Maybe the Sequester Wasn't So Overstated After All

[Synthaholic]

if they are that representative they are able to pay for themselves.

For Federally-funded research?

Within the minds of a conservative we can build a school in Iraq but not fund top rate research in America.

I'm sorry but you can't be a first world nation anymore with a technological economy without doing so.

Good point!

 

[Synthaholic]

how about we cut Obama's vacations in half.....that should cover it and then some.......

http://www.usmessageboard.com/polit...seen-through-the-eyes-of-the-republicans.html


Dumbass.

the cost of security for malia and sasha to go to Atlantis, then to Sun Valley would have covered the cost of the White House Tours for almost year....

Dipstick.

^^^ Dumbass thinks all gov't money is fungible.

 

[Trajan]

For Federally-funded research?

What are they too dumb to use Go to Meeting or Skype or a myriad of other teleconferencing sites?

^^^incapable of reading articles.

for a guy who posted a thread slamming white violence, which was in fact committed by a black, you've got some chutzpah, stop building on your reputation as the forum clown...we get it.

 

[Toddsterpatriot]

To have a top military and civilization you need the best R@d and research China's soon is going to kick our asses.

Think of all the research we could fund if we stopped wasting money on "green energy".

Solyndra could probably pay for all the airfare they're whining about, for 100 years.

 

[Synthaholic]

So...this week you don't listen to George Will? Is it his RINO week?


I keep getting him and Chris Christie mixed up, acceptance-wise.

 

[francoHFW]

The sequester saved some money and cost the country 1-1.5% growth for a year (debt ceiling another year, Jobs Act another 1%) and the end of the Great Recession- great job shytteheads...

 

[blackhawk]

I love how when the left starts these sequester threads they always manage to forget Obama stating he would sign no legislation that would prevent the cuts for taking effect or give him flexibility in managing them.

 

[ScienceRocks]

The sequester saved some money and cost the country 1-1.5% growth for a year (debt ceiling another year, Jobs Act another 1%) and the end of the Great Recession- great job shytteheads...

No shit Franco. Billion dollar project scrapped, soldiers going without and entire departments less efferent. The economic cost wipes out any "savings".

I liked the republicans when they were just about waste and sane reforms. Not anymore.

 

[RoadVirus]

When we can't pay for scientists to attend worldwide conferences on behalf of the United States Of America, that's pathetic.

And yet, President Bongo can spend $100M on a trip to Africa and another $7B for African power grids (which will no doubt disappear into banks in places like Switzerland and the Cayman Islands).

 

[ScienceRocks]

When we can't pay for scientists to attend worldwide conferences on behalf of the United States Of America, that's pathetic.

And yet, President Bongo can spend $100M on a trip to Africa and another $7B for African power grids (which will no doubt disappear into banks in places like Switzerland and the Cayman Islands).

Obama certainly should be spending that money on America.

 

[AmazonTania]

60% of all global medical research is conducted in the US.

Methinks doth protest to much.

 

[ScienceRocks]

60% of all global medical research is conducted in the US.

Methinks doth protest to much.

I want that to remain so

 

[Missouri_Mike]

60% of all global medical research is conducted in the US.

Methinks doth protest to much.

I want that to remain so

Obiecare will make sure that doesn't remain so.

 

[AmazonTania]

60% of all global medical research is conducted in the US.

Methinks doth protest to much.

I want that to remain so

As long as companies run for profit, it will remain so. In the meantime, you can sleep soundly knowing that America exports all of it's drugs to countries with UHC which cannot produce their own drugs.

 

[OKTexas]

For Federally-funded research?

What are they too dumb to use Go to Meeting or Skype or a myriad of other teleconferencing sites?

^^^incapable of reading articles.

^^^^^^ Incapable of answering a direct question.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

Maybe the Sequester Wasn't So Overstated After All



Not long ago, the emerging Beltway consensus was that the impact of the budget sequestration that went into effect last spring had been wildly overstated. The economic recovery was still ticking along, albeit too slowly for anyone's taste, and there were no reports of orphans being cast into the streets. The budget deficit was shrinking, thanks in part to the sequester cuts. There were even suggestions that President Obama had exaggerated the fallout from sequestration in order to force a deal to head it off.


Well, just in the past few days there've been several dings in that happy complacency as more and more people—including at least one esteemed conservative—become aware of sequestration's real and unexaggerated consequences.



Medical research. Even George Will is worried about this one:




.

A 2 percent reduction of federal spending would be easily manageable. It has, however, been made deliberately dumb by mandatory administrative rigidities intended to maximize pain in order to weaken resistance to any spending restraint. Spending on basic medical research is being starved as the river of agriculture subsidies rolls on.

For Francis Collins, being the NIH’s director is a daily experience of exhilaration and dismay. In the past 40 years, he says, heart attacks and strokes have declined 60 percent and 70 percent, respectively. Cancer deaths are down 15 percent in 15 years. An AIDS diagnosis is no longer a death sentence. Researchers are on the trail of a universal flu vaccine, based on new understandings of the influenza virus and the human immune system. Chemotherapy was invented here — and it is being replaced by treatments developed here. Yet the pace of public health advances, Collins says, is being slowed by the sequester.
​

.





It would be nice, of course, if Will acknowledged his and his fellow conservatives' role in bringing about this sorry state of affairs. But hey, we'll take what we can get. Because the budget cuts Will is now lamenting are having real costs, as the Baltimore Sun reported over the weekend:




.

Dr. Craig Hendrix is exploring a novel concept: whether antiviral drugs can be absorbed through certain areas of the body to prevent sexual transmission of HIV. To test such hypotheses, Hendrix and his Johns Hopkins colleagues typically can put up healthy test subjects in hospital beds overnight, which creates a more effective experiment by allowing for more data collection and limiting outside variables. But volunteers in Hendrix's study are sleeping in a hotel between two long days of blood-drawing and CT scans because of a funding squeeze in an innovative federal grant program.
​

.





Great! Volunteers in an intensive and important study, tripping around the Best Western after a long day of blood-drawing. Now that's the way to maintain our global edge in medical research.




*snip*






Government travel. Surely, you say, this is one area where we could cut back quite a bit without any real impact. After all, government officials only travel to absurd junkets like those General Service Administration clown shows, right? Well...

Geological visits to monitor volcanoes in Alaska have been scaled back. The defense secretary is traveling to Afghanistan two times a year instead of the usual four. For the first time in nearly three decades, NASA pulled out of the National Space Symposium, in Colorado Springs, even though representatives from France, Germany and China all made the trip...

Managers at the Food and Drug Administration have made it all but impossible for employees to receive approval for travel to conferences. The Consumer Product Safety Commission, in an effort to help supplement reduced travel budgets for field inspectors, cut back on a program aimed at drowning prevention. At the Pentagon, defense officials skipped meetings with the international Afghanistan coalition in London and Rome this year, and without secure conference equipment, they could not participate virtually, officials said.

*snip*




.

​

Yes, indeed it is. We have a chance to start running the federal government sensibly again this fall, if Obama can get Republicans to agree to a deal to end the sequestration cuts, while also lifting the debt limit and agreeing to regular budget levels for the year ahead. But the odds of that are rather low. So those Hopkins volunteers better hold onto their motel swipe cards, and the Air Force officer better just keep truckin' across the Appalachians.

Every time I think Synth is going to be better than dean he post something like this.

 

[TemplarKormac]

Maybe the Sequester Wasn't So Overstated After All



Not long ago, the emerging Beltway consensus was that the impact of the budget sequestration that went into effect last spring had been wildly overstated. The economic recovery was still ticking along, albeit too slowly for anyone's taste, and there were no reports of orphans being cast into the streets. The budget deficit was shrinking, thanks in part to the sequester cuts. There were even suggestions that President Obama had exaggerated the fallout from sequestration in order to force a deal to head it off.


Well, just in the past few days there've been several dings in that happy complacency as more and more people—including at least one esteemed conservative—become aware of sequestration's real and unexaggerated consequences.



Medical research. Even George Will is worried about this one:




.

A 2 percent reduction of federal spending would be easily manageable. It has, however, been made deliberately dumb by mandatory administrative rigidities intended to maximize pain in order to weaken resistance to any spending restraint. Spending on basic medical research is being starved as the river of agriculture subsidies rolls on.

For Francis Collins, being the NIH’s director is a daily experience of exhilaration and dismay. In the past 40 years, he says, heart attacks and strokes have declined 60 percent and 70 percent, respectively. Cancer deaths are down 15 percent in 15 years. An AIDS diagnosis is no longer a death sentence. Researchers are on the trail of a universal flu vaccine, based on new understandings of the influenza virus and the human immune system. Chemotherapy was invented here — and it is being replaced by treatments developed here. Yet the pace of public health advances, Collins says, is being slowed by the sequester.
​

.





It would be nice, of course, if Will acknowledged his and his fellow conservatives' role in bringing about this sorry state of affairs. But hey, we'll take what we can get. Because the budget cuts Will is now lamenting are having real costs, as the Baltimore Sun reported over the weekend:




.

Dr. Craig Hendrix is exploring a novel concept: whether antiviral drugs can be absorbed through certain areas of the body to prevent sexual transmission of HIV. To test such hypotheses, Hendrix and his Johns Hopkins colleagues typically can put up healthy test subjects in hospital beds overnight, which creates a more effective experiment by allowing for more data collection and limiting outside variables. But volunteers in Hendrix's study are sleeping in a hotel between two long days of blood-drawing and CT scans because of a funding squeeze in an innovative federal grant program.
​

.





Great! Volunteers in an intensive and important study, tripping around the Best Western after a long day of blood-drawing. Now that's the way to maintain our global edge in medical research.




*snip*






Government travel. Surely, you say, this is one area where we could cut back quite a bit without any real impact. After all, government officials only travel to absurd junkets like those General Service Administration clown shows, right? Well...

Geological visits to monitor volcanoes in Alaska have been scaled back. The defense secretary is traveling to Afghanistan two times a year instead of the usual four. For the first time in nearly three decades, NASA pulled out of the National Space Symposium, in Colorado Springs, even though representatives from France, Germany and China all made the trip...

Managers at the Food and Drug Administration have made it all but impossible for employees to receive approval for travel to conferences. The Consumer Product Safety Commission, in an effort to help supplement reduced travel budgets for field inspectors, cut back on a program aimed at drowning prevention. At the Pentagon, defense officials skipped meetings with the international Afghanistan coalition in London and Rome this year, and without secure conference equipment, they could not participate virtually, officials said.

*snip*




.

​

Yes, indeed it is. We have a chance to start running the federal government sensibly again this fall, if Obama can get Republicans to agree to a deal to end the sequestration cuts, while also lifting the debt limit and agreeing to regular budget levels for the year ahead. But the odds of that are rather low. So those Hopkins volunteers better hold onto their motel swipe cards, and the Air Force officer better just keep truckin' across the Appalachians.

Every time I think Synth is going to be better than dean he post something like this.

You can't possibly hope for Synth to say something intelligent, can you?