Posted on 09/13/2004 10:47:00 AM PDT by Feiny
Chat show queen Oprah Winfrey celebrated the opening of her 19th season on US TV today by surprising each of her 276 audience members with a new car.
We’re calling this our wildest dream season, because this year on the Oprah show, no dream is too wild, no surprise too impossible to pull off,” Winfrey said.
Making sure the audience was kept in suspense, Winfrey opened the show by calling 11 audience members onto the stage. She gave each of them a car – a Pontiac G6.
She then had gift boxes distributed to the rest of the audience and said one of the boxes contained keys to a twelfth car. But when the audience members opened the boxes, each had a set of keys.
“Everybody gets a car! Everybody gets a car! Everybody gets a car!” Winfrey yelled as she jumped up and down on the stage.
The audience members screamed, cried and hugged each other – then followed Winfrey out to the car parking of her Harpo Studios in Chicago to see their Pontiacs, all decorated with giant red bows.
The cars, which retail for £15,500, were donated by Pontiac.
“A little idea grew into a big idea,” said Mary Henige of Pontiac
Winfrey said the audience members were chosen because their friends or family had written to the show about their need for a new car. One woman’s young son said she drove a car that “looks like she got into a gunfight” another couple had almost 400,000 miles on their two vehicles.
In other segments on the show, Winfrey surprised a 20-year-old girl who had spent years in foster care and homeless shelters with a four-year college scholarship, a makeover and £6,000 in clothes. And a family with eight foster children who were going to be kicked out of their house were given £72,000 to buy and repair the home.
The Oprah Winfrey Show is syndicated to 212 domestic markets and 109 countries.
Nope, the cars were donated and Oprah paid the tax bill.
>>"You have to do what you have to do, before you get to do what you want to do"<<
I think this will be printed and hung on the fridge for all to see!!!!
Thanks!
From Drudge today:
"OPRAH' SEASON DEBUT ROCKS SYNDICATION 9.8 RATING/23 SHARE, ACCORDING TO PRELIMINARY OVERNIGHTS... DEVELOPING..."
and...
"GM's Pontiac division is covering all of the costs, including the tax and licensing fees..."
Ratings ploy. 'Nuff said.
I saw a local Indianapolis station interview with 4 ladies from our locale who got cars. The 9 folks or so who were on the stage were selected based on need. I don't think the rest were. These chicks were from Noblesville (an upscale suburb) and the local tv broadcast from one of their homes certainly made it look upper middle class at a minimum.
Interesting to note that all of the audience members weren't in dire need of a new car. I feel the giveaway was a ratings ploy. I don't think it was meant to be a chairitable giveaway, more like a game show giveaway. If ir was meant to be charitable then everyone in the audience would have been screened for 'neediness'.
I don't begrudge the upscale gals from getting a car, guess they were in the right place at the right time!
Oprah called the show part of her "wildest dreams" season.
But for many of the 276 recipients of the new Pontiac cars that the talk-show queen gave away last week, there was a bit of reality to come with that dream -- they are going to have to fork over thousands of dollars in taxes.
It turns out that free car wasn't so free.
That's because while Pontiac agreed to pay for most of the local charges -- things like state sales tax and licensing fees -- the recipients have to report the cars as income once tax time comes.
By adding $28,500 to someone's income, it can push them into a higher tax bracket -- which means they will have to pay about 25 percent or more of the car's value in taxes. And for a nearly $30,000 car, that probably means, for most of the recipients, shelling out $7,125 for the "free car."
And if you live in Illinois, you can expect to tack on another 3 percent or so in state income taxes.
"It's not really a free car, it's more of a 75 percent off car," said Susan Nelson, who was one of three Wheaton College public relations staffers at the show. "Of course, that's still not such a bad deal."
Some of the winners, contacted by the Chicago Sun-Times on Tuesday, said they were thinking about the taxes as soon as the announcement came that they would be getting the new cars.
"Some of the people who knew me, my smile looked a little bit forced when I was up there [on the show]," said William Toebe, a suburban Green Bay resident who was at the taping. "That's because paying the taxes was the first thing that popped into my head."
"As I was standing up there, the responsible portion of me said, 'This is very nice, but where am I going to get the money for the taxes.'"
Toebe, who runs a farm, is already thinking of getting rid of the car, though he has yet to pick it up.
Luckily, the recipients weren't given the car on the spot so they can at least start to save now. Although Oprah seemed to have the winners choose their cars from an enormous lot filled with Pontiac G6 sedans, the cars will actually be delivered to a dealer near each winner's home.
Some recipients are going to wait a few months before actually picking up their cars so they can figure out how to pay for the taxes.
"We have to pick the car up between Oct. 1, 2004, and Feb. 28, 2005," said Nelson. "We've decided that we are going to wait until the first of the year so we can have all of 2005 and the first four months of 2006 to figure out how to pay for this."
Heather Lundeen, a physical therapist in Bismarck, N.D., said she has looked into getting a car loan to pay off the taxes.
The tax shock is not much different from the bill that comes to many game show winners. The Internal Revenue Service requires game shows -- and every other large gift giver and casino -- to report winners to the federal government. It is then the responsibility of the winner to fess up on their tax forms.
But most of the winners still think they got a pretty sweet deal.
"Whenever I get something for free, I always think 'What's the catch?'," said Tiffany Self, one of the three Wheaton College co-workers who went to the show. "It's actually a blessing. I mean how often will you get a brand new car for $7,000?"
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