The National Endowment for the Arts fuels rural economies. Trump wants to eliminate it.

[riversedge]

The National Endowment for the Arts fuels rural economies. Trump wants to eliminate it.

https://thinkprogress.org/trump-budget-nea-rural-economies-b690b37fbab




“We’ve done exactly what an investor would want to see: taken the [NEA] money and leveraged it into private investment.”
CREDIT: Flickr/Knight Foundation

...............Before the NEA was created in 1965, this wasn’t much of an option for small towns. There were fewer than 10,000 nonprofit arts and culture organizations across the country, according to Cohen, which meant many communities simply didn’t have any. Now there are about 100,000. “You can have a museum experience or a theater experience or a symphony experience outside of the big cities,” Cohen said. “The fact is that 50 years ago there weren’t a lot of those opportunities.”

“The NEA is a great American success story,” he said. “You can find NEA dollars in every single congressional district.”

“The NEA is a great American success story.”

And while Mulvaney’s comments imply that arts consumption is an elitist activity, Cohen’s organization has conducted public polling that finds the opposite is true. Nearly 90 percent of those polled said the arts are important to their quality of life, while 82 percent said they’re important to local businesses and the economy. More than two-thirds attended an event in the past year. “They cut across all socioeconomic strata and geographic strata,” Cohen said of the results. “It wasn’t just an urban phenomenon and it wasn’t just an affluent phenomenon.”..........