Title: Ten Good Reasons to Eliminate Funding for the National Endowment for the Arts | The Heritage Foundation
Headings: Ten Good Reasons to Eliminate Funding for the National Endowment for the Arts
Ten Good Reasons to Eliminate Funding for the National Endowment for the Arts
Laurence Jarvik
Authors
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Content: His survey shows that many arts venues can easily replace NEA funding, and suggests a number of alternative strategies for those who might find the disappearance of the federal agency problematic. 10
Reason #2: The NEA Is Welfare for Cultural Elitists
Despite Endowment claims that federal funding permits underpriviledged individuals to gain access to the arts, NEA grants offer little more than a subsidy to the well-to-do. One-fifth of direct NEA grants go to multimillion-dollar arts organizations. 11 Harvard University Political Scientist Edward C. Banfield has noted that the "art public is now, as it has always been, overwhelmingly middle and upper middle class and above average in income-relatively prosperous people who would probably enjoy art about as much in the absence of subsidies." 12 The poor and the middle class, thus, benefit less from public art subsidies than does the museum- and orchestra-going upper-middle class. Sawers argues that "those who finance the subsidies through taxes are likely to be different from and poorer than those who benefit from the subsidies." 13 In fact, the $99.5 million that funds the NEA also represents the entire annual tax burden for over 436,000 working-class American families. 14
As part of the Endowment's effort to dispel its elitist image, Chairman Jane Alexander has led a nationwide campaign painting the NEA as a social welfare program that can help underprivileged youth to fight violence and drugs. In congressional testimony, she has trumpeted her "American Canvas" initiative "to gain a better understanding of how the arts can transform communities."