If you're looking for the day's ponderings...

they are in another blog entry.  This is a political rant, so if that's not what you were looking for, please navigate to the entry that is the day's ponderings.

I'm also going to warn you that most of my regular readers will not like what I'm going to say here, because I'm going to take on a "sacred cow" that is very, very popular with most of you.  All I ask is that before you make a judgment, please read the entire entry.  Then, feel free to totally disagree.

First, some numbers that are very important to this discussion.

3
11
$445 million
75%

What do those numbers represent?

3 is the number of executives at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting whose annual compensation exceeds $300,000.
11 is the number of executives at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting whose annual compensation exceeds $200,000.
$445 million is the amount that the CPB will receive over the next two years from the Federal government.
75% is the portion of that money that will go to PBS television operations.

Oh, one more number.  $449,919,620.  That's the total amount of government grants, private grants and other donations made directly to the CPB in 2011.  That's not counting donations made to individual television stations.  Speaking of individual stations, let's look at KCET's numbers for 2011.

$53,542,823 in total revenue.
$26,810,635 in investment income, which is a $26.5 million increase over the prior year.  In fairness, that appears to be mostly from the sale of an asset.  But it's still a startling number.
12 employees earning more than $100K, with the CEO earning over $430,000 in 2011.

So the reality is that hundreds of millions of dollars in non-government grants is flowing into the CPB and its stations each year. 

The reason I'm pointing this out is that I believe the time has come for the end of the government subsidy for the CPB and its stations.  It may be that in some rural areas where there isn't the ability to generate grants and do fundraising to make stations self-sufficient and some stations may continue to need government assistance.  These stations should be able to apply for this assistance on a case by case basis.  But the majority need to removed from government funding.

There was a time when there was a need for the CPB and the PBS stations to get government assistance.  I grew up when TV in L.A. was limited to the three broadcast network stations, the independent stations on channels 5, 9, 11 and 13, and a few UHF channels, which included Channel 28, KCET. 

A few days ago my cable provider made a programming change.  I now have to enter four digits to change the channel on the cable box because 999 potential channel numbers was no longer sufficient.  Oh, some stations appear on more than one channel.  USA Network is on 40, 105 and 441.  But the point remains, there are now hundreds of channels available and a ton of networks broadcasting a very wide variety of programming.

Most of the non-educational programming on PBS is available elsewhere (BBCAmerican broadcasts the BBC news, for example).  Sesame Street and the other programs that are under the umbrella of the Sesame Workshop are self-sustaining.  In fact, the Sesame Workshop is paying its top executive over $1 million in annual compensation.  They don't need government funds.

If C-SPAN doesn't need government funding, which it doesn't, then the same can be said of the CPB.  It's time to end this subsidy.  Yes, PBS stations have high quality programming, some of which isn't available elsewhere.  But in the free market system, if there is a market for these programs, there is a cable channel out there that would pick them up, should PBS stations go dark.  I don't believe most of them would.  As mentioned earlier, there are a few that might and they deserve to be able to ask for government assistance.

No, this isn't a large portion of the federal budget and it wouldn't do a lot to solve the deficit.  But every little bit will help.  If we're going to borrow $400 million (using round numbers) over the next two years to fund the CPB, at 3% interest (30 year bonds are paying very close to that at the moment), that's an interest expense of $12 million per year.  30 years from now we'll have spent $360 million to borrow the two years worth of funding and we won't have paid off a cent of the borrowed funds. 

So the time has come to cut-off the CPB from government funding.