I’d buy this if the resulting whole budget actually reduced anything rather than redirecting the savings to the military and the wall and then some. “Hey sonny, the economy’s fucked, you never got your field trips to the symphony, but we blew up a lotta cool stuff back then!”
:dubious: Except that it demonstrably doesn’t “ensure no program will ever be cut”. Because programs often are cut.
If you actually look at actual federal budgets, programs get cut all the time. Including by presidents and Congresscritters who support maintaining some federal funding for the arts.
In the past several years, budgets have been passed that cut spending for the arts, the military, education, public health, law enforcement, and a variety of other things. This is one major reason why the federal budget deficit (i.e., the excess of annual spending over annual revenue) decreased so sharply under Obama.
This sort of attempt to pump up hysteria for indiscriminate budget-cutting by hyperbolically claiming that no programs are ever getting cut, and so we must start slashing at random in order to break through our fatal paralysis of inability to cut spending on anything ever, is not a rational approach to the genuine fiscal problems we face.
Yes, $150 million is not a big deal. It’s less than half a dollar per citizen. And we’ve already done the studies that show that arts are useful in creating a more intelligent citizenry. It’s a small cost that removing doesn’t help anyone, but that having it can help people.
There is no way in hell any Republican gives a shit about having $0.50 taken from them. So bringing up the dumb idea that taxes are theft is not an issue.
The problem is simply that Republicans are married to a certain image. Anything that looks wasteful must be eliminated, regardless of its actual value vs. cost. Even a marginal value makes funding the arts a good idea. Even if that value were just slightly higher morale.
Remember, they elected Trump, who was literally all image.
Mine is a fairly strict constructionist view of the proper role of the federal government (which I recognize has largely fallen out of popularity today). At a high level, Article 1 Section 8 outlines the powers granted to Congress:
Nothing in there appears to me to justify funding the NEA. I realize that some people argue for an expansive view of “general welfare” which would essentially give Congress a blank check to do whatever they want, so long as it was considered good for the “general welfare”, but that’s a viewpoint that I think is at odds with the rest of the document and do not agree with.
Mostly because it’s utterly intellectually bankrupt and indefensible.
shrug with a couple additional Justices like Gorsuch on the SCOTUS, I suspect things will trend more that direction again.
I appreciate your commitment to identifying dumb ideas.
Yes, when you increase the concentration of morons in positions of power or influence then more moronic things happen. Doesn’t make them any less moronic.
Thank you, Kimstu. To your list, let me add just one more example:
- Alice Walker came from an extremely impoverished family, but went on to fame with her award-winning novel The Color Purple. The tiny NEA grant she received early as a struggling writer may have helped.
It probably cost several million dollars to destroy one Syrian hangar yesterday. For those who think the latter is money better spent, I’d ask them to go through Kimstu’s list and identify the 100 programs they’d eliminate to pay for that one destroyed hangar.
Cutting the NEA budget to afford more bombs is as American as apple pie. But Trump isn’t just pruning the NEA budget; he’s slashing it to zero — the NEA will cease to exist. Trump/Bannon/Pence aren’t the first right-wingers to want to abolish NEA — the list of NEA haters reads like a Who’s Who list of the most hateful right-wingers — but he will succeed. It’s a sad day in America.
I apologize for first using the objectionable term in the thread. I regret that Ditka was warned for, in effect, quoting me, I ask that the Warning be rescinded. I think his use, like mine, was in playful jest.
FWIW, at this point I’m happy to wear the objectionable term as a source of pride! “Right-winger,” OTOH, is intended as a nasty pejorative when I use it — perhaps I should be warned when I use that term.
Answering another poster, musical-instrument playing in high school classes instills an appreciation for arts, and builds discipline and confidence. Does this qualify as “pedagogic purpose”? Such music curricula will certainly add to a school’s cost, despite that students are generally expected to buy their own instruments.
One “esoteric” NSF project I had in mind was LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) which has already cost the taxpayer over $1 billion according to one Googled source. This almost dwarfs NEA funding. (Here’s a 9-minute video describing the first detection of gravity waves. It’s fun to watch, comparing the staggering scale of the detected event with the difficulty of measuring its feeble effect after 1.3 billion years and as many light-years.)
I suspect the Board’s physicists will agree that we cannot hope to weaponize gravity waves any time soon. LIGO will now try to collect other data on black holes but I’m not sure how useful the new information will be if the Klingons (or Syria? North Korea?) hurls a black hole at us. The technologies achieved building LIGO may have value, but that could have been done in isolation, without trying to detect gravity waves.)
To be clear: I do support the government funding of such science projects. However I find the right-wing opposition to NEA, but acceptance of LIGO, to be wrong-headed and hypocritical. In advancing the goal of world peace, I expect the funding of NEA — with the possibility of advancing, via art, globally shared humanitarian values — to be much more effective dollar-for-dollar than LIGO.
Even if I were sanguine with the general idea of federal funding of art, a problem I have with the NEA is that the bulk of their support seems to be directed at certain types of art, expressions that are palatable to the panels. These panels tend to ignore more traditional forms of art – what was the last NEA grant of significance that was awarded to an oil painter of land- or seascapes, in the early Winslow Homer style? These appear to be dismissed as old school now. In fact, how about watercolors, a la later Winslow Homer? When was the last watercolorist award from NEA, period?
Why should the government hold the spending whip hand to steer funded art away from watercolors?
I’m not a closet watercolorist. (Although in full disclosure, I do think “Blackboard” is a stunning example of the flexibility of the medium, perhaps the best ever of its time, and shows a use of lighting that Vermeer himself would have admired). I’m speaking more generally: NEA funding introduces a false market signal; it rewards art of a certain favored type. I don’t like that outcome.
And when’s the last time they funded a finger painting, hand turkey or modeling clay snowman? The bias couldn’t be any plainer if they spelled it out with stick-on letters on a piece of posterboard and sprinkled it with Elmer’s glue and metallic glitter.
I tend to get suspicious when I see phrases like “seems to be directed at certain types of art, expressions that are palatable to the panels”. Cite that NEA funding behaves in such a way? Or are you letting your assumptions and biases influence you?
The warning for this post is rescinded. HD was semi-quoting earlier usage of the term - which was not reported - and we decided to forgo sanctions here.
I will say, however, that the use of -tard and variants is definitely not best practice and can result in warnings and other sanctions in future due to context. It would be best if it’s a usage retired from Great Debates and Elections moving forward.
The fuck you talking about? I just posted a list of NEA music grants that included heaps of awards to orchestras etc. for classical music performance and training: can you get more “traditional forms of art” than that?
If you do a similar search on recent NEA grants in the “Visual Arts” category you come up with a boatload of grants for traditional forms of art including sculpture, printmaking, etc.
Are there oil painters of land- or seascapes in the early Winslow Homer style applying for NEA grants? The NEA doesn’t just show up in a randomly selected artist’s studio to hand out unexpected prizes like Cinderella’s fairy godmother, you know.
There are tons of musicians practicing “traditional forms” of music such as Classical and Baroque, and they get tons of NEA grants. If you can point us to a painter in “traditional forms” such as Homer-style oils who is being unfairly rejected for the NEA grants that he/she is seeking, then you might have some kind of valid criticism. But at present you just seem to be sulking that the NEA isn’t magically making painters practice your preferred style of art which is currently unfashionable among painters themselves.
Cite, please, for the assertion that NEA is awarding funding to any allegedly “favored” form of art disproportionately to the degree to which NEA funding is actually sought by artists?
You’re not done rescinding yet, Jonathan.
Pretty sure Karen Finley used fingers.
I’m not authorized to speak for Bricker, but I suspect that detailing or demonstrating any particular bias is completely irrelevant to his main argument.
The NEA will fund some applicants and deny others. Whatever choices it makes reflect some “bias” by definition. If it seems to prefer “traditional” art we could complain it’s not more experimental. And vice versa. Conservatives prefer the magical powers of the Free Market to operate. If, for example, Black-oriented art is not thriving because Blacks lack money to purchase it, that’s the wondrous Free Market in action! Blacks need to first acquire wealth so they can fund their own art. The NEA, OTOH, much as Soviet-era central planners did, forces museums to house undesired art, or at least, art undesired by the rich.
+1