BUDGET: The Grey Poupon of federal subsidies

San Francisco Chronicle ^ | 3/13/11 | Debra J. Saunders

[SmithL]

Forget the recent scandals involving National Public Radio. Go back to the days before NPR chief exec Vivian Schiller resigned, before a conservative prankster videotaped NPR fundraisers disparaging Tea Party participants as "seriously racist, racist people" - to even before NPR fired senior news analyst Juan Williams after he said on Fox News TV that he got "nervous" flying with passengers in Muslim garb.

Banish from your mind the recent controversies involving NPR's perceived or (I believe) real liberal bias. Even then, fiscal conservatives in Congress had called for cuts in federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., introduced a bill to end taxpayer subsidies to the CPB - $420 million last year - back in June to reduce the federal debt. "If we can't eliminate or at least seriously reduce the funding for a nonessential government program that has outlived its original purpose," Lamborn told me Thursday, "then I fear that we're not serious about our future.

It's true that he is a conservative and that NPR has done things that didn't sit right with him, Lamborn continued. But, he said, his prime motivator was "the spending."

The chairs of the bipartisan fiscal commission named by President Obama - Republican Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles - targeted CPB, which provides 10 to 15 percent of funding that goes to local public broadcasting TV and radio stations, for elimination. They made no charge of bias, just the fact that CPB's funding level is "the highest it has ever been" and that its elimination should save taxpayers just under $500 million in 2015.

NPR boosters scoff at this measly sum. This year's budget will be $3.8 trillion, they argue; CPB is a drop in the bucket....

[dhs12345]

Definitely a lot of excess in the budget.

How about NEA, next. If children are really starving in the streets (according to the liberals), why not use the NEA money to feed those hungry little children?

[goodnesswins]

First the Dept of ED....that will help to starve the NEA

[Quiller]

What, cut CPB?

So millions of adults will actually have to interact with their preschool children, instead of plopping them in front of Sesame Street?

The trend that would eventually be traced back to the demise of public television would be early school-age children being completely unable to count or read.