Actor Tim Daly ( Madame Secretary , Leanne , Wings , Private Practice ) and President of The Creative Coalition, is urging support for the endangered National Endowment for the Arts. The cuts he says, threaten arts education, dance, theatre, music, libraries, in and after school programs, and more all across the country. Daly sat down with LifeMinute editor-in-chief Joann Butler yesterday to tell us about it and more. This is part one of our LifeMinute with Tim Daly.
00:00Tim Daly in the house. Yay! Hi. A longtime fan. I'm so happy you're with us. Thank you. It's great to be here. So you have a lot going on. For some unknowable reason, there's always a politician or two who want to zero out the budget of the NEA and do away with that program once and for all. But we've been there to save it many times. We're trying to do it again. We have a lot of allies. So we're hopeful and pretty confident that we can do it.
00:29And what's going on exactly? What's proposed?
00:32Well, the first proposal, there was a budget that came out that proposed zeroing it out. Then we have enough allies in Congress that they put it back in at a budget of $135 million. And then we have enough allies in the Senate that they put it back at its former number of $207 million, which, by the way, is minute. It's a drop in the bucket of the federal government budget.
00:57But it's also incredibly impactful and effective because it's one of the few government programs that's actually a moneymaker. And in this era where a lot of folks are talking about efficiency, this is actually something that's putting money into the federal coffers.
01:12For every dollar spent by the National Endowment for the Arts, it returns about $9 in economic activity to the federal government.
01:18You know, when I started doing this work at the Creative Coalition, one of the things I read was that children who have a full curriculum in the arts are three times more likely to graduate from high school.
01:28And what shocked me was that even armed with those statistics, a lot of people were against having arts in schools.
01:35Now, the NEA isn't necessarily about arts in schools, but one of the things that people misunderstand about it is that they think that it's an organization that gives money to Hollywood or Broadway or something like that.
01:47It couldn't be farther from the truth.
01:48The amazing thing about the NEA is that it gives money to every single congressional district in the entire United States.
01:55So it disproportionately benefits small communities and small cities and rural communities who otherwise wouldn't have any arts.
02:02And their kids in their community wouldn't be exposed to dance or theater or music or a library or have after-school programs.
02:10And their veterans might not have an arts program who are suffering from PTSD.
02:13So it's important to understand that everybody in the entire country benefits from this program.
02:19It is pretty easy for people to call up their representatives and to leave a message at the switchboard for your senator or your congresspeople and just say,
02:32I'm one of your constituents and I really want you to support funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.
02:37It's important to be heard because, you know, they work for you.
02:41So tell them what you want.
02:42This was part one of my in-depth interview with Tim Daly.
02:46Stay tuned to Life Minute TV to hear more soon.
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