It’s time to defund the National Endowment for the Humanities. They have a right to debauch history and denigrate our country, and even poison the minds of our youth, but they have no right to taxpayer dollars with which to do so.
43 thoughts on “It’s Not Just NPR”
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It’s time to defund them all. It’s a target rich environment.
How about those taxpayer funded institutions of ‘higher learning’? No man should be forced to pay for the instruction of ideas he is opposed to.
Wouldn’t want people looking at all of the fact and opinion out there and then making up their own minds. Much easier to weed out the bad stuff in advance!
Thanks for the unintentional irony, Ethan.
Ok, Titus, you get to clean up my keyboard. 🙂
But just to contrarian, why don’t we try the suggestions offered by Professor Blake, first?
Why not strip Tea Party candidates of any federal campaign financing, they’ve said some pretty bad stuff about the government. Obama’s our sitting president, couldn’t it be argued that claiming he’s a Secret Muslim With Nefarious Totalitarian Aims is denigrating to our country?
Look: I don’t necessarily agree with anything said at that dinner. But this “remove their funding, they said things that look unAmerican to me!” craze is ridiculous. The NEH does a lot of good, as does NPR. All of the examples being thrown around are of individuals who said things they maybe shouldn’t have…hardly evidence of a nefarious liberal agenda being perpetrated by the organizations these individuals belong to.
And just out of curiosity, how many kids have you met that believe everything they hear at NEH dinners? And does that question sufficiently highlight the absurdity of stating that anything said at an NEH dinner might reach the youth at all…let alone poison their minds?
Amend my previous statement, I thought it was some sort of dinner, not a function for college professors.
But either way…professors don’t regurgitate everything they hear. Blake’s offense at what was said is evidence enough of that.
I don’t necessarily agree with anything said at that dinner. But this “remove their funding, they said things that look unAmerican to me!” craze is ridiculous.
What’s crazy about it? It’s not scholarship, it’s not art, it’s a blatant attempt at indoctrination into an obvious and bizarre anti-US viewpoint. Let them do it on their own dime. The NEA should be defunded anyway just because it’s not a task that government should be involved in.
I think the NEH has noble aims, and does a lot to promote independent scholarship in this country. Whether or not they could do the same without federal funding, I can’t say.
You’re right though, most of what’s highlighted in the linked article is insanely biased…when there were facts they were cherry-picked or exaggerated. But, this was a room full of history buffs. I can’t imagine what was said went unchallenged…it was just a series of viewpoints on the war, some more valid than others. Taking the views of a few speakers as the views of the NEH itself would be crazy.
A friend of mine said this (It isn’t terribly civil, but it makes my point better than I managed to):
“Lemme get this straight: Juan Williams is a patriot (and, conversely, NPR is a liberal cesspool) because Juan said something controversial on Fox News, and NPR ‘silenced’ him. Hence, NPR should be defunded.
However, the professors at this debate are EVIL LIBERAL COMMIENAZIS because they said something controversial; they should be ‘silenced’ by defunding NEH. BUH!?”
Ethan’s friend is right — cut all federal funding of Fox News, too.
Think you missed the point there.
Thanks for the additional unintentional irony, Ethan.
Why not strip Tea Party candidates of any federal campaign financing, they’ve said some pretty bad stuff about the government. Obama’s our sitting president, couldn’t it be argued that claiming he’s a Secret Muslim With Nefarious Totalitarian Aims is denigrating to our country?
First, I oppose using tax dollars to fund any political candidate for any office, tea party or not. Second, how much federal funding are any tea party candidates receiving? Third, defaming Obama is not defaming our country, just the man. Given his actions, it isn’t completely unreasonable or unrealistic to say that he does have socialist aims for the country.
Finally, our country is broke. We’re spending over a trillion dollars a year more than we’re collecting in tax revenues and our national debt is over $13 trillion dollars. There are a lot of luxuries that we can no longer afford and NEH, NEA, PBS/NPR and a host of others are on the list.
Let me just make this clear: I’m not particularly bothered if NPR loses the 2% of funding it gets from the federal government. I’m just pointing out the obvious hypocrisy in Rand’s reasons for supporting ending funding for NPR and the NEH. Defund them both for all I care, but…let’s do it with some coherent justification.
I have an idea… let’s just be completely fair, here, and cut all federal funding for any activity that is not explicitly covered in the Constitution or the Amendments thereof.
Let the states fund this stuff, if they so choose.
Just cut the Defense Department’s R&D budget to rational levels and cut out the fat in the management of our social safety nets and I think you’d have balanced the budget right there. No need to discard two and a half centuries of legal precedent, etc.
“the fat in the management of our social safety nets”
The “fat” is that there is management in our social safety nets. If Social Security was just a stupid savings account filled with your own savings mandated by government, the entire overhead would be roughly the equivalent to that of a “Free Checking” account.
For the others: Ebay. Shame Jobs, Bezos, Allen, Gates et al. into stepping forward perhaps instead of stupid big-assed yacht pissing contests.
Ethan,
Why not strip Tea Party candidates of any federal campaign financing
You have some very odd notions of where campaign financing comes from – and they’re wrong.
I think the NEH has noble aims, and does a lot to promote independent scholarship in this country.
I don’t think the NEH has noble aims. I think it was, from its inception, a conscious creation of the Left intended to be a perpetual piggy bank for left-leaning activities that would otherwise have had to be funded by leftists out of their own pockets.
And any scholarship funded by the government is pretty much by definition not independent. When you take the King’s shilling, you do the King’s bidding. Real independent scholarship is stuff like Clayton Cramer taking down that lying sack of shit Michael Bellesilles on his own dime in his spare time.
The NEH does a lot of good, as does NPR.
No, they don’t. “Things I like” is not canonically equivalent to “good.”
Just cut the Defense Department’s R&D budget to rational levels and cut out the fat in the management of our social safety nets and I think you’d have balanced the budget right there.
You obviously have no idea of how big the deficit is or how relatively puny the DOD R&D budget, or even the entire personnel budget of the Social Security Administration, is. Hint: not all numbers greater than three are identically “many.”
I think you’d have balanced the budget right there. No need to discard two and a half centuries of legal precedent, etc.
Well, no, you wouldn’t. Not even close. And what’s two-and-a-half cnturies got to do with anything? NPR and the rest of the public broadcasting bestiary have only been around since the late 1960’s.
I’m not particularly bothered if NPR loses the 2% of funding it gets from the federal government.
It gets ca. 2% directly from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It gets close to half from affiliate NPR stations which get the majority of their funds from CPB. In other contexts this is known as money laundering.
Just cut the Defense Department’s…blah blah blah
Good Lord, do you lefties have a book that you turn to for your talking points? When there is any talk of cutting federal spending you automatically go to one of the few constitutionally mandated functions of federal government and want to cut it!
Heaven forbid we should cut out money going to lefty propaganda houses like NPR and NEH, let’s cut DEFENSE instead!
Ethan,
Just so you know, Titus is here all week. If you give him the opportunity, he has more where those came from. The rest of us have plenty of popcorn.
Is Jim on vacation? The replacement trolls are a step down.
You can cut NPR, NEH funding whatever. It is an infinitesimal portion of the federal budget. It won’t balance anything. To balance things you need to reduce the major items in the budget and/or increase state income. Defense, Social Security, state payrolls, things like that are major spenders.
The US needs to decide if it wants to be a global hegemony. Including paying off all the financial costs associated with the title, such as fighting wars on the other side of the world, far away from the reach of the US Navy, or restrict itself to a more coastal or regional intervention policy. Can you sustain an increasingly more expensive military at a time US industrial infrastructure keeps shrinking? Nations without strong industrial capacity cannot win large modern wars.
Here in Europe we have our own problems. Our industrial capacity is also much decreased, although our auto industry has not suffered as much as that of the US thanks to protectionism. Germany has an insane energy policy of importing Russian natural gas and using wind power to generate electricity. Thankfully the French have all those nuclear reactors across the border. The US had a great deal of luck in that your northern neighbors in Canada successfully pursued tar sands to oil processes, while the US canned its own shale oil R&D effort to pursue… corn ethanol.
US and European businessmen might think it is good for business to shut down every manufacture since they get a higher profit by outsourcing to Asia. In the long term what will happen is that Western economies will get increasingly poorer as a result. Unemployed people and burger flippers cannot buy expensive products. At least we should still have burgers. Both economic regions are self-sufficient in food production.
I’m not a leftist, and I’m not a troll. (Although I do jokingly refer to myself as a Radical Postmodern Neo-Marxist Smartass thanks to some commenter or another from this blog. I still laugh about that one.) But anyway: Defense is 20% of government spending. Funding for NPR is less than a drop in the ocean. Not rocket science.
Let’s spend what’s necessary to keep our military the finest in the world…but do we really need to keep spending billions developing bizarre nonlethal weapons and amphibious vehicles that get scrapped before they actually go into production? R&D is a black hole for taxpayer dollars. It could be it’s a talking point in some circles because it’s actually something worth talking about. Unfortunately, whenever we get people in power serious about cutting the military budget they cut it in all the wrong places…I’m from a military family and I know. They don’t stop their pie-in-the-sky bizarre projects, they close bases and cut pay for the people on the ground.
Ethan is not a leftist, nor is he a troll or a witch. He is you. Ethan is for change — change of discussion topic, that is. If elected, Ethan would balance the budget by cutting-off funds to crazy teabagger candidates, fight wastefraudandabuse in social services and cut funding for those bizarre nonlethal amphibious UFOs.
So this election day, remember to vote YES for Ethan and NO to scary UFOs.
Ethan’s still mad that he lost his job as bag boy in the commissary when Clinton closed the military base. That cashier was really hot but she moved to Saskatchewan with her boyfriend and he never saw her again.
I read the entire article twice. If only all teachers had the integrity of Dr. Blake.
Defense is 20% of government spending.
Moving the goalposts, there, Ethan. The whole defense budget and the defense R&D budget are not the same thing. R&D is only about 12% of that 20% – 2.4% of the total federal budget is what that nets out to. Paychecks for the troops gobble up twice as much money as the entire R&D budget. Pensions and medical care for veterans costs roughly as much as current military payroll. Ditto for purchases of new equipment. Operations and maintenance costs twice as much again. This includes purchases of of fuel, ammo, food, building materials and transport services to fight on two major and several minor war fronts plus running all of those military bases, both foreign and domestic.
The reason military budget cuts hit bases and payroll is because that’s where the real money is.
R&D is both essential and comparatively trivial as a line item. I should also point out that R&D is, by its nature, going to involve some “waste.” The problem is, until you actually do the R&D, you can’t always tell what’s going to work and what isn’t.
Sorry, E, but that’s how it is.
Just read the article. Very “impressive” (for certain values of impressed).
Has the left finally gotten tired of spitting on Vietnam vets, and decided that there aren’t enough Greatests left to make an issue out of this?
Chalk this one up as another sterling example of why the federal budget needs to stick to precisely what its enumerated powers are per the US Constitution, and leave everything – and I do mean everything – else to the States and citizens.
We’re big boys and girls. We can take care of our own, if there’s anything left in the cupboard to do it with.
It’s tough to envision a trillion of anything. The enormity becomes somewhat clearer if one contemplates the fact that a trillion seconds equals 31,688 years. $13 trillion: spend a dollar a second for 411,944 years.
(frowning at Titus for reviving an irrelevant issue, and at Andrea for insensitivity to the potentially lovelorn)
Danae: The problem is that time scales on all manner of strange scales (3600 seconds to the hour, for example, or 24 of those to a day). A better usage, so far as I’ve seen, is to relate the budgets to computer storage. Everyone recognizes that a 5 megapixel photo looks like crud and, in storage terms, is chump change. Sadly, so too is 5 megabucks little more than a rounding error in any State or Federal budget. Now imagine how many of those 5 megapixel images it takes to fill a 1-terabyte hard drive. And then weep when you remember that the deficit currently sits at somewhere north of 4 terabucks – 4 entire terabyte drives filled with the political equivalent of internet pr0n, for all the good it’s done us.
You can cut NPR, NEH funding whatever. It is an infinitesimal portion of the federal budget. It won’t balance anything.
If I had proposed it as a solution to the deficit problem, you might have a point. Sadly for you, I did not.
Precisely. Cut the NPR and NEH because they are poster children of things that should NOT be a function of the federal government. Then start whacking away at the other 20,000 items on the list.
Ah, one of those “Canadian girlfriends.” Gotcha.
Out of curiosity, does anyone have a real reason why the NEA should continue to be funded?
If you believe, like Al does, that we should, “Shame Jobs, Bezos, Allen, Gates et al. into stepping forward perhaps instead of stupid big-assed yacht pissing contests.”
…you might be a Marxist.
Defunding these programs was never about addressing the deficit. They shouldn’t be funded on moral grounds.
But now that they’ve brought up the deficit, it forces me to wonder if these people can live within their means and balance their own budgets. It appears every little unnecessary thing they like “wouldn’t make a difference” compared to the whole of their spending.
The subject of their angst would invariably go to the single largest expenditure (at 30% of total); the mortgage/rental payment that puts a roof over their head.
If only they could shrink that damn mortgage payment (while still keeping the house)! They could get out of debt!
Is Jim on vacation? The replacement trolls are a step down.
I dunno. I find Ethan quite funny. It is like watching these clips of the people at the “Rally to Restore Authority”.
Obama = Keynsian?
and Reason’s interviews at the same event.
Unintentional (and unintelligible) hillarity. I don’t think its possible to make them look any more foolish than they do all by themselves.
“(frowning at Titus for reviving an irrelevant issue, and at Andrea for insensitivity to the potentially lovelorn)”
Don’t get me wrong! I feel for Ethan, I really do. But he’s gotta let go. Move on, Ethan! You can do it. There’s a lot of available ladies out there who will need comforting after today. Some of them even shave their legs.
What?
How about defunding NASA while we are at it? There is no Constitutional requirement to explore space. Let Commercial Crew become truly commercial, using private money. And if folks want to look for life on Mars they could just raise private funds like SETI has.
The NIH and NSF could also be defunded. Any research of military value could be just funded by the DoD. As for the rest, that is what the Internet is good at, raising money for charities.
NOAA could also be defunded. Predicting weather is not in the constitution. And this way the weather bureau won’t be in competition with the weather channel.
Just roll NASA and NOAA into the military and we can do wghat you want Tom.
The subject of their angst would invariably go to the single largest expenditure (at 30% of total); the mortgage/rental payment that puts a roof over their head.
Actually that is a pretty good place to cut expenses. Get a smaller house, or move elsewhere. Even better look at total expenditures of transportation and housing and try to minimize that. In the XIXth century it was common for people to live in one room dwellings. With larger families to boot. I have little sympathy for people who bought McMansions on credit, then filled their mansion with furniture, electronics, and whatever on easy to get credit at usurious rates. Oh and a brand spanking new car or two. One does not need to be a genius to figure out it is near impossible to service a debt like that for long. We had people get into debts which would take longer to pay than the life time of the item being purchased.
After 20 years your house will likely need major maintenance work. After 8 years your car will likely need major overhauling. Do you still want to get into a 40 year credit for that house?
M Puckett,
[[[Just roll NASA and NOAA into the military and we can do wghat you want Tom.]]]
The military already has a space program to designed serve their needs. They don’t need NASA, the ISS or Commercial Crew. Nor is there any military justification to search for life on Mars since its clearly not capable of attacking Earth, Marvin the Martian aside 🙂
And the different branches of the military already have their own weather forecast services designed for their needs. Of course they would transfer back the DMSP they transferred to NOAA in the 1970’s and perhaps some of the existing satellites and NOAA montioring assets. But the bulk of NOAA, including their oceanographic branch would not be needed.
As a side note, this would put an end to federal funding for research on the climate change “myth”, which should make the Tea Party happy.