Romney, Like Ryan, Supports Cutting Funds to PBS

The team of Romney/Ryan isn’t going to stop with simply confronting the leftist media with a war of words. They’re planning to hit the leftists where it really matters – at the source – by cutting off their funding.

The only way some of the media can exist is through government largess, and the example most emblematic is NPR, which has been a major leftist mouthpiece for decades.

Now Mitt Romney has boldly stated that among the cuts he would make in government spending would include the subsidy for NPR. And Paul Ryan has been fighting this battle in Congress for years; in 2005 he opposed restoring $100 million in cuts to NPR; in March 2011 he voted in favor of defunding it entirely.

This is a classic case of how Ryan has distanced himself from the RINOs in the Republican Party.

In March of 2011, Rep. Steve LaTourette (R-Ohio) said of NPR funding:

“I think it serves a purpose. All of those funds, if you look at ’em, are not a lot of money in the big scheme of things here. My position has been in these tough economic times, everybody deserves a haircut and everybody should expect a haircut, but there’s a difference between getting scalped and just taking it above the ears.”

At the same time, Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) was quite clear that she also supported government funding for public broadcasting. Earlier this summer, PBS president/CEO Paula Kerger wailed that if funding were cut, a number of stations would go under. For some stations, federal subsidies constitute as much as 50-60 percent of the budget.

Romney was quite clear about his belief that businesses should try to support themselves:

“Some of these things, like those endowment efforts and PBS I very much appreciate and like what they do in many cases, but I just think they have to stand on their own rather than receiving money borrowed from other countries, as our government does on their behalf.”

President Barack Obama was right about NPR; they didn’t build that. And now Romney and Ryan are going to hold them accountable.