During an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union yesterday, former Secretary of State Colin Powell dismissed congressional Republicans’ proposal to cut the deficit by defunding public broadcasting.
Congress won’t be able to balance the budget without going after the “real money” that’s spent on entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, Powell told host Candy Crowley.
“You can’t fix the deficit or the national debt by killing NPR or National Endowment for the Humanities or the Arts. Nice political chatter, but that doesn’t do it. And I’m very put off when people just say let’s go back and freeze to the level two years ago…..That usually is a very inefficient way of doing it. Tell me what you’re going to cut, and nobody up there yet is being very, very candid about what they are going to cut to fix this problem.”
Links: Huffington Post, CNN video and transcript.
Duh. Obviously the deficit is enormous in comparison to the appropriation for NPR. MANY cuts of unnecessary expenses are needed to make a dent in the budget deficit and among those unnecessary expenses is CPB. At current Gov’t funding, just a two year CPB cut will save the taxpayers $1 Billion in unnecessary expenses imagine a 5 or 10 year savings. Eliminating the CPB appropriation does not mean to end NPR or PBS, if the public wants these institutions to continue then they will fund NPR and PBS through individual donations and corporate gifts. If NPR is handing out $100,000. bonuses then they will be able to survive without federal funding.