I have nothing at all against big-budget movies. But when extremely expensive movies are bad, as most of them are, I get a little dispirited. By the relative waste involved. Because the budgets of a big "event" movie -- $100 million, $150 million, even more -- always reminds me of the amounts spent by the government trying to invigorate the rest of the culture.

What I mean is this: the NEA and the NEH, the two federal agencies with responsibility for all funding for dance companies, folk music archives, inner-city writing programs, documentary film festivals, local orchestras, art museums, everything in the arts and humanities -- spent a total of $105 million and $120 million, respectively, for the whole year. Or about 80 cents per citizen.

As I've said before, I'm not an advocate of giving government grants directly to artists to make art…the inherent arbitrariness and ideological aggravation that are involved seem like more trouble than they're worth.

But what about museums? Doesn't pretty much everyone agree that museums are grand and necessary institutions? And that they deserve and depend on government funding?

So here's a motherhood-and-apple-pie arts-funding scheme for President Bush to embrace as his own, it's a plan that I think would make almost everyone happy, from squishy-minded liberals to his librarian-schoolteacher wife to regular, hardworking people just scraping by.

The president could announce that under his proposal -- a great gift to the working families of America -- admission to every museum in America will henceforth be free of charge.

Museums, he could say, are literally conservative in the very best sense -- they cull the artifacts and stories from local and world cultures judged to be most excellent and most interesting, and conserve them.

The 2002 Free American Museums Act, Bush might say, would be a gift to America's children in particular -- like the gift England has already given its children.

England's 17 national museums have abolished entrance fees for kids. In the two years since then, more than a million additional English schoolboys and schoolgirls have visited the museums, a 10 percent increase every year.

At the end of last year, a good number of British museums eliminated admission fees for everybody.

And in just the four months since, attendance has risen by 75 percent...and additional 1.4 million museum visitors in London alone.

The same act of largesse in this country -- but doing it more broadly, relieving every one of America's 8,000 museums of the need to charge admission fees -- would cost $1 billion a year. From political Washington's perspective, that would be $1 billion sluiced out into every state and every congressional district. And it would be a visionary, big-tent gesture of magnanimity that would generate better press and far more good will than the Bush Administration will ever get from the income tax rebate checks hitting the mails right now.

A billion dollars? A pittance, relatively speaking. About equal to the combined cost of making and marketing just four of this summer's big movies -- Spiderman, Minority Report, and the sequels to Star Wars and Men In Black.

This is Kurt Andersen in Studio 360.

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