Political Quotes

“Thank you, Madam Blackburn, for your great work that you do on the committee. I introduced H.R. 1076 because the Federal Government can no longer afford to fund programs that are fully capable of standing on their own. This is not about the ideology of NPR executives or the content that NPR produces; but whether, in this age of trillion-dollar annual deficits, taxpayers should subsidize a nonessential entity. Plain and simple, this bill accomplishes three things. First, it prohibits public radio stations from using Federal funds to purchase programming. Current Federal law requires that about 26 percent of Federal grants to public radio stations be used for the production or acquisition of programming. Many stations use these restricted grants to purchase programming from NPR. These programming fees are the largest single source of NPR revenue at $56 million in fiscal year '10. Second, H.R. 1076 prohibits stations from using Federal funds to pay NPR dues: in fiscal year '10, over 400 member stations paid a total of $2.8 million in dues to NPR. Third, my bill prohibits direct Federal fundings of National Public Radio. For fiscal year '10, NPR received over $5 million in direct funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Departments of Education and Commerce, and the National Endowment for the Arts. These three sources of revenues I just described totaled about $64 million in fiscal year '10.…”