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After hearing variations of this private charity/welfare argument made by conservative family members, I spent a lot of time looking into this question. I found it was most helpful to look at the history of welfare.EARLY HISTORY OF WELFAREIn fact, during the 19th century, there was already a combination of public and private welfare systems working in the United States. Churches and private charities did play a major role, but I’ll list a few of the state-run systems. For example, after the Civil War, the government created pensions for retired veterans. During the 19th century, the government also played a major role in providing disaster relief for fires, floods, storms, droughts, famine, etc. And in those early years, state governments constructed poorhouses, which were meant to provide a very minimum level of support for poor, able-bodied men. But they eventually became the default support for orphans, the mentally ill, and the elderly without income or family to support them. (Sadly, the conditions were really terrible, and thankfully this practice was ended). Between 1911 and 1920, 40 states passed laws establishing “mother’s pensions” for single women with children. At that time, lawmakers and the public agreed that this state welfare would best serve the families and society by allowing children to remain in the care of their mothers and prevent juvenile delinquency. Unfortunately, this system was flawed in that it excluded a large number of divorced, deserted, and minority mothers and their children.Then the Great Depression hit. And when the Great Depression began, there were already about 18 million elderly, disabled, and single mothers with children already living at a bare subsistence level in the United States. Previously, state and local governments, churches and private charities had helped these people. But during the Great Depression of the 1930’s, about 25% of the country was unemployed. These state and local governments and private charities were now completely overwhelmed by the number of needy families seeking food, clothing, and shelter. Food riots broke out, husbands and fathers deserted their families, and homeless families lived in public parks and shanty towns. Desperate times began to put into question the old American notion that if a man worked hard enough, he could always take care of himself and his family.In addition, most elderly Americans did not have personal savings or retirement pensions to support them in normal times, let alone during a national economic crisis. Those few who had money set aside for retirement often found that their savings and investments had been wiped out by the financial crash in 1929.In 1931, President Hoover said that any response to the economic crisis must “maintain the spirit of charity and mutual self-help through voluntary giving”. This is very similar to the argument made by conservatives today. But, as noble as that goal may be, it failed. The churches and private charities were inherently incapable of meeting the demand for social services on their own. When President Roosevelt took office in 1933, he acted swiftly to try to stabilize the economy and provide jobs and relief to those who were suffering. The first two years of his “New Deal” emphasized providing work relief for the millions of unemployed Americans. Federal money flowed to the states to pay for public works projects, which employed the jobless. Some federal aid also directly assisted needy victims during the Depression. The states, however, remained mainly responsible for taking care of the so-called "unemployables" (widows, poor children, the elderly poor, and the disabled). But states and private charities, too, were unable to keep up the support of these people at a time when tax collections and personal giving were declining steeply. By 1934, there was a general recognition that the local, state and national government would need to bear the primary responsibility for the relief of unemployment, absolute poverty, and social insurance. Churches and charities would fill in the targeted, narrow, yet important gaps in this broad baseline of coverage.In 1935, FDR went on to pass the Social Security Act, which set up a federal retirement program for persons over 65, unemployment insurance, and called for guaranteed benefits for poor single mothers and their children along with other dependent persons. Amended in 1939, the act established a number of programs. Unemployment compensation and AFDC (originally Aid to Dependent Children) are two of the programs that still exist today.In 1946, President Harry Truman said “This Government, through its public welfare program, has long since accepted its responsibility to see that no citizen need face hunger, unemployment, or a destitute old age. The word “charity” has regained its old, true meaning – that of good will toward one’s fellowman; of brotherhood, of mutual help, of love”. These are the ills that Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food assistance, and our other public systems of social insurance set out to combat in FDR’s New Deal and President Johnson’s Great Society. And for a few decades, Americans understood that these systems benefit both individuals and the greater public.RECENT HISTORY OF WELFAREIn 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. Under the act, the federal government gives annual lump sums to the states to use to assist the poor. In turn the states must adhere to certain criteria to ensure that those receiving aid are being encouraged to move from welfare to work. The initiative helped lower the number of families on welfare; 20 years ago, 12 million families used the program, and today that number has dropped to 3.5 million.Since job training and child care are important components of such programs, proponents acknowledged that "workfare" programs save little money in the short term. They contended, however, that workfare would reduce welfare costs and move people away from government dependency over the long term. However, some commentators attributed much of the success to the strong economy of the late 1990′s that produced jobs for those coming off welfare. They also noted that welfare recipients were employed in mostly low-wage jobs. Moreover, as the economy took a nosedive in 2001 and 2002, unemployment rose. By the end of 2002, welfare caseloads had increased in 26 states.THE GREAT RECESSIONThe Great Recession in 2008 actually offers the perfect case study in why the voluntary private sector can’t adequately provide for the welfare needs of our population. As the Great Recession began, private charity did not step up to provide for the unemployed, but rather fell. In fact, charitable giving fell 21% overall between 2008 and 2010. The role that the federal government played during this time was incredibly important in effectively easing the pain felt because of the crisis. There is a system in place whereby “automatic stabilizers”, such as unemployment insurance and food assistance, maintain an income floor and security for people. These stabilizers, in turn, also decline automatically as the economy starts to recover. There are plenty of good arguments to be made regarding how the government could have been more effective in their response to the Great Recession, but it is pretty clear that under these economic circumstances, a voluntary system would have failed.CURRENT REALITIESThis is really important. The media and our lawmakers do not like to talk about these issues, so I think most people are in the dark about how bad things are for a significant portion of Americans.· 1 in 4 Americans makes less than $10/hr. Nearly 2 in 5 existing jobs pay less than $15/hr.· Nearly half of new jobs are low wage jobs.· Almost half of all Americans (more than 146 million Americans) are in the poor-but-working class. This term, the “working poor”, is defined as “those whose incomes do not cover basic needs: foods, clothing, housing, transportation, childcare, and healthcare”.· From 2007 to 2010, the median net worth for middle class families dropped by nearly 40%. That’s the equivalent of wiping out 18 years of savings for the average middle class family· In any given month, 1 in 4 children in the United States receives SNAP benefits. Nearly a third of preschoolers participate in SNAP.· 78% of Americans, working full-time, are living paycheck-to-paycheck.· 34% of Americans have no savings at all.· Half of all households with Americans 55 years old and older have no retirement savings at all.· Currently, there are 6.4 million part-time workers who would rather have full-time jobs. This number of involuntary part-time workers is almost 45% higher than in 2007.All of these statistics were true (only to a slightly lesser degree) before the start of the Trump administration, but conditions are steadily worsening. The United Nations has recently released a report on poverty and inequality in the United States, and it is illuminating. Statement on Visit to the USA, by Professor Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights*CHARITABLE GIVINGIt is important to note that voluntary charity has an important role to play – it can function with ultimate flexibility and sensitivity to specific situations, specific individuals, and local community needs. (Like helping out a family whose house has just burned down or for a unique financial need, etc.) But it would be under a tremendous burden if all government-run social programs were ended. For example, charity will exist in some places more abundantly than in others, but the government has the ability to provide a more universal baseline of coverage. Studies have found that only 1/3 of charitable giving actually goes to the poor. The largest single category of charitable giving in the US goes directly to support the operations of churches (around 32% of donations). But most churches will give the majority of it to missionaries, ministry programs, the pastors & staff salaries, facility maintenance and utilities, helping to build other churches, etc. (Some churches can barely afford to keep the lights on). And a small portion might go to local charities for the poor.And as far as the charitable givers, the poorest 20% of Americans donate around 3.2% of their income, while the wealthiest 20% give on average only 1.3% of their income to charity. And in times of economic disaster, those bottom earners are going to be hit with joblessness or job insecurity. In addition, the poor tend to give to religious organizations and social-service charities, while the wealthy prefer to support colleges and universities, arts organizations, and museums. Last year, not one of the top 50 individual charitable gifts went to a social service organization or to a charity that principally serves the poor.CONCLUSIONThis Conservative/Libertarian philosophy that a purely private nineteenth-century system of charitable and voluntary organizations did a better job providing for the common good than the twentieth-century welfare state is just wrong. It’s incorrect as a matter of history by ignoring the complex interaction between public and private social insurance that has always existed in the United States. It also completely misses why the old system collapsed and why a new one was put in its place. And it fails to understand how the Great Recession displayed the welfare state at its most necessary and how a voluntary system would have failed under the same circumstances.Ultimately, I think it boils down to Libertarian ‘magical thinking’. They don’t want to pay taxes for comprehensive social welfare programs that don’t benefit them.**While answering an excellent question in the comments section, I came across this statistic about the SNAP (food stamps) program that is very relevant to this conversation. In 2017, “93% of SNAP spending went directly to benefits that households used to purchase food, and 6.5% went to state administrative costs, including eligibility determinations, employment and training and nutrition education for SNAP households, and anti-fraud activities”. 93 Percent of Federal SNAP Spending Is for Food I think this makes for an excellent argument for why government welfare programs are more efficient than private charities.**And, I just want to add a disclaimer. I’m not an expert in this field or a historian — I’m just someone that is intellectually curious and occasionally finds the time to research issues of interest. I gathered all of this information a couple of years ago for my sister, who had posed this question to me and is relatively open-minded. If this was a term paper, I would be failed for plagiarizing a lot of great writers and researchers since parts of it are simply copy/pasted from their articles. I took care to make sure that the sources and the history are accurate, but I didn’t bother to document my resources. I will add citations for the CURRENT REALITIES section as soon as I can. Thanks for reading!

First…Stop it.Artificial intelligence is not "intelligence". And it's not "artificial consciousness".Everyone is afraid that AI will suddenly wake up, get upset, and take over the world.Or that AI will wake up and take all of our jobs. This will happen. But without the "wake up" part.Below I describe what real AI is.If we want to understand the “existential threat” we first need to know what AI is.Then, if you are at a cocktail party and someone says, "but what if robots are intelligent?" you can argue with facts, mixed with a little bit of alcohol.---------A) STATISTICSStatistics is at the heart of most AI programs.Just like statistics is at the heart of a lot of human decision making.For instance, if you see clouds in the sky, your brain thinks: "Hmmm, the last 100 times I saw clouds this dark, it usually meant it was about to rain".When you think like that, you are using statistics to make the decision: "I should _probably_ go inside now."I'll give an AI example: Siri or Alexa. How does Alexa understand the words you just said?In 1989 I was visiting Carnegie Mellon to decide if I would go to graduate school there.One of the graduate students, Kai-Fu-Lee (now one of the most famous investors in the world and I would check out his excellent recent TED talk on AI) showed me what he was working on:It was speech recognition for the 60 or so commands that might happen on a Navy battleship (ten guesses as to who was funding his project).When you say the word "Fire!" a sound wave is created. When you say the word "hello" a sound wave that looks different is created.If 100 people say "Fire" and 100 people say "hello", all of those sounds waves are stored in a database.Now, if a brand new person says "Hello" the computer program needs to determine if that person said "Hello" or "fire".There might be 10 different attributes of every sound wave. It breaks the new person's sound wave into those 10 attributes.Then it compares that "vector" of 10 attributes with all of the vectors in its database for "Hello" and "Fire!"It uses a statistical technique called "Hidden Markov Analysis" to determine if the sound wave is more like the "hello"s in the database or more like the "Fire!" in the database.Then it says to itself, "This guy said "Hello". "It then has a line of code that says, "If someone says "Hello" Then say "Hello" back".Additionally, it adds your "Hello" to its database.Your "Hello" might be slightly different than the other 100 "Hello"s so it just learned a new way to say "Hello". That gives it greater ability in the future to recognize the word "hello".In other words, it "learned".So it used Statistics to hear you, code to respond to you, and database technology to learn. There's no real intelligence there but it feels like it's intelligence.Multiply that by 30 years and millions of patterns and computers a million times faster and you have Alexa and Siri in today's kitchens.Ask "Siri" what gender it is.-----B) EVALUATION FUNCTIONI just mentioned about language recognition. But how does a self-driving car work?Every second it has to make a decision. Does it move forward? Does it brake? Does it swerve to avoid an accident? Does it turn left?How does it get from point A to point B?1) Google Maps. - Using GPS it knows where it is. And it puts itself on Google Maps.2) List all of the possible routes. This is a "hard" problem in the mathematical sense (there's no way for it to guess the fastest route. It has to list each route and then sort by the shortest. )But now computers are so fast what would normally be a slow decision (drive me from this corner in Piscataway, New Jersey to the capital building of Sacramento, California) now just takes seconds.3) Waze. Use Waze to eliminate the routes with too much traffic.4) Start driving.5) Statistics: Every microsecond it uses statistics to see if there is blank space or an object that must be avoided or a traffic sign that must be followed.6) Decide what to do according to the code. For each traffic sign, it has code that tells it what to do (if a sign says "Stop" it Stops for a second, uses Statistics to see if any traffic is happening on its sides (with radar and cameras to provide the images). )If there is a person standing in front of it, it might just stop.If there's traffic it didn't expect, it might trigger the program to re-route.If it's blank space it will just keep going.If there's a baby crossing the street and it has to swerve to avoid hitting it, but if swerving will cause the car to hit a truck, killing the passenger in the car, then the "AI" of the car is dependent on the ethical decisions of the programmer of the car.In other words, in every situation, it determines it's options, then uses an "evaluation function" programmed by a coder, to determine which option has the most successful outcome (move the trip forward, don't kill anyone).Eventually the evaluation function will NOT be programmed by a human coder.Instead, through thousands of experiences of other self-driving cars, the experiences plus the outcomes will all be put into a central database.When a new experience is encountered, the code will look up that experience in the database and the database will spit back the best possible outcome.The code will learn statistically what the best outcomes are of each possibly decision and change the code accordingly and send updates to all self-driving cars.-----C) TREESThe hardest game in the world is a board game called GO. With chess, if a computer can evaluate a billion possibilities a second, it can be a world champion level player.But a Go game can involve trillions of possibilities. How did Google make a program, Deep Go, to beat the world's best Go player. This was thought to be impossible.And yet Google did it.For any game, a computer program first builds a tree of possibilities. Much like a human would.A human thinks: "If I make this move in checkers, my opponent might respond with A, B, or C and then I can do D, E, or F and then my opponent can do G, H, I if I do D or it can do J, K, L if I do E and I'm never going to do F.A computer doesn't select as well as a human so it builds the FULL tree. Meaning, what are ALL of the possible moves it can do, what are ALL of the possible responses of my opponent, etc.And then it uses a programmed evaluation function to look at the leaves of the tree it built.Whichever move results in the best leaf of the tree (as determined by the evaluation function) that is the move it makes.That's how computer chess worked for decades. I'll get to the secret sauce in a second for how computers conquered chess.And then after that I'll describe how computers miraculously conquered Go.It's only a miracle until science can explain it. It's only "intelligence" until it can be coded by a programmer.D) HARDWAREEverybody thought for decades (including many Nobel Prize winners) that the best computer chess programs would be developed when scientists encoded the knowledge of the best chess players in the world into the evaluation function.How does the world champion value a position instead of a weak player?This turned out to be wrong.The MORE code in the evaluation function (i.e. the "smarter" the evaluation function was from a human perspective) the SLOWER the program.Which meant a smaller tree would be built, which meant less possibilities would be analyzed.What really allowed the programmers at IBM to build "Deep Blue" which beat Garry Kasparov in 1997 were two things.Both related to hardware.a. Computers got faster.b. First the creators of Deep Blue developed software. But then they made the software into hardware, building the logic right into the hardware infrastructure of the computer. Making the program 100x faster than it would have been.And finally, they made the evaluation function STUPID in order to use less code so the hardware could value more positions.Then, before anyone caught on to their "artificial intelligence" they retired Deep Blue right after it beat the World Champion of chess.As hardware gets faster, artificial intelligence gets "smarter".[as an aside, I once gave a date a chip that was the initial chip for “Chip Test” - the “ancestor” of what became the best chess computer, Deep Blue. She was weirded out.]----INTERLUDEWhat I just described is all the basics. You can stop now.The rest of artificial intelligence is simply combining the basics to make more advanced techniques.-----E) STATISTICS + TREERemember the TREE from computer gaming. And STATISTICS from speech recognition.Now let's go to the impossible game of Go. Google developed the program "AlphaGo" to win at Go when everyone else thought it would take another 20 to 50 years.First, remember Kai-Fu Lee who worked on speech recognition. And later developed Apple's first attempts at speech recognition in the 90s?At one point in his grad student days, he was getting tired of navy battleship commands (as one does) and decided to focus on building a program to play Othello.He ended up building the world champion of Othello.He took a lot of games, let's say a million, and put them in a database. And each position from each game, he would label, "winning" (if it was a position on the winning side) or "losing" in a massive database.He would identify several attributes of each position (how many white pieces, versus black pieces, how many corners were controlled, how many pieces were on the sides, etc).Now, if the computer was playing a brand new game, it would determine all the attributes of that position, then use Hidden Markov Analysis (remember: speech recognition) to match that position to the database.If the position pattern-matched a "winning position" then it would make the move that would lead to that winning position. If it matched a "losing position" it would not make that move.That program became the world champion of Othello.AlphaGo took it one step further.It put in the positions of millions of Go positions and did the same sort of breakdown.It used faster hardware to speed up the process.Then, once it became pretty good at GO, it played BILLIONS of games against ITSELF to put many BILLIONS of new positions into the database. In other words, it "learned".Now it was ready to play Go. It crushed the world champion------That's basically it. That's all of artificial intelligence.Let's say a bank wanted to fire all of the employees in charge of lending. And replace them by artificial intelligence.How would the bank lend money?Well, there's 100s of millions of loans already out there. And for each person who has ever borrowed money I know:- their age- where they grew up- what their job is, are they married?- are they divorced? do they have kids?- How often do they move? how have they done on prior loans like this? and I even know what they buy on Amazon and how often they fly to Las Vegas.I can put all these vectors in a database and divide them into people "most likely to pay back the loan" and people "most likely to default".Then, just like speech recognition or the Othello program above, I can use statistics to determine who I should loan money to.And if I say "no", I don't have to explain. On to the next one!---Let's say I want to fight terrorists.I already have examples of many terrorists who trained in the US and then went on to perform or attempt acts of terror.I know everything about their bank accounts. How often they transferred money. How often they traveled. How often they took out cash versus using a debit card.And so on.I can build a vector of attributes of what a terrorist bank account looks like. Then I can match new people against that database of vectors of terrorists.Believe me, every time you do a bank transfer, some AI program is out there trying to determine if you are a terrorist.----This is all that AI is.It is nothing more. It's not "intelligent" from a human sense. It's not conscious, nor will it ever be.Here's how AI has improved in the past forty years (and how it will improve the next 40):- statistics has gotten better- methods of building the trees have gotten better (this was the subject of some of my research when I was in graduate school)- hardware has gotten faster- more data is available about everything.What is changing the fastest is data. The land grab of modern society is not land, or gold, or oil.It's data.I have been invested in many companies that collect and sell data. I was an early investor (and on the board of) bit.ly, as an example. bit.ly accounts for about 2-5% of all Internet traffic.Believe me when I say, data-driven companies know how many strawberries you ate last summer.And right now that data is used mostly to target you for ads about sneakers. Or politics.But this is AI 1.0. Soon that data will be used to target your every movement, your every want, your every need.Amazon Prime won't be about delivering you what you want tomorrow. Amazon Prime Plus will be about delivering you what you want yesterday.Police 2.0 will be like the movie "Minority Report".Even art and music will be driven by AI that studies the neurochemical responses to music you like to music you don't like. And then compose accordingly.Where will humans still be unique?I don't know. Ask the humans with AI implants that enhance their brains so when they look at you they know exactly what answers will make you happy.BUT… will AI replace jobs?The answer (at least in the next decade or so…) is NO.Look at recent examples:A) Many people were worried ATM machines would replace bank tellers.Instead, the banks made so much in profits they opened up more branches than ever, creating new jobs.B) Will autonomous delivery services cost jobs.Right now there are millions of truck drivers involved in delivering goods. With autonomous delivery, less people will go shopping, more people will be required to shop in the aisles, finding products for people.Obviously this is not a high-end job. But this replaces the fact that less cashiers and drivers will be needed.Meanwhile, there will be more high-end jobs. More maintenance engineers for the cars, customer service, marketing, etc.C) Ecommerce. Branding will become less important (branding is VERY important when everyone is shopping at the big box store but advertising will have to become more clever and digital) so the millions in profits that are generated from AI will filter down to more people starting e-commerce ventures and the ancillary businesses associated with that.)Final conclusion:AI will probably create a “have” and “have not” situation, particularly as humans start to use AI to increase mental and physical capacityThis is probably a net NEGATIVE for society as the higher classes will be able to afford “super AI” capabilities, making them demi-gods to lower-classes.AI will not destroy as many jobsInstead, massive profits will be generated, which will be soaked into the economy through a rising stock market, increase in opportunities, etc.We can’t predict. ATMs didn’t destroy bank tellers. VCRs didn’t destroy movie theaters. Spotify/Pandora/etc did destroy music stores and record sales but that was replaced by growing revenues in music tours.Education needs to scale up. AI, programming, and the higher-end jobs that will be created need to be studied. College is not the place to study these opportunities. Instead: Khan Academy, Lynda, CodeAcademy, Coursera, etc should become accredited and get people ready for the opportunities that will arise.

Skipping to the end:Yes. The tax money that we all are required to pay to the Federal Government should be spent on programs whereby a bunch of educated intellectuals try to tell everyone else what they ought to think and how they ought to think. I say it this way specifically since I wish to address common criticisms on their own terms in this answer and not speak past them.The general concept of "public broadcasting" and the rationale supporting it is a very good one.On the children's education front, I have first-hand insight into the level of scrutiny that PBS-distributed children's programs are subjected to in terms of proving that they are effective at achieving pedagogical goals and in demonstrating positive impact. The bar is far higher than anything I've encountered in the private sector. They set the standard.There are certain "inefficiencies" (to put it mildly and politely) in the broadcast paradigm. That's true in for-profit television as well, but when cash is coming from government grants, foundation grants, and donations from "viewers like you," certain excesses are much less palatable. Although it will take awhile longer before anything matches the reach of broadcast television & radio, technological progress is leading us to better and more cost-efficient models of content distrubtion.I love many of the programs that are distributed by PBS (public TV) and Public Radio – and there are several where I get tears in my eyes. I've had to work really hard to keep this answer clean and not resort to appeal to emotion in lieu of making an argument. My "top ten" list is at the end.Now let's start at the beginning:I offered an answer to Obama-Romney Presidential Debates (October 2012): Is cutting federal funding to PBS an important spending cut? I addressed the question at a general level of American History and Politics of the United States of America – there are people who are still furious about the Barry Goldwater loss to Lyndon Johnson in 1964, and despite the fact that CPB funding is a drop in the ocean when it comes to the Federal Budget, the fact that it's a highly visible Great Society initiative makes an attractive target. I didn't, however, say much about what I personally think. Then Rahul Shankar had to go and call me out. So here we are.In the context of the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election, I'm not at all beyond using pictures of sad-looking Sesame Street (creative franchise) characters to engage in blatant appeals to emotion to rhetorically club Mitt Romney (politician). Such things are completely within bounds of the "Pirate Code" for political discussion.http://www.quora.com/soapbox/319777http://www.quora.com/soapbox/A-Summary-of-the-Debate-for-Emily-Smith-Who-Didnt-WatchThat, however, is not what we're here to talk about. This is a policy conversation that needs to be had independent of that.We need to define a few things:Public Broadcasting: Television, radio, and other electronic media outlets whose primary mission is public service. It's a general concept.The Corporation for Public Broadcasting: A private corporation in the United States that is Congressionally chartered to distribute Federally budgeted funds to further public broadcasting. The CPB does not own stations and does not produce programs.PBS (public TV) - The Public Broadcasting Service: A non-profit American public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership over the network. PBS is a network that distributes content to its affiliates. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBSNPR (public radio) (National Public Radio), APM (American Public Media) and PRI (Public Radio International): Three networks of public radio stations that all produce and distribute public radio content to those stations. NPR is the largest network with 900 members, but prominent programs are distributed by the others. For example, This American Life is distributed by PRI and A Prairie Home Companion (radio) is distributed by APM.Affiliate: A local member of one of the networks that serves a specific market.Producer: Whoever it is that makes the content that gets distributed by the networks and broadcast by the affiliates. Sometimes the producer is one of the affiliate stations, sometimes it is the network, and sometimes it is an independent company – like Sesame Workshop (formerly known as the Children's Television Workshop), which is the producer of Sesame Street (creative franchise).We also need to address the elephant in the room...or whatever it is that Mr. Snuffleupagus is. THE PRODUCTION OF SESAME STREET IS SELF-SUPPORTING AND HAS BEEN SINCE 1978. The Federal Government DOES NOT pay for the production of Sesame Street. Big Bird is a red herring – except that he is yellow and not a fish. If you want to get technical, a small amount does flow from CPB via PBS to Sesame Workshop to cover content acquisition, but it is very little.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sesame_Street#Fundinghttp://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2012/10/04/sesame-workshop-big-bird-lives-on-we-receive-very-little-funding-from-pbs/http://www.forbes.com/sites/larissafaw/2012/10/04/romney-may-like-big-bird-too-bad-he-doesnt-know-sesame-doesnt-receive-pbs-funding/As a matter of fact, Sesame Street started airing in 1969. PBS did not start broadcasting until 1970. Sesame Street came first. Not every show is Sesame Street, though, and not every Producer is Sesame Workshop.(Amended 3/16/2017: In 2015, Sesame Workshop made a deal with HBO to have HBO fund all of its production and then provide to PBS at no charge after a nine month exclusivity window. See Sesame Street’ to Air First on HBO for Next 5 Seasons)Back to the core matter at hand: you want to know why public broadcasting should be funded by the Federal Government? Here's how the 90th Congress of the United States of America explained it:http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCODE-2011-title47/html/USCODE-2011-title47-chap5-subchapIII-partIV-subpartd-sec396.htm47 U.S.C. §396. Corporation for Public BroadcastingThe Congress hereby finds and declares thatit is in the public interest to encourage the growth and development of public radio and television broadcasting, including the use of such media for instructional, educational, and cultural purposes;it is in the public interest to encourage the growth and development of nonbroadcast telecommunications technologies for the delivery of public telecommunications services;expansion and development of public telecommunications and of diversity of its programming depend on freedom, imagination, and initiative on both local and national levels;the encouragement and support of public telecommunications, while matters of importance for private and local development, are also of appropriate and important concern to the Federal Government;it furthers the general welfare to encourage public telecommunications services which will be responsive to the interests of people both in particular localities and throughout the United States, which will constitute an expression of diversity and excellence, and which will constitute a source of alternative telecommunications services for all the citizens of the Nation;it is in the public interest to encourage the development of programming that involves creative risks and that addresses the needs of unserved and underserved audiences, particularly children and minorities;it is necessary and appropriate for the Federal Government to complement, assist, and support a national policy that will most effectively make public telecommunications services available to all citizens of the United States;public television and radio stations and public telecommunications services constitute valuable local community resources for utilizing electronic media to address national concerns and solve local problems through community programs and outreach programs;it is in the public interest for the Federal Government to ensure that all citizens of the United States have access to public telecommunications services through all appropriate available telecommunications distribution technologies; anda private corporation should be created to facilitate the development of public telecommunications and to afford maximum protection from extraneous interference and control.Our common interest – as manifested by 47 U.S.C. §396 – isn't about television or broadcasting. It's about education, and making educational and cultural materials accessible. Easy access to education, information, and instruction is both an imperative for employment & GDP growth and makes for a better society. Both capitalistic free markets and democratic governance break when people are ignorant and uninformed. Education is a matter of national importance and critical infrastructure that supports the economy. The American Dream is a hollow vision when U.S. Citizens aren't equipped to compete.(Frankly, if you spend any time at all on Quora and I have to convince you that you personally benefit from other people being educated, then what are you doing here?)People often raise issues on of the amount that government in the U.S. spends on Education proportional to other things. I have issues with the proportion we spend too:http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/piechart_2012_US_totalA total of 15% of Government spending – when you factor in all levels – is directed to education. That's more then we spend on defense and second only to what we spend on health care. (Go ahead and read that again – especially my very good friends who lean left. We do invest more into education than we do on bombs.)We spend a total of $910.2 billion annually on Education and we're getting inadequate results out of just about everything...except Public Broadcasting. I have first-hand insight into the level of scrutiny and rigor that PBS' educational programming put through and that $445 million is an amazing deal when so much else isn't working. We're getting tremendous of reach and a lot of educational bang for the buck out of the five hundreths of a percent of all of the Education spending we do.Education is a topic I'm very passionate about and I could go on and on here. I've got another post I'm planning to write at some point, but the point I want to reinforce before I digress too far is that – despite rumors to the contrary – we throw a lot of money at this problem, and public broadcasting actually delivers. My argument is NOT that it's only whatever tiny percent of the Federal budget; my argument is that it's a tiny percent of what we collectively spend on Education and we get great value compared to the rest of what we're doing.I'll have a lot more to say on the general issue of education policy in the future, but now back to our regularly scheduled programming.The next piece we need to talk about is access.As I said before, Sesame Street will be fine – but that doesn't matter if people are unable to get to Sesame Street.Some people point to educational Cable channels (like those run by Discovery Inc. (Mass media company)) and to an emerging array of options on the Internet.Regarding cable:http://www.mediacenteronline.com/attatch/Cable10.indd.pdfRegarding the Internet:http://www.census.gov/hhes/computer/publications/2010.htmlUnlike either cable or Internet, Broadcast television has near universal penetration into American households. Over the course of a year, according to Nielsen (company), 91% of all U.S. television households - and 236 million people - watch PBS. The demographic breakdown of PBS' full-day audience reflects the overall U.S. population with respect to race/ethnicity, education and income. http://www.pbs.org/about/background/Via the PBS and Public Radio networks of broadcasters, that investment in educational (and informational and cultural) programming actually gets out there and makes it available.We need to address the perfectly valid questions about private foundations and individual donors filling the void.There's a bit of history that has mostly gotten overlooked in this debate over the years: the private sector actually created non-commercial public broadcasting when the Ford Foundation created the Educational Television and Radio Center (ETRC) in November 1952. That became the National Educational Television and Radio Center in 1958, and simply National Educational Television in 1963. In 1966, Ford Foundation began to withdraw its support. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Educational_Television.As that began to happen, the Carnegie Corporation of New York sponsored a 15 member panel to investigate the future of educational television. That panel – which included corporate leaders – recommended legislative action. http://www.current.org/wp-content/themes/current/archive-site/pbpb/carnegie/CarnegieISummary.html , http://cspcs.sanford.duke.edu/sites/default/files/descriptive/public_broadcasting.pdfPrivate foundations - e.g., Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Gates Foundation, Doris Duke, Melville Charitable Trust, and countless others – are often willing to offer varying degrees of support year over year, but being relied upon as a bedrock restricts them from undertaking other activities. It's not their cup of tea.(Besides, I can hear the conspiratorial complaints now about how a handfuls of private foundations are trying to influence our youth without any transparency or public accountability. We'll wind up having Congressional hearings over it all anyway.)As for individuals.... <sigh>We now head straight towards the heart of one of the core philosophical debates about American governance.236 million people watch PBS in a given year. The CPB appropriation for FY 2013 is $445 million. If that money were cut, every one of those people would have to contribute $1.88 annually to make up the shortfall.WAIT – WHAT??? THAT'S IT???That's correct. One dollar and eighty eight cents per person. Per year. (On top of what regular donors are already giving) If every viewer donated the amount of spare change that they might find lying in the street to their local PBS and Public Radio affiliate, the Federal funding issue goes away.There are two things though:They (we) do this.They (we) don't do this.91% of the 97.5% of U.S. households with television – or 88.75% of American households – watch PBS. And those households pay taxes to the Federal Government. (Go right ahead; I dare you to say "47%" to me.) The government takes a portion of those taxes and appropriates it to the CPB. The 12.5% of households that never ever watch PBS may be a bit irked by that. However, $10.8 billion has been put towards the Corporation for Public Broadcasting over the 43 years since 1969 and that has bought a lot of kids learning ABCs & 123s, a lot of people getting inspired about the Universe through shows like Cosmos & NOVA, a lot of people learning about America through Ken Burns (documentary filmmaker) specials, a lot of people appreciating fine cooking though Julia Child (TV personality), and lots and lots of happy little Bob Ross (artist) clouds. Let me know when the F-35 Lightning II – estimated lifetime cost = $1000 billion (otherwise known as $1 trillion) – finally goes into production and then we'll talk about how the Federal budget process works. That's a program we've been pouring money into and haven't seen anything out of it.Flipping to the next point: do you think all those pledge drives would be necessary if everyone who watched or listened was willing to chip in two bucks? People don't do it. People should but people don't.So do we pull the plug?.....Well?Here we begin to tread a bunch of slippery slope arguments. Some will say that if we expect everyone to simply do the things that they ought to do then we'll never live in a civilized society and we might as well give up on the whole grand experiment of American democracy. Others will say that by protecting people from the consequences of their actions or inactions that we're already on a slippery slope that jeopardizes our civilized society so we might as well give up on the whole experiment of American democracy.I don't want to go to either of those places. How then do we move forward when many of our great debates can be reduced to this elemental question?The best answer I have – which will be unsatisfying to those who crave certainty – is by taking it one step at a time. There are lines and boundaries that we all have to balance individually and all have to balance together. I understand that pragmatism can be really frustrating to people who are looking for ideological clarity and yearn to be in a perfect world that we don't live in. (If you take issue with that stance, please reread Oh, the Places You'll Go! before getting on my case.)In the world we live in, I think we need to spend collective funds trying to persuade individuals to eat more fruits & vegetables, to exercise more, and to embrace education – and part of that is making those "good" things more accessible and available to everyone. How do we determine what is good? There are people who spend time studying things that have positive effects and things that have adverse effects and we drag them before peer-review panels and Congressional subcommittees and we make them defend their conclusions. And then we put those studies out there and put them into action.There are two other things to consider here in terms of individual action:Big MacsThe murder of Kitty GenoveseFor the first of the two above items, I'm of course alluding to America's 30+% obesity rate. With all due respect to the fine folks at McDonald's (fast food chain) who are perfectly welcome to offer and promote their array of fast food products, there are plenty of examples where people don't choose what is "best" for them of their own accord and it has broader consequences for the rest of us. (It also doesn't help that moderation went out of style in this country in the early 1980s.) These individual choices – all combined – are a major contributor to skyrocketing health care costs in this country. It is not too different with education, thinking, and general media consumption. Absent active encouragement from social institutions of more constructive behaviors, a non-trivial percentage of the population will opt for the "lowest energy required at the lowest price presented" offering available to them. The Public Broadcasters are such institutions. As for "lowest energy required" offerings that come out of the private sector, I have two words: Jersey Shore. There may be 57 million channels these days, but there is still nothing on.An aside: I'd like to observe that churches can be great social institutions for encouraging more constructive behaviors; unfortunately, though, some churches and religious denominations are constructed on questionable foundations, too resistant to change, and/or are otherwise dangerously rigid. Some of those even have their own television networks. That's a conversation for another day, though.That brings me to my second point about individual action: there is a well-documented sociopsychological phenomenon known as Diffusion of Responsibility. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility Individuals tend to assume that either others are responsible for taking action or have already done so. The phenomenon tends to occur in groups of people above a certain critical size and when responsibility is not explicitly assigned – and is more likely to occur in conditions of anonymity. One of the most famous examples of this phenomenon was the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese; the crime had 38 witnesses and no one called the police because everyone assumed that someone else was taking care of it. When you expand that pool to a broadcast television audience and the level of urgency is that of a pledge drive, it's easy and low energy to think, "someone else has got it covered."If your reaction is, "if people won't pay then we shouldn't offer it," then please loop back to the bolded, "So do we pull the plug?" above.Moving on.You may be wondering about perceived bias.Which bias? The accusations of liberal bias or the accusations of conservative bias?http://mediamatters.org/research/2005/06/16/noonan-claimed-everyone-knows-pbs-has-liberal-b/133349http://www.usnews.com/usnews/culture/articles/050623/23cpb.htmhttp://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2671The Public Broadcasters get hit from both sides of the political aisle, which I take as a sign of doing something right. The content that gets put out there is subject to the scrutiny of a partisan Congress – and for all of the threats, CPB funding keeps increasing over time – even through the early 2000s where the ostensibly conservative Republican Party controlled both houses of Congress and the White House. http://www.cpb.org/appropriation/history.html If you consider the fact of PBS' receiving tax dollars via the CPB an affront to Conservatism, there's not much I can do for you if you don't buy the case I've made thus far.I strongly believe that the benefits are well worth the costs, but...Read Marco North's answer. I come out in a different place in my conclusions, but I don't dispute his observations. The benefit of the broadcast medium is wide audience access and nearly 100% household reach. The downsides are high barriers to entry, high capital costs to maintain, and lots of middlemen in the operating and production structures.Yes. I am obliquely stating that there are some places where money hemmor - OH MY GOODNESS! Look overhead! Is that an F-35??? No - my bad. Just a pigeon. We still don't have any F-35's.The future heralds something different, though. When Internet household penetration gets to 95+% and approaches the reach of broadcast, the benefit of the expensive broadcast infrastructure goes away and we can focus entirely on promoting quality content which is being made in abundance online for a tiny fraction of the production cost. The future is Khan Academy, Coursera, MITx, Udacity, iTunes U, Podcasts, random how-to videos that individuals upload to YouTube, and expansive conversations about politics and public affairs on Q&A Websites.It is technically possible for many of the people reading this to shoot & edit a video on their smartphone and then post that video for public consumption. Once we get to the point where everyone has the ability to do that and access to what everyone else is doing, it's a whole different ballgame. We're not there yet (http://www.internetworldstats.com/am/us.htm), but the day is coming.CODA(If you don't know what that is, you should probably listen to a classical music program – perhaps on a public radio station.)This answer went through more drafts and course adjustments then pretty much anything else I've written here. Somewhat ironically, the biggest reasons that it was challenging for me to approach this subject in a balanced and reasonable fashion are a host of balanced and reasonable people that have entered my life via public broadcasting. Here's my top ten:#1: Fred Rogers (Mr. Rogers)I count Fred Rogers as a personal hero. I LOVED Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood as a child and his attitude to creativity, make believe, and imagination. I went to college in Pittsburgh, PA – in Mr. Rogers REAL neighborhood. WQED Pittsburgh, where the show was filmed and produced, was between my apartment and the Carnegie Mellon campus. The School of Drama did the annual "Television Project" over at the station, and the set for King Friday's castle was along the wall. These days, I have a wooden "Neighborhood Trolley" sitting on my window sill as a constant reminder of that model of amazing human decency and sincere commitment to bettering the lives of the young.#2: LeVar BurtonSome people hold that LeVar Burton's most important cultural contribution is his role as Kunta Kinte in the Roots TV miniseries. Others will say that it was as Geordi LaForge in Star Trek: The Next Generation (TV series). Without a doubt in my mind, the most important work that Burton has done has been on Reading Rainbow (Children's Television Show). The show featured great books for children to read and children themselves reporting on their favorite books. (A child reporting on Gila Monsters Meet You at the Airport is etched in my own childhood memory.) These days he's continuing the work in the form of an iPad app: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/reading-rainbow/id512350210?mt=8#3 Jim HensonC'mon. You KNEW he was going to be on this list.#4: Neil deGrasse Tyson (astronomer)And you had to guess that he was going to be on this list too. Following in the footsteps of people like, Don "Mr. Wizard" Herbert, Bill Nye, and most importantly his mentor Carl Sagan, Tyson is currently America's foremost voice for Science. And he makes it AWESOME.#5: Sylvia Poggioli#6: Lourdes Garcia-NavarroI'm pairing #5 and #6 together. I listen to NPR most of the time when I'm driving and part of the reason for that is because actual Journalism occurs. The foreign correspondents on NPR – most notably Poggioli and Garcia-Navarro – provide what I hold to be the best coverage and insight into what's going on in the broader world. I'm incredibly grateful for their work and the stories they bring home.#7: Terry GrossFresh Air is what an interview show ought to be. Terry can sit for an hour with just about anyone and plumb the depths of their life story, interests, and opinions. Interview "segments" almost anywhere else usually deliver little except talking points or a plug for a new book or movie. Terry Gross gets their story told. Amongst my personal favorites are her two interviews of Tom Waits – where she's practically giddy: http://www.npr.org/2011/03/04/134236977/tom-waits-a-raspy-voice-heads-to-the-hall-of-fame , http://www.npr.org/2011/10/31/141657227/tom-waits-the-fresh-air-interview#8: Louis RukeyserMy appreciation of Rukeyser is mostly nostalgic, and a large reason that he makes this list now is because of the current ridiculous state of what passes for financial reporting. Remember when this person, who exuded sober discipline and responsibility – at least in the mind of an elementary school kid who left the TV on after kids programming was over – was a public face of Wall Street and Investing?#9: Kai RyssdalWith my #8 in mind, amongst the people still doing a good job with making business and financial news both insightful and interesting is American Public Media's Ryssdal. When I'm working on site somewhere, Marketplace is usually what I listen to during my evening commute. Ryssdal does a great job with feature stories and connecting the dots of the day's events to market responses.#10: Tom & Ray Magliozzi (Click & Clack, the Car Talk (talk show) guys)I close my personal top ten with two guys who would probably take offense at being called "balanced and reasonable." They're retiring now after 35 years on the radio. C'mon – admit it. You know you love 'em. And you know you've learned from 'em too.Honorable mentions: Ira Glass (who I imagine is way up on other people's lists), Peter Sagal & The "Wait! Wait! Don't Tell Me!" Cast, The Radiolab Team, and Garrison Keillor.And that, as they say, is a wrap.