So they are defunding CPB which funds a lot of NPR and PBS stations. Not cutting funding, ZEROING it out. WTF!?!?!? They need the 500 million to help fund increased military spending.
At the same time they are increasing military spending by 60 BILLION dollars. This is some fucked up Ronald Reagan type math.
I can’t find a link but the OMB Director said that we can’t ask struggling families to help pay for pbs but we can ask them to pay for the military. In what way is an extra 60 Billion in military spending on the largest fucking military in the world something you can ask struggling families to pay for (~$200/American) but $500 million (~2/family/American) too much of a burden to place on the American public?
Right or wrong, the thing a lot of people miss with these arguments is that it’s not between $60 Billion or $500 million.
It’s between $60 Billion & $60.5 Billion.
That $60 Billion increase is happening whether they make cuts or not. The cuts are then made to ease (or eliminate) the burden of the increase, not on their own merits.
I’m not saying it’s the right way to do it, but that’s how it works. Spending increases are generally identified before cuts–which are then sought to help swallow the pill that is the spending increase.
In other words, nobody says “Hey, if we cut the Public Broadcasting budget, we could drastically increase our military spending”. Rather, they say “We’re going to drastically increase our military spending, find some cuts we could make”.
Well, maybe. Even when it’s all one party involved, the president’s budget proposal doesn’t usually bear a huge amount of resemblance to what actually happens.
There’s always more money to spend on armaments and war. Propose the same increase to give people in Flint clean drinking water or send people to college and you’re a communist.
My question is that, if that were the case, would there still be an argument about the virtues of Public Broadcasting?
The budgeting process doesn’t change. They could give a $60 Billion increase to education or NASA or anything else, but they’ll still be looking to cut things that they view as non-essential elsewhere in the budget to make up for it.
If one of those things was, again, Public Broadcasting, would this thread still be here?
Also, while this is surely in part about cutting things to make a show of fiscal responsibility (because over-spending on the military is never a bad thing, donchaknow), it’s also an obvious strike against and an attempt to silence “liberal” “fake news”.
Hell, Ronnie’s vodoo *spared *things like public broadcasting, the arts and humanities endowments and a whole bunch of social programs, sticking only to cutting or limiting rather than eliminating. The optimistic, positive gentleman seeking a new morning for all and for the opressed to be let free would be an outcast among today’s dour get-yours-and-fuck-anyone-else, I-want-to-taste-your-tears Republicans.
It’s a good thing Trump wants to increase the military budget by so much, at the expense of so much! Remember all those military adventures we lost in recent years because our military just wasn’t big enough? Now we’re gonna win those! And, as a bonus, have more illiterate kids to use as cannon fodder!
No offense to you but, I don’t understand how CPB has any sort of partisan flavor at all.
I specifically listen to NPR and CSPAN specifically because it avoids all that partisan bullshit. I think that they are achieving balance because both liberals and conservatives call in to whine about how NPR are just a bunch of shills for the other side.
NPR has a facts based bias so they end up undermining a lot of conservative talking points but they also have reports that undermine the GMO scare the gender pay gap too.
I’d really like to hear the argument for how NPR is a liberal.
And that might require attracting commercial sponsors. That can affect the autonomy and objectivity of the broadcasts.
Silly example: Oscar then Grouch might start pimping Nestle brand cookies as being especially delicious and encouraging kids to eat more and more cookies.
The Count might start using a Texas Instruments calculator.
More importantly, NPR might stop reporting on stuff that is against the commercial interests of its sponsors
Maybe you’re missing my point. I agree with you. But Trump and conservatives do not. I think it’s not a stretch to claim that the conservative party has launched a war on the media (Trump has, in fact, said so); all media that is not a shameless conservative talking-point parroter is derided as liberal fake news, and they are “among the most dishonest human beings on Earth.”
Cutting funding to CPB is partisan because Republicans have decided that the “media” is the enemy.
This is not just about which policies a news organization supports or doesn’t, but a much deeper battle about shutting out fact- and evidence-based reporting, and by extension, about whether or not you believe America is better off with a well-informed and critically-thinking populace, or with a citizenry who are ignorant and mis-informed.
Cutting CPB funding (and the NEA, NEH, and major cuts to the NIH and research arms of other federal agencies) is a blatant attempt to shut off the flow of knowledge and “inconvenient truths” that stand in the way of the current Republican party’s delusional beliefs about the nature of the world.
I remember when Reagan was complaining about funding for the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. Someone pointed out that the US military spent much more on its bands (e.g., the Marine Corp Band and others).
This article from last year says that the military had 130 bands with 6,500 members, costing $437 million, or about three times the cost of the National Endowment for the Arts.
The vast majority of the federal budget is stuff like Social Security, Medicare and the military, which are difficult politically to cut. All of the stuff that Republicans complain about is relatively a small amount.
From a few years ago, CPB reported {PDF} that about 15% of their funding comes from the Federal appropriation … and don’t worry about them Sesame Street muppets, they got a gig whoring on HBO now …
Belt tighten is all we’re asking … when the typical family is twenty trillion in debt, maybe a pizza pie every other week is in order … but Terry Gross won’t have to take on a part time reporter job in the evenings or anything …
Understand that Public Broadcasting at first was about wholly dependent of the Eagle’s teat … but here fifty years later they’ve been able to broaden their revenue sources … one important revenue source are these various foundations that have been set up for Public Broadcasting’s support … some long time listeners/watchers will bequeath say $100,000, this returns $5,000 per year to CPB … not much per individual but all we need is 600,000 individuals to do this and that covers the $3B annual budget … and every year a few more are added so that at some time in the future CPB will be completely self-supporting with just these foundations and trusts …
God I miss Gwen Ifill … liberal biased reporting will never be as motherly again …