Appropriations vs. Pork – What’s the Difference and Why It Matters

October 1, 2024

Ken Shirk  -  AFM International Secretary-Treasurer

In the world of AFM policy wonks, the perception is that the AFM Secretary-Treasurer is in charge of International Musician. The reality, however, is that the AFM International Executive Board is the supervisor of the paper. My job is to make sure that we have the staff to produce it and get it into the mail to the membership—no small feat, and one that the staff accomplishes with aplomb.

As a full-time officer of the AFM, however, I contribute a regular monthly column. When I took this job, I determined that whatever I wrote in this column for the membership’s pleasure or irritation would be a reflection of who I am and what I believe, about things that I think warrant the membership’s active attention. That includes things of a political or societal nature.

I’m not a fan of writing pablum, blowing my own horn, or reciting dry financial statistics that can be easily found at the AFM website, the US Department of Labor, or the IRS. This column is, indeed, a bully pulpit, and I use it as such in as straightforward a manner as I am able. I write from 40-plus years’ experience as a freelance musician and union officer, which has shown me in excruciating detail, over and over, just how badly musicians get squeezed by government, industry, corporate influences, one-sided laws, fiscally and politically conservative politicians, paralyzed legislatures, market forces, and each other.

Not everyone will like what I say. Our membership is comprised of rabid liberals frothing at the mouth (like me), ultra conservative adherents to the farthest-right of thinking, and everything in between. I will not write for the middle ground simply to avoid exciting controversy on either side of the spectrum.

But I do respect that this union belongs to all the members and that members have a right to be heard—indeed, should expect that they will be heard. That is why any member who wants to contribute a cogent, on-point, and coherent response to anything printed in this paper will find a landing spot for their thoughts in the IM’s Feedback section.

One such response in last month’s Feedback section took issue with my unabashed doubling down on my call to members to vote liberal in the upcoming federal elections—primarily as a matter of survival of public funding for the arts, because conservative governments regularly try to slash or eliminate it. For example, President Biden this year submitted an increase for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) budget, and within weeks a Republican House member from the Midwest submitted an amendment to cut the budget by 25% (which together we all beat back, thankfully). The objecting reader implied that my viewpoint was pork-barrel thinking at the expense of all the other societal imperatives that our society faces today.

Pork barrel, or simply pork, is a metaphor for the appropriation of government spending for localized projects, secured solely or primarily to direct expenditures to a senator’s state or a representative’s district. Funding for the NEA’s budget clearly does not fall into that bucket. In fact, to double-check, I looked at Citizens Against Government Waste website (cagw.org), along with its periodical, the Congressional Pig Book. Nowhere within the Pig Book or the site does funding for the arts or the NEA appropriation get a mention.

Public funding for the arts is an important part of keeping musicians employed and earning a living. What we do is a cornerstone of our culture and society. I take the reader’s point—there are many existential issues confronting our world today, and I have very strong personal viewpoints about them. But my wages are paid by musicians to represent musicians’ interests, and I can attest that conservative legislatures in both our countries have always attacked arts funding. The age-old political policy of the AFL-CIO says it all: “Stand faithfully by your friends and elect them. Oppose your enemies and defeat them.”

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