John Atilano

Recently I have read many stories about the heroic efforts of the Republican party to rein in spending by cutting NPR’s funding from the federal budget.  Now, I’m a supporter of NPR and public broadcasting in general because I think both provide valuable, intelligent programming.  However, we are in a budget crisis and cuts need to be made.  Having said all of that, I’m not here to discuss the merits of NPR.  For this discussion, let us stick to facts.  Clearly, with all of the energy being expended on cutting NPR’s budget it must get us really close to a balanced budget.

Let’s take a look at the numbers!

2010 Federal Budget (Source Wikipedia)

Income:  $2,380,000,000,000 ($2.38 Trillion)
Spending:  $3,551,800,000,000 ($3.5518 Trillion)
Deficit:  -$1,171,800,000,000 ($1.1718 Trillion)

That’s a lot of money!!

-$1,171,800,000,000 / $3,551,800,000,000 = -32.99%

Basically we spend 33% more than we take in.  Cuts must be made!

NPR does not get any of its money DIRECTLY from the federal government.  It receives part of its budget through grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.  Since we are making cuts, lets just get rid of the CPB!  This way we can get rid of NPR, the Public Broadcasting Service, etc.  Nobody likes Sesame Street anyway.  Besides, I didn’t want to research how much NPR recieves and CPB’s budget is bigger.  Therefore, my results are much larger than if I had only accounted for NPR.

CPB Budget: $420,000,000 ($420 Million).  That’s a lot of money too!

-$1,171,800,000,000 – $420,000,000 = $1,171,380,000,000  WTF?

Ok, let’s put this in perspective and try to explain this in a way a knuckle-dragger like me can understand.

Let’s look at this as if it were a family budget with some nice, small, round numbers.

I’ll eliminate some zeroes so it looks like a normal household budget.