Nancy Pelosi: “today's vote by the House to increase funding for the NEA and NEH is a victory of imagination over ideology. In recent…”

“today's vote by the House to increase funding for the NEA and NEH is a victory of imagination over ideology. In recent years, we have worried a great deal about the digital divide--a lack of access to technology that could limit opportunity for lower-income Americans. We should be equally concerned about a creativity crisis. Studies have proven that arts education is not just a frill tacked on to the vital work of learning reading, writing and arithmetic. Art education increases skills in all of these subjects, as well as in language development and writing and spatial reasoning. Grants from the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities leverage millions of dollars each year in private support for arts projects. In many communities, they are the sole source of arts funding. This amendment would provide an additional $10 million for the NEA's ``Challenge America'' initiative, which is specifically designed to provide access to the arts for underserved communities. According to the Georgia Institute of Technology, the arts industry generations millions of jobs and $134 billion in economic activity every year. The amendment also provides $5 million for the NEH--the nation's largest source of support for research and scholarship in the humanities. I want to make it very clear that this amendment is not an increase in funding, but an attempt to recoup some of the cuts that NEA faced in 1995 when its budget was slashed by 40 percent.”