Bill Bennett: “We have had previous conversations about the effectiveness of the Agriculture Department. We are talking about our own…”

“We have had previous conversations about the effectiveness of the Agriculture Department. We are talking about our own backgrounds. I have a little bit of background in advertising. I would be anxious before we spend this money to do a little analysis of how effective the advertising has been. You talk about instruction in schools. We all know that there are instructions that work and there are instructions that don't. My own experience is that the Government is not very good at advertising healthy lifestyle changes. We could have been spending--I have no idea. We have not researched this at all. I have no idea where the evidence might be. We could have been spending the 21 cents per pupil and wasting every bit of it in terms of results. I have something of a background in advertising and I know how much advertising budgets get wasted simply because the advertising campaign is not effectively carried out. I recommend to my colleagues we defeat this amendment and if, indeed, the Senator from Oklahoma and the Senator from New Mexico can examine this from their background and demonstrate we are getting a 17-to-1 return from this particular program, that we are getting a 17-to-1 return from the kind of instruction going on in classrooms, then I would be happy to endorse this at some future time.…”