RALEIGH – Debates over taxes and budgets often display a feature that is perverse but all-too-common: policymakers and voters tend to want to wrap their heads around relatively small programs and expenditures rather than big ones.

It’s one reason why so many previous presidents and Congresses have done little or nothing to address the budget crunch coming in a few years as Baby Boomers start cashing in on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Speaking of Medicaid, it’s one reason why at the state level, budget debates so often turn on hot-button issues with comparatively small fiscal impact while avoiding the kind of far-reaching evaluation of big-ticket items such as information technology or health care programs that I wrote about yesterday.

I don’t mean to suggest that we shouldn’t discuss the budgetary “small-fry.” It’s human nature to boil complex, macro-issues down to straightforward, micro-examples. And, after all, if you add up all the half-million-dollar programs in the North Carolina budget that are questionable or indefensible, you start approaching the threshold of “real money” in Raleigh-speak.

Take state funding for the arts – please (obligatory Youngman reference).

The entire budget for the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources is about $64 million in Gov. Mike Easley’s 2005-06 proposal. That’s less than one-half of one percent of the proposed $16.9 billion General Fund. If the department disappeared altogether, its absence would close only about 6 percent of the projected gap between what the administration wants to spend and what current tax law will generate.

But that doesn’t mean that state funding for arts and cultural programs isn’t a legitimate topic for debate. Downsizing the taxpayers’ obligation here is one of the steps fiscal conservatives should urge policymakers to take to fashion a more responsible state budget – yes, just one step, but an important one.

Culture, history, and the arts are highly valuable to me. Many other North Carolinians value them, as well. It is not obvious to me that, in the absence of coercive funding, programs of true artistic and educational merit would fail to attract sufficient voluntary support from those who actually care about or benefit from them. Indeed, I think it is wrong to force taxpayers whose tastes and interests lie elsewhere to subsidize ballets, symphonies, museums, galleries, and the like.

The one legitimate exception I can think of to the Separation of Art and State is the preservation of documents, artifacts, and buildings related to the history of state government in North Carolina. Because they involve the operation of our government in the past – and, one would hope, inform the operation of government in the present and future – it seems reasonable to devote an agency of state government to their preservation.

Accepting this principle would still eliminate a large portion of what the state currently spends in Cultural Resources. That would be welcome. In addition, I have always thought that the argument against coercive funding for the arts should not be limited to the benefits that accrue to taxpayers. It would also stress the likely benefit to art itself, as there is strong evidence suggesting that artists do better work of more lasting value when their bills are paid by willing patrons, rather than by government.

So, politicians, defund the arts – to benefit the arts.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal Online.