State or federal makes no difference to me. It's the intellectual concept that I'm questioning. We heard the same arguments against building the Morton Meyerson Symphony Center that we hear against raising funding for the NEA, but either way, it all ends up coming out of my paycheck. And the referendum business is a joke: they put new sports arenas on the ballot and sell them to idiots as some sort of magical, glittering, basketball-related Christmas gift that rich property owners will have to pay for, so of course poor people vote for them. Then, once it's half-built, suddenly, the cost estimate triples, and uh-oh! Turns out we have to raise sales taxes on your beer and cigarettes to pay for it. What a surprise.
All I'm saying is that if it's immoral for me to force someone at gunpoint to hand over part of his salary to pay for my preferred form of entertainment -- which I believe it is -- then it is equally immoral to force me to hand over my hard-earned money for pay for someone else's preferred form of entertainment. The whole concept should be abolished on every level.
Of course the dirty little secret, is that red meat types only get REALLY upset about government spending on stuff that they cannot relate too. I haven't read anyone getting upset about below market rate lease rates to ranchers who rent land from the feds for cattle grazing. I really haven't read much about government spending on the big ticket items either, ie medicare, medical subsidies, and social security, that made any sense. I haven't read any rants about spending on ethanol, and agricultural subsidies in general. I haven't read much about the maintenance of wasteful domestic military bases.
This isn't about spending. It is about folks' splenetic over-reaction to a culture war they want to fight, with targets that prove so ever elusive, that they really can't get satisfaction from the fight. So they seek enemies anywhere that they can possibly be found, and then go ballistic.