A great deal of hoopla has been made by Republican politicians this week about government funding through the National Endowment of the Arts for the Cowboy Poetry Festival held every year by the Western Folklife Center. Sarah Palin blasted the spending, writing, “We’re $14,000,000,000,000+ in debt, yet rodeo clowns still want to fund Cowboy Poetry Party. That must be 1 helluva high natl priority shindig.”

Republicans attempting to promote their package of budget cuts in Congress are focusing on the Cowboy Poetry Festival, rather than other spending cuts that they are proposing. They’re suggesting that the proposed Republican budget cuts are mostly of programs like the Cowboy Poetry Festival. They’re suggesting that, if only programs like the Cowboy Poetry Festival were eliminated, the federal budget deficit would be gone. Let’s look at the facts, to see if they support this narrative.

Fact: The Cowboy Poetry Festival does not receive very much of its funding from the National Endowment of the Arts or the National Endowment of the Humanities. Charlie Seemann, Executive Director of the Western Folklife Center explains that only 7 percent of the festival’s money comes from the federal government. The budget for the festival is between $750,000 and $800,000 each year. So, on the high end, federal spending to support the festival is $56,000 in the federal budget.

Fact: The 2011 federal budget deficit is $1,645,000,000,000. It would require 29 million 375 thousand years for the cancellation of federal funding for the Cowboy Poetry Festival to pay for just this one year of the federal budget deficit. That’s approximately 50 times the entire human race – even including the time of Homo erectus, before modern humans.

Fact: The amount budgeted of the of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq this year, not including substantial extra costs incurred outside of the Department of Defense resulting from the wars, is $170,700,000,000. For the cost of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, every one of the 30,000 incorporated cities in the United States could hold 101 Cowboy Poetry Festivals this year, and still have something like half a million dollars extra to play around with.

Fact: The Republican plan cuts more than one billion dollars from Head Start education programs. That’s 20 percent of the budget for the successful Head Start program, but it’s less than one percent of the budget of the failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Fact: The Republicans are trying to cut one billion dollars from the system that delivers Social Security payments to Americans who have spent decades investing in the system.

The Republicans in Congress aren’t targeting the the wars in Afghanistan. They’re targeting the Cowboy Poetry Festival instead. They’re targeting education for America’s children. They’re targeting the system to support widows, disabled Americans and retired workers. What does that tell you about the seriousness of the Republican commitment to eliminate the federal budget deficit? What does it tell you about Republican values?