Response to former Lt. Gov. Barbara Lawton's April 10th comment in Sturgeon Bay
Dear former Lt. Gov. Barbara Lawton:
https://doorcountypulse.com/arts-schools-potawatomi-tower-come-up-at-listening-session/ describes your comment:
“The Wisconsin budget for the Arts Board hasn’t been increased since 1992 – I’m embarrassed to say not in my tenure in office [as lieutenant governor, 2003-11] either,” Lawton said. “So it’s a struggle in an industry that is a $9.6 billion industry in our state, employing over 80,000 workers.”
Lawton said Wisconsin’s per capita funding for the arts of 14 cents ranks 50th out of 50 states.
“I’m hoping that you would use your relationships and influence with the Joint Finance Committee to talk about how we can actually make an investment that’s going to have a huge economic input,” she said.
Using your figures, 14 cents per capita for Wisconsin residents comes out to $10 per each of the 80,000 workers. If Wisconsin hiked its arts spending ten-fold, that would be $100 per worker. Currently it costs $9.6 billion to employ the 80,000 workers; at a cost of $120,000 per worker. Not that each of the workers earns $120,000, because that is going to include expenses besides labor. You said that the lack of a high funding is "a struggle". This doesn't make sense because that the difference between $10 or $100 is just a rounding error at a cost of $120,000 a worker. Some of the cost comes out to ancillary businesses, but it is still a cost none-the-less to somebody, somewhere.
https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/DECD/Arts_Culture/Creative-Economy/CT-AEP4-Impact-Study-Final-Report.pdf says on page 14 that for every $100,000 of direct spending by nonprofits, only 2.69 fulltime jobs are created, using the national average figures. If Wisconsin were to increase its arts funding from 14 cents to $1.40 cents, it would employ only 200 more people (full time), at a cost of nearly seven and a half million dollars in additional state funding. 200 more jobs is just a rounding error for an 80,000 worker-large industry. The 200 jobs figure is inclusive of the total economic impact; even though the money spent will bounce around some with a quantitative economic model of various inputs and outputs, you still get only 200 jobs.
Yet other industries also spread money around, until it finally leaks out of the local area. Agriculture has a more powerful ratio of input-to-output than leisure industries; if economics is the reason, why not spend the money on agriculture instead?
I searched on the internet to see if the 14 cents statistic was really true. It turns out that the 14th cents figure is just one of the ways to measure it. https://www.axios.com/2022/03/17/public-funding-for-the-arts-is-up has a map showing that by another measure, Wisconsin spent 30 cents per person on its state arts' agency in 2022, close to Iowa's figure.
https://jps.scholasticahq.com/article/21506-the-arts-as-a-polarized-issue-and-the-role-of-political-trust-in-promoting-the-arts-evidence-from-the-united-states says that the reason conservatives at times have not supported public arts funding is because of trust.
Trust would be something you could work on, if arts funding is to be protected from political winds of change. Likewise, increased trust might help with persuading Republican legislators to increase arts funding.
Boards of institutions seeking public funding could voluntarily document that they represent conservatives roughly proportional to their area. Artists receiving public funding could decide not to make art which doubles as propaganda.
Similarly, the Facebook page for a special interest group pushing more arts funding is disproportionately concerned with Milwaukee and Madison. These locales are competing with Door County for some of the same clientele. Would increased state funding end up subsidizing the competition? Geographical apportionment of state funding could be another trust issue you could work on.
There should be other redeeming virtues for public arts funding besides economics. State expenditures on the arts should be justified in other ways. It is useful to keep an eye on the economics, but if economics really were the reason behind funding the arts, Wisconsin would fund it less rather than more.