At the bottom of U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt's news release are the words: "This release was sent by the office of U.S. Senator Roy Blunt (Mo.), and therefore paid for by taxpayer dollars."
Blunt, R-Springfield, wants government ads in other forms - including print, radio, television, video, Internet and social media - to carry a similar message.
So does state Rep. Paul Curtman, R-Union.
"We're both working on a similar issue," Curtman told reporters at a Capitol news conference Tuesday, as he promoted his Taxpayer Transparency Act of 2015. "It would require any department that puts out any type of advertising through any medium (to) also disclose that that
particular advertisement is being paid for by taxpayer dollars.
"Right now, that's not a requirement - but it's something that the people expect."
No Missouri House hearing has been scheduled, yet, on Curtman's bill.
In Congress, Blunt is sponsoring a federal Taxpayer Transparency Act, which passed the House last year, but never was debated in the Senate.
"There's so much disclosure on so many other kinds of communication now," Blunt told reporters at the Capitol news conference, "that what would be wrong with the government just saying, clearly, who's paying for this?"
Blunt thinks the public already knows when the government is paying for the production of an ad for things like military recruiting, the federal health care law or a state lottery.
"I think the health care ads were one of the things that, probably, got the U.S. House and Senate engaged last year," Blunt said. "There was a lot of money spent encouraging people to sign up for health care - which may be a laudatory and fine thing to do.
"But there's nothing wrong with telling people that their tax dollars are being used to to pay for this ad, to tell you what you should do for your own benefit."
Blunt acknowledged many in Congress have not been asking federal agencies about the costs of their advertising efforts but, as the new chairman of a U.S. Senate appropriations subcommittee, he intends to ask the question more often of officials from the federal departments of Labor, Education and Health and Human Services.
"I think the interest here is just in knowing how money is being spent," Blunt said. "There are a lot of promises the government makes about how things are going to cost less, that people are going to sign up, this is such a good deal that people aren't going to be able to resist it.
"If all those things are true, it's also fine to disclose the amount of money that you're spending to encourage people to take advantage of any of these programs."
Curtman, who chairs the Missouri House Committee on Government Efficiency, said he wants to know which "of the several hundred videos that have been uploaded" to YouTube "by our various (state) departments are being paid for by taxpayer money."
He said Missourians tell him they just want "transparency and accountability" from their government - and many people responding to a Facebook post about his proposal thought the sponsorship requirement already was part of state law.
Curtman said passage of the state and federal proposals "would help the government prioritize the kind of messages that we're sending out and, secondly, I think that when they have to disclose that information, it will also help lend itself to our government being much more careful with how we're spending the taxpayers' money and, also, making sure that the money is not being spent in a self-serving way that benefits the government more than the public."