GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney has Brownback-like plans for the arts. Asked by Fortune recently about his targets for spending cuts, Romney listed “various subsidy programs” he would eliminate: “the Amtrak subsidy, the PBS subsidy, the subsidy for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities. Some of these things, like those endowment efforts and PBS, I very much appreciate and like what they do in many cases, but I just think they have to stand on their own rather than receiving money borrowed from other countries, as our government does on their behalf.” But as the Washington Post noted, “in fiscal year 2012, the federal government spent $1.42 billion on Amtrak, $444 million on PBS, and $146 million on the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities. Getting rid of all these subsidies would have saved the government about $2 billion this year – chump change relative to the scale of cuts that Romney wants.”
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