How much is the PBS really getting?

My favorite Sesame Street sponsor--the Necromatic Golden Dawn.

We interrupt the parade of Halloween cat pictures for this important reality check. As we all know, we are in an election cycle--the ugly one that we have every four years--where we elect the leader of the free world, or at least that bit of it that we call the United States of America.

Now, in the debate the other night, Mitt Romney once again stated that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and its evil mascot--Big Bird--were a bunch of free loaders because they recieve government funds.

(Yes, me and my wife are part of 47% of the American population that Romney considers freeloaders--funny, I am a self-employed writer and my wife is a school teacher--obviously, we need to find different jobs where we make a lot more money and make a bigger contribution to society.)

Ok, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 2011 recieved 430 million dollars. This money was split among PBS, NPR, and some other groups. I presume that some went to feeding Big Bird and the Cookie Monster--but seriously, not a lot. Sesame Street gets a lot of its funding from non-goverment sources.

If you are like me, the figure of four hundred and thirty million dollars sounds like a lot. It is--unless you are looking at the Federal Budget. So let's translate this into a figure that you might be able to understand.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting represents a mere .012 percent of the Federal Budget (that is .00012 of every dollar for the non-math people). Ok, that number does not mean much to any of us. So let's pretend that your budget was the Federal Budget. And let's say that your household budget for the month is two thousand dollars.

So what amount would you save by eliminating a .012 percent budget item? A whole 24 cents!

Yeah, we can eliminate this country's national debt by cooking Big Bird. Nice try, but this is merely a talking point of a politican who desperately does not want you to realize that he is talking about a bandage solution that does absolutely nothing.

I do not care who you vote for--just remember that you are the Big Bird that they really want to hurt.

(Public Broadcasting costs you $1.37 a year as a tax payer...if you would rather look at it from that view, according to one source.)

[The picture for this post was created for Loki's Wisdom, my humor blog that never really got off the ground. I did have to update to put the decimal in the right place--it is early or late here, depe upon your viewpoint.]