So, I got an email today from our dean of finance and administration, which went to all faculty, staff and doctoral students. There's already a university-wide hiring freeze, but now they're trying to find ways of saving some more bucks. If you're old enough to remember the WorldCom debacle, that was a company in dire financial straits (which they misrepresented to stockholders who got wiped out, and the president went to jail, but that's beside the point). So the president issued an order to save money by stopping maintenance of office plants.
At our school, the new directive is to cut back on food served at events (we normally get lunch at faculty meetings), if we have an invited speaker we can only take them out to dinner with three guests instead of six, and trying to cut back on office supplies. Sorry, but this is evidence of denial, not a serious response to mortal peril. At Boston Children's Hospital, they get it:
According to [Governor Maura] Healey’s administration, the hospital receives over $200 million in NIH funding annually, including $230 million last year. The proposed cuts by the Trump administration would cut that funding in half.
“That means halting research into the diseases that harm children,” Healey said. “Ripping away hope from families … who are facing a devastating diagnosis. These cuts are going to cost jobs. They’re going to cost lives, young, vulnerable lives.” It’s not rhetoric,” she continued. “It’s not hyperbole. It’s a fact.”
“Everyone needs to understand how very serious this threat is,” said Healey. “And everyone needs to understand the cuts that are being proposed in order to fund huge tax breaks for some of the richest people in the world are going to come on the backs of these patients and their families.”
Healey said the cuts have already had an effect in Massachusetts. Despite a federal judge’s temporary restraining order against the NIH for barring funding for medical research, Healey said the funding is still not coming through. Healey said that colleges and universities in the state are already reducing their budgets because of these cuts, which are stopping research and clinical trials in their tracks.
Now, Healey said that a presence from China, Europe, and the Middle East is looking to poach these researchers to move overseas. “That is against America First,” she said. “We are giving away assets to other countries instead of retaining them and supporting them here.”
In my previous post, I tried to understand why they are doing this. Yes, as Gov. Healey says, Peter Thiel doesn't want to pay taxes. But believe me, wiping out the NIH entirely wouldn't make a dent. The entire NIH budget is about $50 billion. The federal budget is $1.7 trillion. A trillion, in case you didn't know, is 1,000 billion. In other words the NIH is less than 3% of the federal budget. So no, that can't really be the reason.
3 comments:
And no one asks, "Would you be willing to pay an amount equal to 3% of the taxes you paid to fund the NIH, even if it is wasteful and inefficient?"
Another question I never see asked of folks who say that the Federal government costs too much is, "Exactly how much should it cost to do what it does now?"
After all, if I'm considering buying a house but the asking price is too high, I need to have an idea of what a reasonable asking price would be.
Additionally, if Peter Thiel doesn't want to pay US taxes why doesn't he move somewhere with lower taxes?
I'm betting the answer is that he couldn't make nearly as much money there as he can here. In short, this country has been a gold mine for him, but he doesn't think he should have to pay the owners of the property a reasonable fee for the right to dig here.
The drive to decimate seems like an insane confluence of libertarians, power-hungry megalomaniacs, racists, insane Christians and Vlad Putin (who controls Shitler and tells him what to do--I still marvel, stunned, at the fact that the two of them were allowed to meet, in private, with no accountability as to the content of the meeting). Putin-Shitler is one of George Washington's greatest fears come to life: a foreign power who controls the chief executive of the United States, who happens to be the most pathologically narcissistic individual in the entire country. And the media and the rest of the government facilitated it!--lets a completely venal psychopath sow the country's field with salt at the behest of an insane foreign mass murderer.
Therefore, this is what we have now become: the twisted, alternate reality between Shitler's ears ... because the helm was open and ripe for hijacking.
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