain or motivate their employees. They do this because sometimes the morale boost is worth far more than what it costs.
It's all about the mindset. When you think of it as play money instead of money that people have sweated to earn and might otherwise be used for medical procedures, safer environments for children or otherwise improving quality of life, you get this kind of thing happening and it's symptomatic of a much bigger problem.
Somebody needs to work on their reading comprehension skills:
Q Why does the IRS even have a film studio? ...to make training films and informational videos for taxpayers.
A
If you'd even browsed you'd find out that they have one for training videos because they found out they could do them cheaper in house than farming them out. It's not too surprising if you have either (a) a large number of videos to produce or (b) in-house technical staff with surplus time. I suspect (a) is correct as the congress changes tax law - Every Fucking Year - and all of the agents need to be retrained. Sending in-person trainers is even more expensive.
You'd be surprised at how many large companies have their own film and sound studios for in-house work. It doesn't take too big an operation to justify having one over paying a contractor to do it every time you need something updated.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Right - what has the government done for us.... (insert monty python quote here)
education , sanitation, roads, police,
Seriously, try to imagine what the US would be like without a government, or if people had to pay specifically for the services they wanted. You may not like the police but would you prefer Blackwater hiring out as private security? No public education for the poor? Private roads closed to non-members? No water systems? It would be a hell on earth - a scaled up Somalia.
Sure, there is out of control government spending but its a lot better than no government at all.
Incidentally,
You may not like the police but would you prefer Blackwater hiring out as private security?
My neighborhood - and this is a normal, non-gated, houses $150-$200k neighborhood - has a private security force that patrols part time, because the police won't do their job. It is far from the only one like it.
No public education for the poor?
Setting aside the larger question of whether or not they actually educate those poor people, are publicly owned and operated schools staffed with government employees the only way we can think of to provide education to the general public? All my education tax money goes down the drain - my city's schools are unusably bad; I never spent a day in them, and neither will my children. My wife did work in the administration of the local school system before we married, and it firmly convinced her that the entire operation was a complete waste.
Private roads closed to non-members?
You mean like the NY, NJ, PA, OH, IN, and IL turnpike systems? The Dulles toll road? There are plenty of roads you have to pay to use, and yes, they were often privately owned and maintained in the early days of the country.
No water systems?
I guess you've never seen rural areas where water is in fact often supplied by a cooperative owned by the people who receive it? Even here in a city, where the incredibly disruptive nature of water and sewer services mean that they're always going to be provided by government (too hard to get permission to tear up all the streets otherwise), we pay for our water just like we pay for natural gas or electricity - fee for service.
I'm not an anarchist, but acknowledging that we have to have some government is not carte blanche for said government to waste other people's money, and if you sometimes sound like the crazy old guy complaining over the cost of paperclips used by the city, that doesn't mean it's always a bad idea.
The three largest expenses of the US Federal government are Social Security, Healthcare and the military. If defense was handled at the state level it would be difficult to prevent some states being free-riders, particularly land-locked states. Healthcare and social security could possibly be handled at the state level but the costs would still exist and would result in a great deal of duplication. Also, big business would love to be able to play individual states off against eachother for the best tax deal. It would be a very different country - in fact each state would operate much more like an individual country with all the potential for internal conflict that that entails.
This doesn't excuse waste, but it is extremely naive to think that large corporations are intrinsically any less wasteful and bureaucratic than government departments once they achieve a certain size.
$1,000? Let's say you pay minimum wage to the actors for a day of shooting.
5 actors * 10 hours * $8 = $400
Camera rental = $200 (Minimum)
Light rental = $100 (Minimum)
Greenscreen 20' = $100
Whoops we've used up your $1,000 budget and we still don't have:
An editor ($150 minimum)
No sound (Add another $100)
No poorly done 3D animation (Another $100)
You didn't pay a camera operator to setup and point your camera (Another $150 minimum)
Now you need to include the time for someone to "write" it. Probably would take a day. Another $150 minimum even if your employee was working for minimum wage.
Are you going to shoot in a room at the IRS? You have to account for your Janitor then clearing the room of furniture. Let's say $50 for 2 hours work. Still cheaper by a factor of 10 or more than renting a stage.
Oh yeah, the actors have to wear something. Add $60 per actor * 7 actors = $420
________
$2,120.
Also that $30k per video number is meaningless since it includes setting up a whole new in-house studio, stage space, purchasing lights, buying computers etc. If they produced 30 videos (1 per week) for the rest of the year, every video next year would be saving tax payers money.
For instance the 2009 Iraq war spending ($95.5B) was about $1.13 per tax paying household. On the other hand, the 2010 $521 billion cost of Medicare was funded by grabbing $6167.43 on average from each tax paying household.
Score -1 Major math fail.
95 billion is about 1/6th of 520 billion. Therefore Iraq costs 1/6th the Medicare budget based on your figures.
Your figures say that there are about 90 billion households in the u.s. based on your iraq figures of 95 billion / $1.1
I guess you have deliberately confused millions with billions to try to make a political point. Your figures should probably say iraq cost $1100 per household in one year.
It depends on the purpose of the video. Was it a fun and engaging way for the employees involved to familiarize themselves with the process of making videos (before making regular training videos), if so it was money well spent.
Was it something to lighten up the mood and engage the participents at the start of the training conference? If so it was probably worth it.
Was it just play money for the involved employees? If so it was probably wasted, but I don't think that was the objective.
The fact they found a way to make part of their job enjoyable doesn't mean it was a waste.
I stole this Sig