Hit & Run : Reason.com: Give the president credit, though. He's diverted attention from his overall increase in spending and gigantic increases in deficits by driving critics crazy with proposed cuts to programs and agencies they love, such as the EPA, the Small Business Administration, food stamps (SNAP), and, of course, the National Endowments for the Arts (NEA) and the Humanities (NEH).
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I completely disagree with the argument of this article. Yes, Trump's budget plan is an absolute mess, but cutting federal funding for the arts is not the solution. In terms of making a budget less debt-inducing, the government has two options: cut funding or raise taxes. I'll address the second one first. Almost every modern politician runs on the platform of cutting taxes. Almost every politician fails to keep that campaign promise. If the government does not collect taxes, the government can't run. The huge tax reform that was just pushed through Congress cut taxes in all the wrong places (large corporations, the upper and upper middle class). It didn't alleviate any of this nation's problems with our tax code. If we were to increase funding and fund every program that every politician wanted to fund, we'd have to increase the percentage that the upper class and large corporations are taxed and increase the amount of tax brackets to match the steep gradation of our population's income scale. The second option is to cut funding from "unnecessary" programs. The biggest issue with cutting funding is finding the "unnecessary" programs. Every government program was created with a specific purpose in mind, and our government is young enough that most of our government's programs are still relevant to the needs of the nation. (If I were on the House Budget Committee, I would lean towards increasing taxes.) If we had to cut programs, cutting our government's arts programs would absolutely NOT make little impact. Most of the National Endowment for the Arts' grants go to individuals. To cut that program would mean hurting small artists and individuals with little to no popular power. Sure, people spend $2900 on entertainment a year, but little to none of that money is going to the same place as the money that the U.S. government gives out through federal arts programs.
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