From CBS News , 02.26.2003......

A Federal Communications Commission memo says telemarketers attempt 104 million calls a day to U.S. businesses and consumers. Sales revenue rose from about $435 billion in 1990 to around $660 billion in 2001.

Telemarketing advocates fear Do Not Call lists could devastate those revenues and the jobs that depend on them.

An article in the February issue of Customer Interaction Solutions, a telemarketing industry magazine, said FTC restrictions could eliminate three million jobs.

The article estimated that the top 75 U.S. telemarketing firms paid for 13.2 billion minutes of long-distance phone service last year. At 4 cents a minute, that amounts to $528 million in telecommunications revenue.

So, if I understood that right, one person in three of every man, woman and child in the United States of America, gets, on average, one call per day from a telemarketer, and if we were to try to reduce that number of telemarketing calls, both the people who work as telemarketers and the phone companies who sell the phone connect time would suffer.

Hmmmmm.... Seems to say that the solution is to hire more telemarketers, make more telemarketing calls, and for folks like you and me to be interrupted more at inconvenient and annoying times.

I guess they've reached the right dosage of Stupid Pills per day, don't you think?