What a Kroc

The late Joan Kroc, widow of McDonald's founder Ray Kroc, has left a record $200 million of her estate to...the government. Like many liberals, she evidently did not feel that the government took enough of her money while she was alive, so she's thrown 200 big ones at National Public Radio.

The nonprofit organization, which will disclose details of the bequest at a news conference this afternoon, called the donation the "largest monetary gift ever received by an American cultural institution" in a brief announcement to its staff yesterday.

Sensing my objections to NPR, the Washington Post story hastens to point out:

About half of NPR's revenue comes from public radio stations that pay annual dues based on the size of their audience. The balance comes primarily from private donations and corporate contributions. The organization receives less than 1 percent of its funding directly from federal tax dollars. The federal Corporation for Public Broadcasting supplies about 15 percent of the budgets of NPR's member stations, however, which then pay some of that money to NPR.

Terrific. If their tax-siphoning is as inconseqential as claimed, perhaps now as a result of Mrs. Kroc's largesse NPR would be willing to take zero tax dollars. And perhaps, as Wayne used to say on Wayne's World, "monkeys might fly out of my butt."

Incidentally, if NPR's listenership is truly 22 million people per week as they claim (which, by the way, is a wildly exaggerated figure), why don't they try to support themselves like any other American business, rather than mooching off taxpayers and corporations?

Perhaps if they actually had to pay their own freight, we'd see how many listeners they really have.