An excellent essay on arts funding from the federal government is "Federal arts funding: a trace ingredient in the sausage factory of government spending," by Aaron Andersen, posted on Createquity.com. Read it. Andersen points out that federal art funding is 0.066% of the federal budget or 66/1000s of one percent. The percent of the federal income which is not collected because of the income tax deduction for mortgage interest is 200 times the amount spent on the arts, or about 13 percent.
Looking for a comparison, I considered my computer monitor, which has 1,600 by 900 pixels or a total of 1.71 million pixels. If my monitor was all federal expenditures, the federal funding for the arts would count for less than one horizontal line of pixels on this monitor, 1,129 pixels. If that number of pixels on the edge of the screen went black, I'm not sure I'd notice. The mortgage deduction moneys would be 222,300 pixels, about 138 horizontal lines or 1/7 of the screen real estate. That much, I'd notice.
So much political heat about arts funding over so little money.
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