Where Your Taxes Aren't Going -- Health And Education
richardreeves.com
BY RICHARD REEVES
Columnist
Universal Press Syndicate
April 25, 2003
WASHINGTON -- The new Marcus Emergency Response Center of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta opened earlier this month, just in time to coordinate information on SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) cases in the United States.
Your government in action.
Well, not quite. The new operations center exists right now only because of the generosity of Bernard Marcus, the retired founder and chairman of Home Depot, Inc., which is headquartered in Atlanta. He put up the $4 million for the center because the government of the United States would not or could not.
In fact, the Bush administration is in the process of cutting the budget of CDC units, including the Center for Infectious Diseases, which is facing a $12 million reduction from $343 million to $331 million in President Bush’s new budget proposals. In the words of Senator Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, "The administration came in this year with a budget proposal that’s essentially an abandonment of the CDC."
That’s where Bernard Marcus came in. He is, by the way, a Republican, too, one of the party’s largest individual contributors. He was serving on the board of the CDC Foundation on September 11, 2001, when he learned that CDC staffers who rushed to New York after the destruction of the World Trade Center to prepare for possible epidemics had no working emergency communication system. They had to use pay phones to talk to Atlanta. The same thing happened a month later when the agency tried to deal with anthrax outbreaks in Florida and Washington.
That is one small battle in the war against government begun by President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and continued with great fervor by President Bush and his team. Making war on other countries and cutting taxes inevitably means that there is less money available for public services at home -- even for public health, probably the most effective government program of the last hundred years. Clean water, better sanitation and vaccines against polio, influenza and other diseases were among the great achievements of public agencies, federal, state and local, in the 20th century.
Now it seems it’s up to Bernie Marcus, who lost his job at the age of 49 and and started Home Depot with a friend named Arthur Blank. Marcus, who is also a significant contributor to Emory University and many Jewish causes, brought in other donors for CDC, including Dell and Hewlett-Packard. Both companies supplied equipment for the new state-of-the-art response center.
Good people, but they are hardly a substitute for a superpower government. "We shouldn’t have to depend on handouts from the private sector to afford a modern facility for disease surveillance," said Barry Bloom, dean of the public health school of Harvard University, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.
No, we shouldn’t, but that is the way things work when the government is run by people who are proudly anti-government -- men and women determined to reduce not only the size but the role of civilian government. Not that they care, but they are managing a trickle-down public service crisis that is hidden in the budget lines of states, municipalities and boards of education.
Perhaps the most revealing example of where we are going these days is that more and more children (really their parents) are being forced to pay fares on school buses.
Yeah, public education is still officially free, but parents are being forced to spend more and more for books and such and now to get on the yellow buses. More than one-third of school districts in Massachusetts are now paying about $200 per child per year beginning in the 7th grade to use school buses. Governor Mitt Romney, another Republican, hopes to move toward balancing his budget next year by eliminating all state subsides to local school services. More than 300 California districts are now charging for bus rides. Students are paying in New Jersey, Montana, Hawaii, Kansas, North Dakota and Utah, as well.
That’s the way it is in the richest nation in the history of the world. The president says no child will be left behind. But a lot of them will have to walk every day to catch up.
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RICHARD REEVES is the author of 12 books, including President Nixon: Alone in the White House. He has written for the New York Times, the New Yorker, Esquire and dozens of other publications. E-mail him at rr@richardreeves.com. |
