Big Bird was spotted on a Central Park West bench between 84th and 85th Streets with a sad sign on Wednesday. Donald Trump’s budget would defund PBS (Sesame Street has made fun of Trump for decades).
The “real” Sesame Street, by the way, is at 64th Street and Broadway.
Thanks to Louise Barder and our other tipster for the photos.
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Sesame Street makes nearly $400 million a year in merchandise sales. They don’t need our tax dollars.
End tax exemptions for houses of worship.
The author of this piece will probably surprise you, he’s hardly a progressive.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/opinion/stanley-mcchrystal-save-pbs-it-makes-us-safer.html?ref=opinion
We fill the coffers of WAR MONGER MACHINES like:
Bechtel,
KBR,
Academi (formerly known as Blackwater) and Halliburton
all make BILLIONS of $$, they don’t need our tax dollars either, yet I don’t hear any on the right complaining about that wasted money.
When you stop sending them money, we can talk about limiting PBS and other children’s programming.
PBS is such a small fraction of the federal budget, it’s insane that we are even talking about it. He’s just pandering to the right. Let’s talk about the 21 BILLION dollar wall instead.
If PBS is such a small part of the Federal budget, then why do people make such a fuss about Trump’s travel expenses which are an even smaller part of the budget.
I would argue that Trump has more of a right to travel to his home on the weekends than force taxpayers to pay for PBS. It’s the Secret Service that doesn’t allow him to travel on a budget.
Agreed, cut all funding to NPR as well.
I agree, let the wealthy upper west siders give their money to PBS if they want it so bad.
How does the cost of PBS and NPR compare to the cost of Trump’s weekly trips to his own properties to promote his own business interests? Talk about chutzpah. If he needs to get away so badly perhaps he could occasionally stay at Camp David or a place owned by someone else.
Hello Carlos,
Perhaps the criticism is valid that the increased costs of providing security to the President and the First Family that their extravagant lifestyle creates amount-to an undue burden upon the taxpayer. (Though I must question whether, if the First Family were one whom such detractors were favorably inclined toward, we would be hearing the same complaints from them.) By your logic, however, couldn’t one point-to any number of other expenditures, for which the costs to the taxpayer amount to far more than those of protecting the President and his family? If someone were to do just that, as an argument in defense of the costs of the latter (providing security for the First Family), would you accept such an argument? Would you even acknowledge it as a valid one? Somehow, I doubt that you would do either.
I hope you can see that that is exactly what you are doing here, however. Once you start down this road of saying “But what about this expense that’s so much greater?” and “What about that expense that’s…”, there is simply no end to it. It is a manifestly, demonstrably illogical line of argument. Two wrongs do not a right make. And the existence of a greater expense that one considers unjustified (even if it truly is unjustified) does not negate arguments against a lesser expense that one considers justified (whether or not it actually is).
Enjoy your weekend,
Independent/ UWS Dissident
Big Bird was also there last Thursday afternoon
LOL A rich Bird on CPW drinking his 12 dollar latte.
Interesting article in today’s times ‘Why Authoritarians Attack the Arts’
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/06/opinion/why-authoritarians-attack-the-arts.html
At 0.004 percent of the budget this has no impact in fiances. They see art as a threat and need to destroy it. Drumpf may start his own degenerative art list soon.
You want to use the power of government to force people to pay for the arts. In other words, pay for the arts or go to prison. Really? If you want to fund the arts, wonderful, go right ahead. I do by my own volition. But I don’t want to force other people to. That’s immoral.
The authoritarians are the ones who want to use the force of government against their fellow citizens to pay for their own goodies.
But this attitude is common among the moochers on the UWS. They expect someone else to subsidize — or pay for altogether — pretty much everything they need or want, whether housing, food, healthcare, the arts even. What’s particularly galling is that they somehow think they are taking the moral high ground while doing it.
It would seem that you don’t understand the concept of taxes.
Everyone pays. Some of what your tax dollars fund will be things you’d prefer not to fund.
I’ll bet there are benefits that you receive through tax revenue that make you a “moocher” too.
Reality is hard but you have to pull on your big-boy pants and deal with it.
But that’s just like people on the Right. They don’t want taxes to pay for stuff unless they want that stuff.
[replaces previous]
Mark wrote,
What you had articulated in your April 6th comment above is a valid argument– and indeed the prevailing one– for why everyone is required to pay taxes, even when they are used for expenses that one does not approve. I found your attempt to apply that argument to the case-at-hand, a completely different one, to be fallacious. I demonstrated this in my reply of April 6th that appears above. Your reply to that comment of mine, in which you completely ignored its substantiative content and chose, instead, to summarily dismiss the entirety of what I had written with your (transparently tendentious and gratuitously insulting) “overwrought emotions” remark, only strengthens and actually confirms my points.
Jen:
I pay enormous sums every year in taxes. And yet, I hear constantly from politicians (and others like yourself) that I don’t pay my fair share. In reality, the top 1% of income earners, whose share of gross income is 19%, pay nearly 40% of the total income taxes (and the top 5% pays 60%).
I am quite consistent in my views on taxation and spending. Taxation is using force to take someone else’s property: i.e., theft. I don’t want someone to steal my earnings, nor do I want to steal that of others. There are many causes which I support, but I would never sanction using the power of government to force someone else to. That is immoral.
The purpose of taxes is to fund the government (for someone who is apparently so fond of taxation, you have difficulty articulating the purpose yourself). As to government, Frederic Bastiat put it best:
“Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else.”
Yup.
Lots of words to basically say “I have no idea what’s going on”.
WOW!!! This guy must be fun at parties, huh??!? amazing
Anyway, you can try to use all the 50 cent words and antiquated grammar, etc… trying to impress us regular folk but wrong is just wrong. Sorry…try again.:)
Mark: You’re a big boy, alright, whining when someone else doesn’t want to pay for your Sesame Street.
I understand the concept of taxes very well: it’s a way for people like you to steal my stuff and rationalize to themselves that it’s not actually stealing.
And no, not everyone is a moocher. Some of us have to pay for all the goodies government doles out, after all. Besides, ‘everyone does it’ is hardly a great moral argument for theft.
You just confirmed you have no idea about he concept of taxes. Only when spending suits you.
The most offensive part of this and other of your posts – you assume that anyone pro-funding something you don’t like is a leech and is on welfare. Please stop. I probably paid much more in taxes as you ever did.
the right wingers never complain about the particular forms of welfare payments they like. Such as: the mortgage interest deduction. or the lower tax rate on capital gains. (yes, it’s a form of welfare.) or the special tax loophole for “carried interest”, which provides huge benefits to the managers of private equity funds — some of the richest people in the country.
or that real estate tax loophole that Trump uses which allowed him to “carry forward” a ONE BILLION dollar loss in one year — a paper loss, which he spread around over many years to avoid paying taxes. most welfare economists would consider this a form of “welfare” payment.
“The right wingers”? The Right is not a monolith. The establishment/ Beltway/ corporate/ Chamber-of-Commerce/ globalist Right does indeed heavily favor any number of taxpayer-funded, government subsidies to corporations, banks and various other business and other private entities. And in doing so, that segment of the Right does indeed often exhibit much inconsistency and hypocrisy.
There are other segments of the Right, however, whose members are not guilty of such inconsistency and hypocrisy– either because they are consistent in opposing government intervention in economics (Cf. the Austrian School of economics; “Libertarians”, of whom Ron Paul is representative) or because they are not “free market”/laissez-faire ideologues or absolutists in the first place and do not purport to be such. The latter includes the nationalist, populist strain of the Right that I identify with. A growing number within this segment even support single-payer health care.
So then, based on that argument, I take it that there is nothing that you would protest the taxpayer funding of? That no matter how much you may oppose– even on principle and even fundamentally— a given project, policy or initiative, you would never cite the fact of it being publicly funded (i.e., by the taxpayer) as at least one of your objections? Really?
No citizen (at least no citizen that is law-abiding and tax-paying) has any less right than any other to protest any given instance of public spending. Likewise when it comes to availing oneself of any legal and legitimate means that may be available to register said protest or attempt to stop said spending. Whether in contacting one’s elected representatives, organizing and rallying the public to a cause or any number of other possible actions, no particular political or ideological entity — whether Left, Right, Center or anywhere in between– possess any less rights than any other.
Independent: I love to see the Austrians mentioned here! Do you follow the Mises Institute? They are having their 35th anniversary celebration in NYC in October. The speaker lineup looks very interesting. Ron Paul isn’t on it, but I’m hoping maybe he’ll be added.
I think that in your overwrought emotions you missed my point.
The dude who plays Big Bird isn’t homeless.
He lives in Lincoln Towers.
The original “dude” died
Trump funds Trump!!! Most self serving president EVER!!
Why are so many of you bitter and angry. Your comments are so obnoxious. PBS provides amazing programming that is not available anywhere else. Of course a lot of it requires that one’s brain needs to be used to absorb some of the information. Sorry that some of you just don’t have that ability. Some of you need to get a life.
well said.
it’s amazing how many of the good things in this country some of these people are willing to destroy.
PBS is great, but it does not need to be funded by my tax dollars. De-fund PBS, de-fund NPR.
End foreign aid to ALL countries.
PBS “great”? Sure, some of its programming can be good. Some excellent, perhaps. But can even the best of what PBS has to offer outweigh the insidious Cultural Marxist indoctrination of its vaunted children’s programming, for example?
I realized that even though we both dissented from the prevailing views in these parts, there nonetheless were considerable differences between us in our views and positions. But I must say that this post of yours disappointed me. I would not have expected you, without qualification, to call PBS “great”.
In any event, as a fellow “Hebrew”, I will wish you and others here a kosher un freilechen Yom Tov.
By the way, I have always been curious about your chosen posting name, “UWS Hebrew”. Is the point that you want to identify yourself as a Jew in order that people see that not all UWS Jews fit the Leftist stereotype? If so, why “Hebrew” and not “Jew”?
Except if de-finding PBS and NOR, how about no tax breaks for people like UWSHebrew? After all this money can go serve much better purpose . Personally I can barely stand his selfish greedy tone about anything human.
Can’t Soros support PBS? I hear he has a lot of disposable $.
That’s great! A great message!
Without government support there would be no Bach, Beethoven. Mozart, etc. Simple as that.
dj wrote,
I’m glad you seemed to have appreciated my comment but I’m afraid that the answer to your question is no, I do not follow the Mises Institute. For one, as I noted in my comment, I identify with the nationalist and populist Right and do not, as a rule at least, subscribe-to Austrian School type economic views. (I do give them credit, though, for at least being consistent, as I had noted.) Economics and tax policy are altogether outside of the areas in which my primary interests, concerns, passions and knowledge lie. Sorry if I have disappointed you.
Let me add, however, that if you are also a Ron Paul man on foreign policy, then our views in that area, at least, would surely converge and align with each other to a great extent. In that case, you would almost surely join me in my great unhappiness (to put it mildly) about the President’s about-face on Syria. Should there be any plans for an anti-war demonstration in the neighborhood, I hope WSR will publish the info. I would seriously consider joining such an event– but only if I were to have assurance that it would not include any Trump-bashing; any other Leftist messages; any vulgar antics of the type that were on display at the “Women’s March”; or any kind of violence or vandalism. How many committed anti-war individuals are there on the UWS who would be ready to join people from across the spectrum in such a demonstration?
“I would seriously consider joining such an event– but only if I were to have assurance that it would not include any Trump-bashing; any other Leftist messages; any vulgar antics of the type that were on display at the “Women’s March””
So in other words, you want assurances that participants will not be permitted their First Amendment rights.
Perhaps the event can be held in Yemen.
Brevity is the soul of wit.
Even though my views are almost always different from the ones of @Independent, I agree with his views about how anti-war march should be – no silliness, unnecessary rhetorics, personal attacks. Just address the matter.
“Even though my views are almost always different from the ones of @Independent, I agree with his views about how anti-war march should be – no silliness, unnecessary rhetorics, personal attacks. Just address the matter.”
Yet your responses are reactionary and you continue to make personal attacks throughout this forum. You can’t have it both ways.
Personal attacks? Maybe.. guilty…as many of us of this forum. Still agree it is not right. However, it is totally unacceptable at march among other matters as I was agreeing with @Independent.
Reactionary? I showed your post to my friends and they were laughing hard. I’m a long-time democrat but not left of the left. You called my comments reactionary just because I occasionally agree with conservatives on some of the matter? Am I supposed to wear a Pink hat with ears not to be branded reactionary?
I don’t care about your political affiliations. I was referring to your personal attacks on others in this forum while praising someone for not making personal attacks. Glad that you and your friends had a good laugh.