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| Sesame Street's Big BIrd |
Our friends at Sesame Street are asking the Obama campaign to pull down a TV ad released Tuesday that mocks Mitt Romney for vowing to take away the subsidy to PBS.
At the presidential debate in Denver last week, Mr. Romney said he would end the subsidy in view of the nation’s fiscal troubles.
“I love Big Bird,” the Republican challenger said “… But I’m not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for.”
Mr. Romney is right. This is a good example of things this country can no longer afford. Besides, and few Americans know this, we taxpayers subsidize the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and the home to Sesame Street, to the tune of $445 Million. On top of that Sesame Street markets Big Bird and all the Sesame Street characters through stuffed animals, toys, DVD's, coloring books just to name a few. Sesame Street and PBS market profits from Big Bird and company is somewhere in the nature of $50 Million. None of this comes back to the taxpayers.
If you have small kids who are now shedding tears that Big Bird, Elmo, The Count and friends will disappear from their TV screens should Romney become president, fear not. The Christian Science Monitor points out today on its website ( http://www.csmonitor.com/ )only about 12 percent of PBS’s funding comes from the government subsidy. 60 percent, meanwhile, comes from private donors and grants as well as dues paid by PBS’s 350-plus member stations.
Eliminating the government payout will not doom PBS or Sesame Street which is only one program. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting which funds PBS and National Public Radio received the $445 million from the 2012 federal budget. It is only about 1/100th of the total U.S. budget. And while $445 million seems a drop in the budget bucket, $445 million would go a long way in in other areas.....like it back in Medicare to at least make up a small part of the $714 billion Mr. Obama is stealing from that program to help pay for Obamacare.
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