Musical Earmarks - Updated 2008-10-10

We hear so much lately about earmarks attached to government spending bills and wasteful use of tax dollars. So, I thought I’d take a quick turn around that new-fangled interweb and see if I could find out where all of that money goes.

A Google search got me to the government Office of Management and Budget website and the section on Earmarks . I looked at a few pages for the U.S.’s FY2009 budget and found the following programs, among many others, that got earmark money. You may think differently, of course, but I thought these were pretty good buys for the price.

$99,000 for the Community Music School of Collegeville, Trappe, PA for music education

$248,000 for the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, Tennessee to support community programs

$72,000 for the Music Maker Foundation, Inc. for acquisition, renovation, and buildout of a facility in Orange County, North Carolina. (These folks are a not-for-profit organization that helps support elderly blues and old-time musicians who have fallen on hard times.)

$99,000 for the Settlement Music School, Philadelphia, PA, to support arts education

$148,000 for the First Congregational Church for conservation of Henderson American Music Archive.

$347,000 for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum for music education programs

$306,000 for the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), NY for juvenile-based services for prevention, control, or reduction of juvenile delinquency

$99,000 for the Mountain Arts Center, Prestonsburg, KY, for expansion of its Music and Arts Development Program

$992,000 for the Yonkers Public Schools, Yonkers, NY, for after school and Saturday academic and enrichment activities, literacy services, music and arts education, and parent involvement activities

$472,000 for an Oral History Program Experience Music Project, Seattle, WA

$887,000 for the Blue Ridge National Heritage Area to celebrate the region's natural landscape, abundance of nationally significant places, cultural contributions of the Cherokee Nation, and mountain culture that shaped the area's distinctive music and crafts.

And don’t forget that some of our tax dollars go to support and maintain the old-time and country music collections (like the the Henry Reed Collection) at the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution (curators of Smithsonian Folkways records). Update 2008-10-10: Per a comment posted by David Horgan of Smithsonian Folkways, they're not actually supported by tax revenues as I had thought. They are instead "based in the national museum, but rely on revenues, grants, private donations, and good will to survive and to carry out [their] mission." Thanks for the correction, David! Keep up the great work.

I don’t care what Sarah Palin and her oil-drilling, ocean-fishing, Alaska-seceding husband say; if my taxes go to pay for the above items as well as maintaining roads & bridges, libraries, Medicare, police & fire protection, public schools for all children, NASA, and scientific research that leads to healthier and longer lives, then I believe that paying them is plenty patriotic.

It was Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes who said, "I like paying taxes. With them, I buy civilization."