Modern Medicis

To start off the new year, I bought my family three museum memberships. My kids take music lessons, we attend plays and concerts, and our trips to the big city almost always include a historical, cultural, or artistic experience. We are above-average consumers of "the arts." If Congress eliminates all federal arts funding, as President Trump's budget proposes, I would be .  .  . perfectly fine with it.

Many in the "arts community" reacted to the news of Trump's proposed elimination of National Endowment for the Arts funding the way New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof reacted to Trump's budget in general. "Reading through the Trump budget, I feel as the Romans must have felt in 456 a.d. as the barbarians conquered and ushered in the dark ages," he tweeted. The very thought that NEA funding would disappear has caused a great wailing, gnashing of teeth, and rending of community theater wardrobe garments.

Some perspective is in order. As art gushes into the mainstream of American culture with unprecedented force, leaving no tributary of society unfilled by various expressions of imagination and whimsy, we are being asked to believe that defunding a single federal agency will cast the culture into a permanent, primitive darkness.

One could read dozens of commentaries and stories about this supposedly Neanderthal move without running across a single statistic on the proportion of U.S. arts funding shouldered by federal taxpayers. Advocates of federal funding for the arts shy away from that data for good reason. It renders their hysteria absurd.

How the United States Funds the Arts, published by the NEA in 2012, shows that federal arts funding accounts for only 1.2 percent of the money Americans dedicate to nonprofit performing arts groups and museums. Local governments nearly triple that share, accounting for 3.3 percent. All government funding combined comes to only 6.7 percent.