On 3/5/2011 3:57 AM, wrote:
The WSJ had a piece by Jim Demint on why Public Broadcasting Should
Go Private . It is interesting to see t he salaries of those
involved. You can read the whole article at

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...p_mostpop_read

If you are going to read the article, do not bother to read the quotes
below. For those too lazy to go to the source, I posted most of the
information on salaries.


Dan

But if PBS can pay Ms. Kerger $632,233 in annual compensation—as
reported on the 990 tax forms all nonprofits are required to file—
surely it can operate without tax dollars.

According to CPB's 2009 tax forms, President and CEO Patricia de Stacy
Harrison received $298,884 in reportable compensation and another
$70,630 in other compensation from the organization and related
organizations that year. That's practically a pittance compared to
Kevin Klose, president emeritus of NPR, who received more than $1.2
million in compensation, according to the tax forms the nonprofit
filed in 2009.

In 2001, the federal government appropriated $340 million for CPB.
Last year it got $420 million. As Congress considers ways to close the
$1.6 trillion deficit, cutting funding for the CPB has even been
proposed by President Obama's bipartisan deficit reduction commission.
Instead, Mr. Obama wants to increase CPB's funding to $451 million in
his latest budget.

Meanwhile, highly successful, brand-name public programs like Sesame
Street make millions on their own. "Sesame Street," for example, made
more than $211 million from toy and consumer product sales from
2003-2006. Sesame Workshop President and CEO Gary Knell received
$956,513 in compensation in 2008.

Last year, for example, the Open Society Foundation, backed by liberal
financier George Soros, gave NPR $1.8 million to help support the
latter's plan to hire an additional 100 reporters.



Two points; PBS only receives about 15% of it's revenue from the federal
government. The rest comes from donations from viewers and other
sources. So the fact is the amount going to PBS from the taxpayers is
very small and believe me there are millions of taxpayers who do want
their money to keep going there.

The other thing is the sham these spending cuts are. They are only to
domestic discretionary spending. As such they only amount to a pittance
of what needs to be cut to bring the deficit down. So no matter how much
of this kind of cutting is done it's not going to make a dent in our
financial problem. That will only be addressed by cutting the so-called
non discretionary items like defense, medicare, and social security.

Everyone knows this, so this supposed spending reduction is not to bring
fiscal order to the country. It's just a thinly disguised way for the
right wing to eliminate many liberal programs that they don't like. It's
nothing more than that. Just as the governor of Wisconsin is using the
budget as an excuse to eliminate collective bargaining for unions, the
right wing is using "spending cuts" as a way of ending programs they
have always hated. In other words, the republicans are not being honest.
They are just using this budget deficit as an excuse to eliminate
liberal programs. If they were really serious about the deficit and the
debt they would be cutting the defense budget and the entitlement
programs. Funny how they have scrupulously avoided those? Which should
tell you how serious they are about fixing things.

Hawke