New York Times Tries to Make the Case Against Cutting Arts Funding, Inadvertently Presents Excellent Argument for Cutting Arts Funding

From today's New York Times, a sad story about what happens when states are forced to cut funding for the arts:

For 10 years Erika Nelson, an artist in Lucas, Kan., has been making miniature models of giant pieces of Americana, putting them in a van and driving around the country to show people. 

She has made tiny copies, for example, of the World's Largest Ball of Twine, which is down the road in Cawker City, and the World's Largest Can of Fruit Cocktail, which is in Sunnyvale, Calif….

But this year she may not be able to travel far. Kansas, which has one of the country's smallest state arts budgets, has decided to shrink it even further, to zero.

A traveling sideshow hauling a ball of twine and a normal-sized can of fruit cocktail actually sounds weirdly appealing. But we are out of money, and it's no-brainer to trim the 2,000 taxpayer dollars this lovely gal and her van were counting on for gas money to show her quirky wares to college students in Kansas.

Reason.tv on three reasons not to fund arts with taxpayer dollars: