Romney Loves Big Bird, Hates Paying for Him

Romney said at the debate last night, "I'm sorry, Jim, I’m going to stop the subsidy to PBS. I’m going to stop other things. I like PBS, I love Big Bird. Actually like you, too. But I'm not going to—I'm not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for. That’s number one."

Mary Elizabeth Williams thinks Romney is missing the point:

What Romney, in his adorably out-of-touch way, failed to grasp with that statement is that practically every American under the age of 50 has a powerful childhood association with that goofy oversize lug. An entire generation can trace its first understanding of death to the moment that Big Bird let it sink in that “Mr. Hooper’s not coming back.” And another generation learned about loss and community and resilience after 9/11 when “Sesame Street” had Big Bird’s own nest destroyed in a storm. (The show aired Big Bird’s odyssey again after Katrina.) And I defy even a robotic millionaire to get through Big Bird’s choked-up rendition of “It’s Not Easy Being Green” at Jim Henson’s memorial service and not completely lose it when he says, “Thank you, Kermit.”

Republicans in Congress have tried to cut PBS funding before. They found it wasn't popular:

A 2011 poll found 69 percent of voters opposed to defunding PBS. People like Big Bird. And that's even though another 2011 poll found that PBS gets more of the federal budget than it does. Much more: 30 percent of people thought PBS gets 5 percent or more of the federal budget, and another 40 percent believed it gets between 1 percent and 5 percent.

Besides, cutting off PBS wouldn't make much difference in cutting the deficit anyway, as it only accounts for 0.00014% of the budget. This isn't about fiscal responsibility. This is about ideological preconceptions about the role of government. As Neil deGrasse Tyson tweets, "Cutting PBS support (0.012% of budget) to help balance the Federal budget is like deleting text files to make room on your 500Gig hard drive."