Why Aren't Americans Angrier?
From Tyler Green at Artinfo.com:
Although you’d hardly know it from Americans’ comparative silence... decreases in U.S. government funding to arts groups are almost certainly going to be deeper than the ones that have provoked such a strong reaction in the U.K. At the federal level, President Barack Obama proposed 13 percent cuts for both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities
for fiscal year 2012. (Over the past three decades, it’s typically been conservative Republicans who have slashed NEA and NEH spending, while presidents and legislators from Obama’s party, the Democrats, have generally sought increases.) Seeing that the White House wasn’t going to stand up for the arts, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives promptly doubled the president’s figure to 26 percent, the deepest funding decline in 16 years. (The Senate is highly unlikely to take up the NEA and NEH budgets until at least midsummer.)