<story><title>The CDC lost control of the coronavirus pandemic, then the agency disappeared</title><url>https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/danvergano/cdc-coronavirus-containment-redfield</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>icegreentea2</author><text>I think you&amp;#x27;d make a stronger argument by instead of making a military or other things argument, and just make a &amp;#x27;fund other things more&amp;#x27; argument.&lt;p&gt;The reason I think you should stay away from pointing fingers, especially at a relatively divisive issue like military or especially aircraft carrier funding is because then you shift a question of &amp;quot;should American be world leading in commercial air travel regulation, pandemic prevention and control, and medical development&amp;quot; to a far more complex one of what America&amp;#x27;s role in the world should be.&lt;p&gt;The combined CDC, FDA and FAA budget is something like 35 billion dollars a year. Overall DOD budget is is nearly 700 billion, making up nearly half of annual discretionary spending (roughly 1.5 trillion). You could literally double the funding of those three agencies and barely budge the overall calculus of the budget.&lt;p&gt;Edit&amp;#x2F;Add-on: I think the whole sub-thread under my comment (my bad =&amp;#x2F; - I get the irony...) is an example of the types of distractions that might be avoidable if you don&amp;#x27;t scope military spending into discussions.</text></item><item><author>vikramkr</author><text>Over the past few years a series of American agencies have lost their reputation and world standing. The FAA with the 737 max, the CDC with the test, the FDA with testing regulation and hydroxychloroquine. Its important to have institutions that work, but we&amp;#x27;ve spent years deliberately gutting them and undervaluing them. All that money spent on the military and homeland security, and in the end we were caught utterly unprepared for the greatest national security threat of the past few decades. Even though we have more aircraft carriers than makes sense to have, we&amp;#x27;d rather build another one than invest in crucial infrastructure such as strong regulatory agencies and science infrastructure. And we get to pay the price of those misplaced priorities as we barrel towards 200,000 dead. Hopefully this serves as a sort of wakeup call.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>EGreg</author><text>There is a huge disparity here that needs to be addressed.&lt;p&gt;The Pentagon can’t pass an audit for decades, $7 Trillion just in the last 10 years unaccounted for. Yet we &lt;i&gt;increased the annual military budget by $100B a year&lt;/i&gt; in 2018 alone.&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile we say we can’t afford these other programs.&lt;p&gt;If national security is a priority then why this mentality? Given such a mentality, the military should probably just subsume the CDC or something, just so the politicians can fund CDC as part of “the military”.&lt;p&gt;The root cause though is this obsession with growing the largest fighting force and largest employer on the planet. We have 30x more bases than the rest of the world combined! The same people who say they want to see smaller government and hate central planning tell us to open our pocketbooks to keep giving more, more, more to continuously operate in 80 other countries.&lt;p&gt;Then when we ask why can’t we have money for better education and healthcare to cover &lt;i&gt;all our own citizens&lt;/i&gt; like European countries, they turn around and tell us the reason those countries can afford it is that we protect them. Well if that’s true, how is that America first, I wonder?&lt;p&gt;Nothing makes sense.</text></comment>
<story><title>The CDC lost control of the coronavirus pandemic, then the agency disappeared</title><url>https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/danvergano/cdc-coronavirus-containment-redfield</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>icegreentea2</author><text>I think you&amp;#x27;d make a stronger argument by instead of making a military or other things argument, and just make a &amp;#x27;fund other things more&amp;#x27; argument.&lt;p&gt;The reason I think you should stay away from pointing fingers, especially at a relatively divisive issue like military or especially aircraft carrier funding is because then you shift a question of &amp;quot;should American be world leading in commercial air travel regulation, pandemic prevention and control, and medical development&amp;quot; to a far more complex one of what America&amp;#x27;s role in the world should be.&lt;p&gt;The combined CDC, FDA and FAA budget is something like 35 billion dollars a year. Overall DOD budget is is nearly 700 billion, making up nearly half of annual discretionary spending (roughly 1.5 trillion). You could literally double the funding of those three agencies and barely budge the overall calculus of the budget.&lt;p&gt;Edit&amp;#x2F;Add-on: I think the whole sub-thread under my comment (my bad =&amp;#x2F; - I get the irony...) is an example of the types of distractions that might be avoidable if you don&amp;#x27;t scope military spending into discussions.</text></item><item><author>vikramkr</author><text>Over the past few years a series of American agencies have lost their reputation and world standing. The FAA with the 737 max, the CDC with the test, the FDA with testing regulation and hydroxychloroquine. Its important to have institutions that work, but we&amp;#x27;ve spent years deliberately gutting them and undervaluing them. All that money spent on the military and homeland security, and in the end we were caught utterly unprepared for the greatest national security threat of the past few decades. Even though we have more aircraft carriers than makes sense to have, we&amp;#x27;d rather build another one than invest in crucial infrastructure such as strong regulatory agencies and science infrastructure. And we get to pay the price of those misplaced priorities as we barrel towards 200,000 dead. Hopefully this serves as a sort of wakeup call.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>x86_64Ubuntu</author><text>The fact that &amp;quot;military&amp;quot; is a &amp;quot;divisive&amp;quot; issue proves the point of how we got to this point in the first place.</text></comment>