G
Guns Guns Guns
Guest
This makes sense:
"The amount of federal money given to the CPB is a rounding error of a rounding error in our gargantuan federal budget: 0.01% of $3.834 trillion, if I have my math right. In both cost savings and generalized country improvement, removing taxpayer money from NPR and PBS ranks distantly behind ending ethanol subsidies or agricultural subsidies or the Department of Agriculture altogether.
But the public broadcasting subsidy shares something in common with corporate welfare schemes everywhere, whether for Archer Daniels Midland (one of NPR's biggest sponsors, incidentally), film productions or your local professional sports venue: It forces taxpayers to fund other people's cultural preferences.
That's what Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack admitted this week in a remarkable interview with Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein. Farm subsidies, Vilsack maintained, are necessary because "There is a value system (in rural America) that's important to support. ...These are good, hardworking people who feel underappreciated."
Though it's frequently dressed up in (bogus) economics, the obscene practice of handing out tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to finance state-of-the-art professional sporting venues is at heart a cultural question, too. Some of us (raises hand) love to spend our leisure time at nice ballparks, some of our wives (hi, honey!) believe that live professional baseball is "the death of the soul." Why should she be forced to pay one dime to the Washington Nationals?
This week's brouhaha has underlined the single biggest problem with public broadcasting from the fan's point of view: namely, that with taxpayer financing, no matter how small, inevitably comes political considerations and even outright interference."
http://articles.cnn.com/2011-03-11/opinion/welch.npr.funding_1_cpb-npr-subsidies?_s=PM:OPINION
"The amount of federal money given to the CPB is a rounding error of a rounding error in our gargantuan federal budget: 0.01% of $3.834 trillion, if I have my math right. In both cost savings and generalized country improvement, removing taxpayer money from NPR and PBS ranks distantly behind ending ethanol subsidies or agricultural subsidies or the Department of Agriculture altogether.
But the public broadcasting subsidy shares something in common with corporate welfare schemes everywhere, whether for Archer Daniels Midland (one of NPR's biggest sponsors, incidentally), film productions or your local professional sports venue: It forces taxpayers to fund other people's cultural preferences.
That's what Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack admitted this week in a remarkable interview with Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein. Farm subsidies, Vilsack maintained, are necessary because "There is a value system (in rural America) that's important to support. ...These are good, hardworking people who feel underappreciated."
Though it's frequently dressed up in (bogus) economics, the obscene practice of handing out tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to finance state-of-the-art professional sporting venues is at heart a cultural question, too. Some of us (raises hand) love to spend our leisure time at nice ballparks, some of our wives (hi, honey!) believe that live professional baseball is "the death of the soul." Why should she be forced to pay one dime to the Washington Nationals?
This week's brouhaha has underlined the single biggest problem with public broadcasting from the fan's point of view: namely, that with taxpayer financing, no matter how small, inevitably comes political considerations and even outright interference."
http://articles.cnn.com/2011-03-11/opinion/welch.npr.funding_1_cpb-npr-subsidies?_s=PM:OPINION