National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities Elimination Bill

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Nay for the record

O/c radical overhauls in how they operate and who they give the money to is needed and yes a cut in the amount of money they get may be a good idea, but I really can't see what good scrapping them does; the amount of money saved is peanuts.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

O.K, O.K... I understand you all feel strongly about this, but could you all please cool it down a wee bit? This is just getting ugly and reflects very badly on the Senate...

Personally I think this godawful mess shows very clearly that our priorities are in the wrong place, but that's just my opinion and I'm not going to shout it from the rooftops when it won't effect a thing.

So can we all just try to calm down please?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Does anyone else now think that on reflection making the Senate work out a budget was a bad idea?
It's not exactly made this thing anymore enjoyable and it certainly hasn't made it anymore realistic (quite the reverse actually...)

And yes, this is a u-turn...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

My main reason for changing my mind about whether to have a budget or not isn't so much whether it's fun to do so or not, but more down to realism and I suppose up to a point being fair; we have a budget every 12 months, right? It must be balanced, right? And so on. Stuff gets extremely fiddly as well. Thing is we have new Senators sworn in every 2 months, New Presidents every 4 months.
Can anyone else see the problem with that?

If we are going to keep a budget it really has to change; we'll have to do them more often but at the same time they'll have to be easier to do and try to avoid them turning into mindless slashing of programmes that the slashers know absolutely nothing about (or when the "left" takes control, mindless raising of taxes to pay for er... something...)