A lot of shadow artists in this thread seem upset that a relatively tiny bit of money is supporting some people that chose a difficult life producing art over a stable career.
If I had a choice between some of my tax money supporting artists versus lighting my money on fire to pay an army of bureaucrats doing not much of anything, I'll always choose the artists. I've seen contracts for more money that do a lot less for society.
That's not the choice though. The bureaucrats are getting paid either way.
The choice is whether or not you want your taxes raised by a small amount so that other people can live their dreams while you sit in a cubicle for 40 years.
I agree, it'd be nice to cut the bullshit jobs, but you're right that that's not going to happen.
But I still am down with paying a little more to support people that are providing to our overall culture. I'm friends with many artists here in NYC, and in most cases everyone is broke. You'll see profiles written about them in the NYT, or see them on panels at major cultural institutions, but that's just the outward appearance. In reality, they're struggling to pay rent. Sometimes they're sleeping in cars when out on tour doing work because they can't afford a motel.
Many of us don't have the courage to do what they do. It's not like they're sitting around, flush with cash, day dreaming all day. They're doing extremely difficult work (personal, spiritual, cultural), and we all benefit from it. I'm down with supporting it. Of the tens of thousands of dollars I pay in taxes every year, an extra $40 isn't a big deal.
But the key word here is "chose". Those artists can already choose to do a different job - if you want people to be burdened with supporting someone's choice to be an artist then you need to make an argument why that benefits those people.
If I had a choice between some of my tax money supporting artists versus lighting my money on fire to pay an army of bureaucrats doing not much of anything, I'll always choose the artists. I've seen contracts for more money that do a lot less for society.