British Columbia's 'liberal' government has announced its plans to make staggering to arts funding over the next year.

I created a dataset from the September Budget Update (bcbudget.gov.bc.ca/2009_Sept_Update/) to get a better handle on how these cuts fit in with the rest of the budget.

There are 114 items in the budget with expenditures of $1M or higher. Arts & Culture funding moves from the 57th highest expenditure at 19.5M in 2008/2009 to the 100th highest expenditure in 2009/2010 with less than 3.7M in funding.

When the 114 expenditures are ranked by gain or loss, the picture becomes even more clear. With a loss of more than 80%, Arts & Culture is suffers the second worst cuts - with the worst being another Arts-related line item!

This video render is meant to give an idea of how the tool behaves and performs - hopefully I will be able to release it online shortly.