Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Proposal to Defund NPR Wins GOP Anti-Government Spending Contest

I'm all for free speech. I just don't feel that my tax dollars should be used to fund an organization with a political agenda. I don't listen to npr, I don't donate to npr and I don't want my tax dollars to support them either. Sure, there are lots of things that my tax dollars fund that I would rather they didn't, but we have to start somewhere.

You should go take a look at the article at American Thinker, it will show you how much tax money npr really receives. You might be surprised.

Once our government defunds npr, maybe we can convince them to defund the united nations. Don't get me started...

From FoxNews

National Public Radio, under fire ever since it sacked Juan Williams last month, is now the latest target of YouCut, the anti-government spending program started by House Republicans earlier this year.

The winning proposal in this week's online contest, in which Americans vote for the items they want slashed from the federal budget, was to terminate federal funding to NPR. That proposal received 63 percent of the vote, the highest percentage for a proposal since the program began in May.

House Republicans will bring that proposal to the floor Thursday for an up-or-down vote.

"When NPR executives made the decision to unfairly terminate Juan Williams and to then disparage him afterwards, the bias of their organization was exposed," House Minority Whip Eric Cantor and Doug Lamborn, who authored a bill this year to defund NPR's parent company, said in a joint statement.

"Make no mistake, it is not the role of government to tell news organizations how to operate. What is avoidable, however, is providing taxpayer funds to news organizations that promote a partisan point of view," they said.

"Eliminating taxpayer funding for NPR is precisely the kind of commonsense cut that we have to begin making it we want to fundamentally alter the way business is conducted in Washington," they said.

With Democrats still in charge of the House until the end of the year, the proposal is certain to fail. Lamborn's legislation to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) , introduced in June, hasn't made it out of committee.

But when Republicans assume power in January, they are expected to go after NPR's federal funding with a vengeance.

NPR says only 1 percent to 3 percent of its $166 million budget is funded by taxpayer dollars. But a new report by the Congressional Research Service found that taxpayers fund at least 4 percent of NPR's budget, while an analyst at the conservative American Thinker estimated it was closer to 25 percent.

Cantor's office has said it will conduct an audit to determine how much taxpayer money NPR is actually getting.

NPR triggered a firestorm last month with the firing of analyst Juan Williams over comments he made during an appearance on Fox News' "O'Reilley Factor. Williams said the sight of individuals dressed in Muslim garb on airplanes made him nervous as he tried to persuade Fox News host Bill O'Reilley that bigotry against Muslims is wrong.

Fox News expanded Williams' role as an analyst after the firing.

YouCut said ending federal funding to NPR could save taxpayers tens of millions of dollars and possible even hundreds of millions. The program noted that NPR receives a significant amount of funding from individuals and organizations through donations and sponsorships.

"Therefore, eliminating taxpayer support should not materially affect NPR's ability to operate while at the same time saving taxpayers millions of dollars annually."