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. I actually like you, too. But I’m not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for it.
— Mitt Romney, making a promise to gut funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting during last night’s debate. Some perspective: The $450 million per year that would be “saved” by gutting funding for PBS would not be enough to buy even a sixth of one of the U.S. Navy’s new Zumwalt-class destroyers, which cost $3.4 billion each.
