Defund PBS

Among the cuts which Mitt Romney has proposed should he become President is to eliminate funding for Public Television. Needless to say, there has been and will be whining about losing programs such as Sesame Street and new Ken Burns documentaries. Not there's anything wrong with, well, Ken Burns documentaries anyway, but the one thing you can be certain that the defenders of PBS will yell from the mountaintops will be the shrill cry that federal funding of Public Television is a drop in the bucket compared to overall federal spending. It will be followed closely by, how will kids learn to read?

It should be hoped that parental involvement in their kids' lives' alone would address that question. Where it does not, it ain't likely Ernie and Bert will successfully fill the void anyway. Further, in this day and age where dozens upon dozens of channels offer a wide variety of programs, up to and including educational shows for kids and myriad documentaries as good as anything Ken Burns can offer, it is difficult to see that PBS could possibly be the only option for good television.

Yet the real issue is something beyond all that. The real issue is the flippancy with which many folks view federal spending in particular or government spending in general. Funding for PBS is next to nothing considering how many other ways Washington spends money; it is said as though we ought not worry about the minutiae when looking at government expenditures.

But how much minutiae is out there? How much of it is smaller than what the PBS is granted each year? If the tiniest of the government outputs are enough to justify government spending, then pretty soon we'll have government spending for everything so long as each line item is small. And this is before we even broach the question of whether governments at any level should be spending taxpayer cash on TV programs at all. Surely the dozens of other stations offer the public a tremendous choice of entertainments. There are great baseball documentaries out there not made by the prolific Mr. Burns.

This is not to pick on him or Big Bird. But it is to say that those who insist on funding PBS are barking up a tree. The funding, no matter how small, is still from taxpayers many of whom, for good reasons, may not want it spent that way. It still comes from a federal establishment too big which spends too much. Cuts to such as PBS ought not be spared for any particular reason. Indeed, they can be made with very good reason, if the arrogance of its supporters were to open their minds about the question.