02.12.11

Bleak and bleaker

Posted in Extremism, Permanent Fail at 10:06 am by George Smith

Krugman breaks out the GOP recommendations for budget cutting. It’s called Eat the Future:

WIC 1008 million
Food for Peace 544 million
NOAA 450 million
NASA 579 million
Energy efficiency and renewable energy 899
Science 1111 million
Nuclear nonproliferation 648 million
Federal buildings fund 1653 million
Homeland security administration 489 million
FEMA, various, around 1.2 billion
EPA clean water and drinking water about 1.8 billion
Community health centers 1.3 billion
Centers for disease control 900 million

WIC is nutritional aid for pregnant women and women with young children; let’s cut that, because the damage to the nation from malnourishment is a problem for future politicians. NOAA is weather and climate — hey, what we don’t know can’t hurt us. Nuclear nonproliferation — well, we probably won’t feel the pain of a terrorist nuke assembled from old Soviet fissile material for a couple of years. FEMA — well, how often do hurricanes hit New Orleans? CDC — with luck, by the time plague hits someone else can be blamed.

Contrast the cuts for science and homeland security.

Since we know the GOP despises science, it’s a natural for them. It cannot, of course, cut all funding for science since this would not only destroy many universities, most government agencies including the Department of Energy and the National Institute of Health but — most importantly — private sector arms development, too.

The homeland security cut is trivial, as one might expect, a 0.8 percent sliver from its 56 billion 2011 budget. And there is found humor in that the GOP wishes to cut more from “nuclear non-proliferation.”

However, the GOP wishes to cut 25 percent from the FEMA budget, since that agency’s aspect of homeland security is, well, you know the story.

In BAD, Paul Fussell wrote in 1991:

Bad ideas are those that are palpably unsound, like constructing a building from the top down, or trying to run a car with a pill in it. Some people can always be persuaded to embrace such notions, but most would agree that except as the material of jokes, they are a waste of time. Bad ideas, on the other hand, are widely accepted and so familiar as to go largely unquestioned …

[Another bad idea]: … [disease], homelessness, poverty and drug addiction are justly punitive, and will probably go away if we do nothing about them.

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