Trump Ends Arts Funding and Balances Federal Budget
President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that the United States will eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts, instantly balancing the federal budget apart from the remaining $1.8 trillion deficit, which administration officials reclassified as decorative spending. The roughly $200 million cut will provide enough money to operate the federal government for about 50 minutes, or permanently under the White House’s new accounting method, which measures savings by applause rather than subtraction.
Trump described the decision as the largest fiscal achievement since Americans began affording groceries by buying fewer groceries. “Two hundred million dollars is a tremendous amount of money, enough to pay off the debt, rebuild every airport and give every American a beautiful refund,” Trump said. “The accountants say it is not enough, but these are very negative accountants using numbers from before I fixed numbers.” Treasury officials said the remaining national debt would be removed from budget presentations because repeatedly displaying it had failed to make it smaller.
White House economists explained that federal arts funding was uniquely responsible for annual deficits because paintings, orchestras and community theaters do not manufacture aircraft carriers or deductible business lunches. Grants previously supporting museums, rural arts programs and veterans’ writing workshops will now be converted into savings several thousand times their original value through a fiscal process known as saying the figure confidently on television. Officials said the same $200 million could simultaneously finance tax cuts, border enforcement, farm subsidies, infrastructure repairs and a ballroom, provided Congress did not compare the promises on the same spreadsheet.
Budget analysts were instructed to surrender their calculators before reviewing the plan, while lawmakers prepared commemorative checks displaying additional zeroes for economic confidence. Administration officials said future deficits could be eliminated by cutting other extravagant programs, including weather forecasts, library chairs and the portion of scientific research that produces unwelcome measurements. The cancellation of one small cultural agency has erased the federal deficit, retired the national debt and made every American independently wealthy.
* None of the quotes in this article were spoken by an actual person. More info.