President Trump wants to take away Big Bird’s subsidy and instead give the Muppet a tax cut, budget director Mick Mulvaney said Wednesday.
Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, delivered his comment while defending the president’s fiscal 2018 budget request and its phase-out of funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in a hearing before the House Budget Committee.
The CPB, Mulvaney told the committee, does “extraordinarily well” and can survive without government funding.
“I can assure you Big Bird makes more than everybody in this room,” Mulvaney told lawmakers.
Later, Rep. Brendan Boyle, D-Pa., took up Mulvaney’s quip.
“The good news is — if Big Bird really is a billionaire, he is standing to get a huge tax cut from the Trump budget,” Boyle said.
Mulvaney, though, was happy to run with that characterization.
“Big Bird actually does get a fairly large tax cut, and we want him to,” he responded. “Because Henson Associates, that owns Big Bird, has been paying the highest corporate tax rate in the world for the last several years. And we want them to have more money to reinvest in that kind of creativity that created Big Bird in the first place.”
Jim Henson created the Muppets. Today, the characters are owned by Sesame Workshop, which is a nonprofit organization.
Episodes of “Sesame Street” now air first on HBO, a property of Time Warner. But they are also shown on PBS, which is partly funded by the CPB. Cuts to the CPB could conceivably affect “Sesame Street’s” appearance on public television.
The CPB and Sesame Street have long been symbols used by both parties in debates over the federal budget. Republicans have called for defunding the CPB since at least the 1990s, although public television enjoys broad public support.
