Arts Funding

I will grant you that there is a strong argument for letting the Arts be funded by their own earnings.

NEA funding is at $117.480 million in fiscal year 2004. That's for all the arts ... Music, dance, theater, arts, new media, community art centers etc.

That is is 6.8% of 8 billion dollars

and yet:
From the Government Accounting Office //
Burgeoning Corruption.

" Between May 2003 and June 2004, U.S. officials shipped nearly $12 billion in cash to Iraq. As government audits later found, the cash was spent and disbursed by U.S. officials with virtually no financial controls or reliable accounting. The Administration cannot account for over $8 billion that was transferred to Iraqi ministries. This unsupervised flood of cash into Iraq became an open invitation to corruption. A senior U.S. official already has been charged with accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes and kickbacks from a U.S. contractor in exchange for steering up to $3.5 million in fraudulent contracts his way.

Government investigators have said that there are dozens of other criminal corruption cases being processed."

It is one thing to object to public funding of the arts, it is another to throw away almost 7 times that much money to "patriotic" crooks that are trying to figure how to rip off everyone in sight, most fundamentally the American taxpayers.

An interesting factoid is that the top 25% of the top income earners are sure they are a member of the top 1% that are getting 90% of the benefit from the Bush administration tax cuts. So 24% of these richest people in America are deluding themselves.

"Arts funding is really research and development. Are we going to say that anything that sells is OK? Or, like the British, are we going to spend billions on the arts? Unless you're willing to subsidize the arts, you're just handing down what's been done before." Peter Coyote, Chairman of the California Arts Council