He puts himself in the shoes
In case you missed Trump’s budget director saying the thing about coal miners and PBS, here’s CNN reporting it – starting with the fact that Mike Pence actually supported public tv not long ago:
But in 2014, Vice President Mike Pence, then Indiana’s governor also known for frugal budgets, made a passionate defense for the role of public television.
“I believe the state has the primary responsibility for educating our children and I will say from my heart through all of my life, one thing has been clear: Public television plays a vital role in educating all of the public, but most especially, our children,” he said during an acceptance speech at that year’s Public Media Summit.
Including, thank you very much, the children of coal miners and chicken processors, farm workers and janitors, fry cooks and factory hands – and all those people themselves.
But that’s not how Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney sees it.
“It’s a simple message by the way: I put myself in the shoes of that steelworker in Ohio, the coal-mining family in West Virginia, the mother of two in Detroit, and I’m saying, ‘OK, I have to go ask these folks for money, and I have to tell them where I’m going to spend it,’ ” he said during Thursday’s White House press briefing.
“Can I really go to those folks, look them in the eye and say, ‘Look, I want to take money from you, and I want to give it to the Corporation (for) Public Broadcasting.’ That is a really hard sell, and in fact, it’s something we don’t think we can defend anymore.”
So that’s what they think of working people then.
Or you know, they could take a little pocket change from people with net worths in the eight or nine figures.
Or, you know, you might once in a while actually pay the invoice from “little people” who do miscellaneous work for you.
Maybe he would explain, then, how he can justify going to hard working schoolteachers and janitors, and say “we’re going to tax you to subsidize coal mining, even though your town is not using coal fired power”. Same thing, right? So the coal miner pays a few pennies for the school teachers salary, and the school teacher pays a few pennies for the coal mining subsidies, and this man wants to cut the few pennies from the coal miners, but not from the schoolteachers…of course, he isn’t interested in coal miners at all. He’s only interested in billionaires (and maybe the occasional millionaire, even though most of those are just sad, pathetic losers).
Maybe he could ask “those folks” if they’d prefer to fund PBS Kids and Sesame Street, or shovel more of their money into bombs, tanks, drones and other killing machines. He might be surprised at the answer.
It’s a stupid argument; the above pay virtually no taxes. Pricks like Trump are supposed to be paying for this shit, not poors.
I don’t know. Why don’t you try it and see what they say?
The airwaves are the property of the American people, just like the national parks and NIH. We can see what this administration is trying to do with other parts of our national patrimony.
I suspect Mr. Mulvaney doesn’t watch much PBS programming or he would know that one of their most popular and long-running shows is Austin City Limits, a program that presents a wide variety of popular artists. And what makes him think that coal miners have no interest in the documentaries on Frontline?
Yes, but ever since deregulation under Reagan, no one considers them that. Just like public forests and public grasslands, they are for sale cheap to plutocrats. If these plutocrats clear cut the forests, overgraze the grasslands, and pollute the airwaves with pap and lies, who cares? That’s the free market for you.
I am getting more and more convinced that our future is basically over.