Are You Getting Your 24 Cents Worth?

Daniel Pink had an entry this weekend where he presents a taxpayer receipt created as part of a policy paper by some gentlemen at Third Way. David Kendall and Jim Kessler who wrote the piece for Third Way start their paper by pointing out that we know the breakdown in the nutritional value of the food we buy, but we haven’t the faintest idea what sort of value we are getting for our taxes.

Given that so many politicians promise to control spending without touching Social Security and Medicare, they wanted to create an easy to understand listing of where all that money was going and what would likely need to be cut to make good on those promises. Since the median taxpayer in the U.S. earns $34,140 and assuming all that income is taxable, they created a graphic breakdown of where the $5,400 in taxes paid in 2009 went.

Of course, I gravitated directly to arts spending – 24 cents. Now remember, this isn’t the amount spent on arts per person, just what the median tax payer’s share is. Those with higher incomes are paying more and those with lower incomes are paying less. The amount per person is probably closer to the usual rule of thumb of the cost of a postage stamp. I was a little surprised to see that benefits and salaries for Congress fell below the arts at 19 cents until I remembered there are only 535 of them compared to all the arts organizations that seek funding.

If you visit Pink’s site, you will see that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid top the list at $1,040.70, $625.51 and $385.28, respectively. Next down on the list is interest on the national debt and military operations. Cutting spending on the arts isn’t going to vastly improve the lot of any other area. Above arts spending is the Smithsonian Museum at $1.12. Giving all the arts money to the museum doesn’t improve their budget by a quarter.

When people complain that they don’t want their tax dollars going to support degenerate art, the truth is more money was likely spent powering their computer while emailing those sentiments and then paying a Congressional staffer to read and perhaps print it out than is spent on the arts. If a person mails their complaint, well they have already spent more on the stamp than they probably paid in taxes to the arts.

About Joe Patti

I have been writing Butts in the Seats (BitS) on topics of arts and cultural administration since 2004 (yikes!). Given the ever evolving concerns facing the sector, I have yet to exhaust the available subject matter. In addition to BitS, I am a founding contributor to the ArtsHacker (artshacker.com) website where I focus on topics related to boards, law, governance, policy and practice.

I am also an evangelist for the effort to Build Public Will For Arts and Culture being helmed by Arts Midwest and the Metropolitan Group. (http://www.creatingconnection.org/about/)

My most recent role was as Executive Director of the Grand Opera House in Macon, GA.

Among the things I am most proud are having produced an opera in the Hawaiian language and a dance drama about Hawaii's snow goddess Poli'ahu while working as a Theater Manager in Hawaii. Though there are many more highlights than there is space here to list.

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