For years we have had to listen to the whining of the conservatives and their media toadies about the tax money that goes to support NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It seems that they are all bent out of shape because their tax dollars are going to support, what they see as a liberal entity when Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck have to depend on Murdock’s millions.
The funny thing is, I agree with them. Why should their hard earned tax bucks go to support programming that doesn’t include even one steel cage match? It’s outrageous and I understand the right wing’s anger because its been happening to me and people like me for years. We felt the same way when Bush/Cheney started two unprovoked wars; dumping billions of our tax dollars into countries we care nothing about, in some vague mission to find weapons of mass destruction and oil. Well, we had about the same luck finding each so now a lot of my tax dollars have gone to a cause, (enriching the industrial military complex and the oil companies) for which I have no empathy.
So I’ve worked out a deal. The military manufacturers and the oil companies will give back all the money they made on Cheney’s tax subsidies, thereby making a severe dent in the deficit and the people who got deductions for giving charitable donations to NPR will send that money back to the IRS, making no dent in the deficit and everyone will be happy. No? Seems fair to me.
The truth be told, I have never been in favor of government support of the arts. This despite the fact, that I have made my living in various forms of art and entertainment for over fifty years. The reason is simple. I believe that if you accept money you also accept a responsibility to adhere to the wishes of the donor. This is especially true when we speak of tax dollars. I‘ll give you an example. A few years back, NPR aired a series called Armistead Maupin’s: Tales of the City. It was pretty terrific, but a number of religious groups were outraged (there’s that word again) over a number of instances of nudity and some homosexuality in the show. I understand religious groups getting teed off about nudity and gay life, they rarely have anything better to do, but it all could have been avoided if NPR hadn’t had any tax support. Not that the religious groups wouldn’t have complained, just as they do now, about any number of cable shows, just that no one would have listened to them, just as they don’t now.
Brian Lowry, writing in Variety, has proposed a rather fanciful but fair solution to the problem of tax supported public radio and TV. It runs, rather on the same tracks, as a solution I proposed in these pages a few months back for election finance reform. Mr. Lowry points out that the government only gives about $450 million a year to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. This is the number that the Republican’s think is breaking the bank. This is the little brick on top of the pile that makes the whole economy collapse. If CPB gives this money back to the IRS, the nation will be saved. To give you a rough example of how that figure stacks
up to everything else out there, the government was going to spend $29 billion on 65, F-35 jets before Obama cancelled the contract. That comes out to slightly over $446 million per jet. So if we cancel all funding for CPB we could have bought one more jet and have four grand left over for our Republican congressmen to spend on male prostitutes.
But let’s follow Mr. Lowry’s concept, because it’s a good one. He thinks that the shortfall to public broadcasting, occasioned by a government cut-off of funding should come from three areas:
First should be commercial TV which could fulfill its legally required commitments to community-service broadcasting by paying for PBS to air the children’s and public service shows that now appear on commercial channels. This would free the networks from their need to show unwatched programming and still fulfill their legal commitments. So we start with the commercial networks that sold more than $17 billion in advertising last year. Assess the networks somewhere in the neighborhood of three quarters of one percent of that and you end up with about $128 Million.
Next assess a $2 per subscriber surcharge to the cable and satellite systems. The average subscriber pays them about $1,200 a year so this is really an infinitesimal amount but with around 100 million subscribers, it will come to about $200 million.
Finally, there are 1,750 TV stations and 13,000 radio stations in this country. If each, in exchange for phasing out children’s and community service programming, had to pay an average of say, $7,500 per year, this would raise an additional $111million. Add them up and they come to $439 Million of the $450 million public broadcasting would lose in funding from the government. The rest could come from additional donations or adjusting the above percentages slightly. In any case it’s a workable solution, which means, unfortunately, that no one will buy it.