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November 10, 2005
just me and my radio
I spent quite a bit of time in the car today, which means that I spent quite a bit of time listening to the radio. NPR to be more precise. Since I was more awake than usual today, a few of the stories got me thinking.
The first was about this much-discussed Asian Bird Flu, or whatever it's called. I was thinking about how much it's going to cost to prepare for it while also trying to prevent it. I checked the numbers, and according to Our President, the price tag is somewhere in the range of $7.1 billion. I'll call that $7 billion, though they've underestimated the costs of pretty much everything else worth estimating. So, to sort of digest that a little bit, the proposal suggests that we borrow $7 billion to pay for preparations and prevention of a disease that hasn't yet proved itself to be a major threat to humans. Suffice to say that it's a potential threat. That's $7 billion more of debt for a potential threat. This digestion, so to speak, led me to this question: how much does Our government spend on current, real health threats. Well, here are some of the numbers:
This year, the government has spent $1.4 billion on "humanitarian" aid for Africa. That's for the whole continent of Africa.
This year, the government has spent $2.7 billion to combat the domestic AIDS pandemic (which, I may add, is very much real and not at all potential).
During the 2004 campaign, Bush proposed spending $2.8 billion to combat the global AIDS pandemic. Again, that's for the whole world. And it's a campaign proposal.
I'm just not so sure why we need to spend so much on a potential problem when we are yet to live up to the demands of our existing ones.
Another tidbit that I found to be, well, sort of ironic had to do with religion. They were doing a story about a string of robberies that have happened in churches around the city, and some dude they were interviewing came on and said something like, "You can't steal from a church and then get into heaven. It's just bad Karma." Little eastern philosophy never hurt the protestant establishment, I suppose.
And, alas, I heard a story about the Intelligent Design debate. Several folks were on the air talking about how they have been shunned from their scientific communities for suggesting that Intelligent Design may be a valid theory. Well, I would have to guess that the reason for that is that Intelligent Design doesn't make any sort of scientific claims. They made comparison's to the rejection of Newton's theories when they were first presented. I wonder if they don't see that in order to disprove a long-standing theory, another scientifically-based theory really has to supplant it. At least, from my understanding, that's how human history has worked up to this point.
This all leads to a much bigger question: When did we become such a black-and-white society? Why is it that people can believe in either science or religion, but not both? The same is true in politics. You're either in favor of the Iraq war or you're helping terrorists. You support the Supreme Court nominee or you're an obstructionist, partisan complainer. You're in a red state or a blue state. You're in favor of the use of replay in baseball, or you're an old fogey who's hanging on to the good ole days. Such strong divisions, don't you think? Is there no middle ground left any more? Can't we raise concerns without being nay-sayers? Can't we have replay for home runs only? Maybe it's always been this way in our Fine Country, but I sure don't remember it being this intense.
Posted by ben at November 10, 2005 4:48 PM