WELI is the Clear Channel station in New Haven, CT.
Jim Masters (no relatiOn to Roy Masters) has been swimming upstream – when most big radio news/talk stations have no live local programming on weekends, he has been on the air on Saturday and Sunday morning for 19 years, 7 or 8 hours a week.
He was doing Groupon before most people heard of the internet – he sold coupon deals – Harry’s lobster shack is selling a $25 certificate for only $10, but you have to call in the next three minutes, etc. customers would be set up with a customer # connected to their payment info – “hi, this is customer 15527 – give me the Harry’s lobster deal” – the credit card was charged, the coupon was mailed, some portion of the money goes to the merchant, and the customer tries to use the coupon before the business vanishes.
So it looks like the show ended – not only is it scrubbed (partly) from the WELI web site, but the Facebook page is gone too.
So one of the last holdouts is gone, replaced today by Gary Sullivan talking about gutter brushes
Stump the professor is gone from Clear Channels’s KOA in Denver, replaced by Gary Sullivan
Must be big money to be made hawking gutter brushes. Who knew?
I tend to go to sleep with the radio on, and weekends are horrendous because I usually wake up to some kind of home/garden talk or an infomercial. Radio has betrayed me. More often than not I have to turn on some British or Australian radio just so I can hear people not talking about cherry tomatoes.
One of my observations about radio is the ads usually give you clues about who listens to a show – it’s not shocking that shows that encourage booze and drugs are sponsored by rehab clinics. If people aren’t calling in, the ads would go away.
Based on that theory, are Conservatives a bunch of tax cheats?
The majority of people operating small businesses are conservative. The evil IRS knows this fact and unfairly over-assess those folks, often by tens of thousands of dollars.
Yet another example of Zersetzung, the term for the evil tactics employed by the East German, Stasi police against people who were targeted for government harassment.
The ads I hear regularly focus on non-filers or people who failed to pay employment taxes – neither of which match your hypothesis.
Do you have a source for your assertion that small business people are Conservative (whatever that means these days) beyond your own personal experience?
The tax code is mind-boggling huge, subject to constant changes, and not very well understood by the typical IRS agent or by small business owners who are required to pay quarterly taxes. By the time several exchanges of letters/phone calls have taken place, which can go on for months and even years, ‘failure to file’ or ‘non-filer’ status is easily reached, and precisely matches my hypothesis.
So, think about 1) small business owners with employees, and 2) people who, according to the IRS, failed to file the proper forms and/or pay the proper amount of taxes, and 3) being challenged by the IRS for various and nefarious ‘failure to file’ and “under-payment’ issues, then tack on penalty and interest charges, and the assessment very quickly soars into 5 and 6 figure amounts.
For the typical small business owner dealing with the IRS is a nightmare scenario. Hence, there is a critical need for true experts in the tax code. If people were not calling in, the ads would go away.