[miked]

The US has 338M people and they are claiming $763B PER YEAR for art. That's $2257 PER YEAR for every man, woman, and newborn infant in America. Total BS. Even if you include music and movies and TV, this is still way too high.

It's also dishonest, since this is a politically motivated attempt to counter cuts in NEA funding, yet very little of TV, movies, or music is sponsored by the NEA, which just goes to show how unimportant it is except to pseudo-elites who think that a urinal in a museum is art as long as the rabble don't approve of it.

[evgen]

Without the arts there is no content. Goodbye internet, radio, TV & films. Telcos and the consumer electronics industry? A tiny fraction of its current size. You have to be truly delusional to think that $2K per year is some sort of low-ball number for this. If anything this number is minimizing the second-order effects.

[miked]

You've missed my point entirely. The OP is playing a game by defining arts (clown mask on) to be all of the entertainment industry (and citing that size in the headline) while supporting an argument for (clown mask off now) the NEA, which is an organization for the Fine Arts, not Katy Perry videos and iPhone apps.