Secret Military Spending Versus The Arts
The National Endowment for the Arts has long been a favorite target of free market libertarians who like to depict themselves as “fiscal hawks”, ever-ready to confront government waste. Dan Kennedy, of the Business and Media Institute, for example, complains of President Obama “pouring billions of borrowed dollars” into the National Endowment for the Arts as an example of government spending gone out of control.
That kind of spending certainly sounds extreme. In point of fact, however, no such spending exists.
The truth is that the National Endowment for the Arts appropriations request for fiscal year 2009 is about $128 million dollars (to be precise, $128,412). There is no effort to pour billions of dollars of government funding into the arts.
Compare that, on the other hand, with the military’s black budget - that portion of military spending which is kept absolutely secret. The American people aren’t given the information about how the military spends this money, though they have to pay for it with their taxes.
The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments calculates that the 2009 appropriations request for the U.S. military’s black budget is about 34 billion dollars. That means that the entire National Endowment for the Arts could be funded for more than 264 years with just the secret portion of the Pentagon’s budget.
It’s not funding for the Arts that’s leading to the huge budget deficit. Fiscal hawks need to focus on where the bulk of spending is really going: Into the shadows of America’s military.
Yet, there’s not much that fiscal hawks can do about waste in the black budget. Almost no one is even allowed to know where that money goes, much less to examine whether it is spent responsibly for programs that have any reasonable purpose.
If you’re one of those people who distrusts government spending, the Pentagon’s black budget is a good first place to bring the light of open examination. Forget the distracting noise about tiny programs like the National Endowment for the Arts. In our democratic system, a good place to begin the reduction of waste is in the opening of our government’s secret military budget, making it subject to direct examination by the American people.