Asa Hutchinson: “over and over during the debate on the National Endowment for the Arts we have heard the proponents come to the floor…”

“over and over during the debate on the National Endowment for the Arts we have heard the proponents come to the floor and say how good and beneficial the arts are. Who can argue with that? The argument they seem to make is, we ought to automatically reauthorize, that we ought to automatically appropriate $100 million for the National Endowment for the Arts because art is good, without any scrutiny, without any close examination of how the National Endowment is operating, how they are working today. The debate has in fact deteriorated into kind of a syllogism. The syllogism goes like this: Art is good. The National Endowment for the Arts is art; and, therefore, the NEA is good. Obviously, art is good. It is inspiring. It is uplifting. We have heard anecdote after anecdote of the benefits of art in our lives. But the NEA is not the equivalent of art. In fact, as we see on this chart, the NEA is less than 5 percent of the total Federal support for the arts and the humanities.”