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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: sylvester80 who wrote (1222178)4/19/2020 9:25:50 AM
From: RetiredNow  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 1582684
 
Except here's the problem...

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The Obama Administration Proposed $72 Million In CDC Cuts Back In 2012

Matt Vespa

“Republican cuts kill;” that’s an ad run by the Agenda Project Action Fund. Of all the things in the world, liberals have decided to politicize a deadly, incurable infectious disease to attack Republicans. Guy and Katie have written about the absurdity of this claim; even the Washington Post gave it four pinocchios:
  • This ad is simply a more extreme version of a new Democratic talking point — that GOP budget cuts have harmed the nation’s ability to handle the Ebola outbreak. It mixes statistics — the budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “cut” $585 million (the ad offers no date range) — with disturbing images of the outbreak and various Republican leaders saying variations of the word “cut.”
  • On many levels, this line of attack is absurd.
  • Obama’s Republican predecessor oversaw big increases in public-health sector spending, and both Democrats and Republicans in recent years have broadly supported efforts to rein in federal spending. Sequestration resulted from a bipartisan agreement. In some years, Congress has allocated more money for NIH and CDC than the Obama administration requested. Meanwhile, contrary to the suggestion of the DCCC ad, there never was a specific vote on funding to prevent Ebola.
If we are going to talk about spending, let’s bring in the CDC’s priorities, like why has more money gone to the “community transformation grant program” than programs that help fight and prevent infectious diseases. Also, as Guy wrote:
  • Republican budget "cuts" simply slow down the overall rate of spending increases. Even the dreaded sequester -- which was President Obama's idea, changes to which he vowed to veto -- barely dented spending at all. Reason's Nick Gillespie has an excellent post full of facts and charts to refute the DEADLY CUTS! hyperventilating. To put things in perspective, President Clinton's last budget (FY 2000) called for $1.77 trillion in federal spending. A decade-and-a-half later, we're steadily marching toward $4 trillion in outlays, having accrued well over $17 trillion in debt, with tens of trillions more looming in unpaid-for promises. The notion that the federal government is spending every single one of those dollars responsibly is laughable. The federal budget is rife with waste, inefficiencies and reckless long-term math. John Hayward's apt summary: "We don't have an under-funded government. We have a bad government." Republicans are right to fight for needed reforms and restraint -- and doing so does not entail far-fetched side effects such as aiding and abetting Ebola. And by the way, if that insane Ebola ad reminds you of this startling smear of Paul Ryan in 2011, it might be because both spots were produced by the same group.
So, let’s play by Agenda Project's rules for a second. Do they think cutting $72 million from the CDC for public health preparedness and response is a rational move? If not, they have to call the Obama White House to find out why they proposed such cuts in their 2012 budget (via Daily Caller):
  • Obama’s original budget plan for fiscal year 2012 cut funding for a CDC public health emergency preparedness program by $72 million. The proposed cuts would have taken money away from municipal and state health departments to hire health workers and monitor for public health hazards and disease outbreaks.
  • The CDC budget plan (p. 40) lists vast “Decreases” in funding for categories including public health preparedness and response, including the Public Health Emergency Preparedness Grant Program, as well as environmental health, chronic disease prevention, public health scientific services, and occupational safety and health.
In the end, both the White House and GOP budget plans failed, but the Obama administration seemed content with cutting some funds from the CDC. Now, in the end, both GOP and Obama budgets plans failed and sequestration was a bipartisan agreement, so one must wonder how the Agenda Project put this this Republicans=death narrative together. Frankly, I wouldn't waste your time on it.

Hopefully, this sort of overreach will kill future attack ads of this nature on both sides.

H/T Daily Caller



To: sylvester80 who wrote (1222178)4/19/2020 9:28:55 AM
From: RetiredNow  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 1582684
 
And then here is an article from the left leaning Huffpost:

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Obama Also Pushed For CDC Cuts In Years Before Ebola Outbreak

By Sam Stein and Zach Carter



FILE - In this Oct. 10, 2014, file photo, President Barack Obama speaks at Frank G. Bonelli Regional Park in San Dimas, Calif. Democratsâ?? high hopes of mitigating House losses in a rough election year have been dashed by reality. Obamaâ??s dismal approval ratings and midterm malaise have been a drag on Democrats. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)

WASHINGTON — Recent attacks by a Democratic outside group blame congressional Republicans for exacerbating the Ebola epidemic by continuously seeking to cut funds for government health agencies.

But the charge leaves out a critical point. President Barack Obama hasn’t been consistent on funding the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the dominant U.S. public health agency combating the outbreak. In some years, he’s been a budgetary champion for the CDC. In other years, he’s bowed to austerity.

During Obama’s first three years in the White House, the CDC’s total funding increased from $6.64 billion to $7.16 billion, according to figures provided by the administration. Those funding levels were all higher than what was in place at the end of the Bush years.

After the GOP took control of the House in 2011, the administration protected CDC funding by relying on new funding streams from the Affordable Care Act. But the CDC’s total budget fell by $430 million in fiscal year 2013, and the president can’t blame Republicans for the drop. The president’s funding requests for the CDC dropped too.

In FY 2010, the budget authority requested by the president for the CDC was $6.38 billion, according to administration figures. That number went up to $6.68 billion in FY 2011. It then decreased sharply to $5.89 billion in FY 2012 ( Page 85). The cuts were softened by the fact that the CDC received money from additional funding streams. In that fiscal year, additional funding streams actually resulted in a higher overall account for the CDC than the prior year. (Hence, how it ended up with $7.16 billion.)

But these non-traditional funding sources couldn’t reverse the general movement to austerity the following year. The president’s budget authority that year was $5.06 billion ( Page 113). The funding for the CDC that year ended up at $6.73 billion after the other accounts were taken into effect.

An administration official acknowledged to The Huffington Post that “sequestration and tight budget caps have had an impact on a range of critical health care programs.” But the official said the totality of the funding — as opposed to just the budget requests for the CDC — underscored that even “within a constrained environment, the Administration has prioritized CDC funding over the years with significant increases for control of infectious diseases.” The official noted that other sources, such as the Prevention and Public Health Fund, helped keep funding levels stable even during the most austere times.

Still, the fact that the president went along with those austere times complicates the attacks that Democrats are making against Republicans today. A new ad by the group Agenda Project Action Fund all but accused the GOP of letting people die by draining funds from the CDC and the National Institutes of Health. Certainly, it’s fair to say that Republicans were more interested than Democrats in cutting the budgets of those agencies during the past few years. But the president’s budget requests didn’t provide the sternest of pushbacks, and indeed explicitly posed significant cuts at times.

The White House has recently moved away from austerity. The president’s recent budget includes a slight increase in both CDC and NIH funding — though well short of what Democrats and medical research advocates say is necessary. According to administration figures, Obama requested $5.47 billion for the CDC for FY 2015, which is a $180 million increase from FY 2014.

Budget figures are often in dispute. And so, other media outlets that have looked at the president’s requests have put forward different statistics. Separate documents put together by the CDC do provide slightly different numbers, but they tell the same general story:

Do you have information you want to share with HuffPost? Here’s how.