Why Am I Paying for Their Political Calls?

Somewhat off-topic for this blog, but vaguely financial is my anger at these automated political calls that have popped up constantly in recent years. Number one, it's annoying, but worse, when I don't answer the calls and they roll over to my voice mail, I'm actually paying for them, because I am charged some small fee for checking my voice mail.

It's sort of like the fax machine thing where people spam your fax machine and you pay for the ink and paper to print out their junk ads. The do-not-call list was supposed to stop that practice, but good luck figuring out where the heck those faxes are coming from.

At my last high school reunion, one of my ex-classmates had been fairly successful at his business using the practice of marketing by fax. This was before do-not-call lists, so he wasn't doing anything illegal, but I felt like slapping him. What a disrespectful thing to do to your customers, to expect them to use their paper and ink to print out your ads. Think if you sent an ad to a prospect through the mail that was postage due or made collect calls to prospective clients--you think they'd stand for that?

Why are politicians allowed to do this? You guessed it--because the politicians make the laws, and they've exempted themselves from the do-not-call lists.