With Arts in State of Anxiety, Dana Gioia Insists Federal Government Support the NEA

Dana Gioia gets straight to the point in an op-ed for the LA Times: "No American president — Republican or Democrat — has ever tried to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts. ... Even Ronald Reagan was a supporter." More:

Both the Heritage Foundation and the Republican Study Committee have long been obsessed with ending federal support for the arts. During my six years as the chairman of the NEA under President George W. Bush, these groups launched one unsuccessful volley after another. Their stated rationale was that the federal government had no business funding the arts. Beneath that small-government ideal, however, was another openly acknowledged motive not related to the public good but to political advantage. By eliminating the NEA, they could deliver a symbolic victory against leftist urban constituencies.

There is an obvious element of class warfare in these attacks — the endowment’s critics often say its grants are a way for the rich to use public money to subsidize their own elite cultural institutions. This assertion misrepresents how and where the NEA does its work.

The NEA’s 2017 budget is $149.8 million. In a nation of 319 million people that amount doesn’t allow the agency to subsidize much of anything. But the endowment has found ways to make the money work with outsized effectiveness and efficiency. It makes thousands of small grants to nonprofit organizations — on average 2,100 a year. Each grant requires the recipient to raise matching local funds — often at a ratio of two or three local dollars for each federal one. So the NEA mostly serves as a catalyst for local groups to raise private and state money to serve their own communities.

Repeat, repeat, repeat. Read all here.