My friend Chad at CCK and I have been ignoring each other for too long now. I find this piece of jaundiced reasoning on his site today:
You've probably heard the good news about deaths from cancer taking a dip for the second straight year.
It's really too bad President Bush is cutting the research that is giving us the treatments and medications that are providing us with this good news.
Of course, the standard GOP response would be something like this ...
If you want research to help cure your cancer, go do it yourself you lazy bum!
Leaving aside, for a moment, the dubious emotional maturity expressed in the last two sentences, we have this: first, cancer rates have declined under President Bush. This is somewhat understating the case. Lung cancer declined among women for the first time ever, and total cancer deaths decreased for the first time since 1930, when data was first compiled. Second, Bush "is cutting" spending on cancer research. I was curious enough to follow the link, which is to a site called Think Progress. Chad poo poos any talk of a liberal media, but maybe it's not out of line to point out that leftists, at least, are leftists, and, like conservatives, they have an agenda. What I found was this:
The total budget for the National Cancer Institute has increased $1.2 billion since 2001. But as ABC News’s Medical Editor pointed out last night, “most of that occurred in those early years under a Clinton initiative. The budget was actually cut last year and the projected budget for this year is to be cut even further.”
So the budget for the National Cancer Institute has in fact increase by one billion, two hundred million dollars, since the first year of Bush's Presidency. That's a lot of dollars. And it may be true that this was "under a Clinton initiative." But it was a Republican Congress that continued to fund that initiative, wasn't it? And it would have been Bush who signed that legislation, wouldn't it?
As for cutting the budget, Think Progress has this:
Bush’s 2007 budget proposed cutting funding for the National Cancer Institute by $40 million.
The link provided leads to a Senate Democratic website, which, I humbly suggest, also has an agenda. None of the sources mentioned what the total budget of the NCI is, or whether this cut represents an actual cut in funding or merely a cut in projected funding, i.e., what the NCI thought it was going to get. It looks like an actual cut. Here is what the NCI says:
The fiscal year FY 2007 budget includes $4,753,609,000, a decrease of $39,747,000 below the FY 2006 enacted level of $4,793,356,000 comparable for transfers proposed in the President's request.
So: the NCI budget in 2006 was, using the Think Progress estimate, about a third larger, under President Bush, than under Bill Clinton. That is a big increase. The 2007 budget is 39.7 million less, a decline of less than one percent. That is a very small decrease in a big increase. I do not know whether such a decrease is warranted or not. To know that, I would have to consider the budget as a whole, and ask where the 40 million was going to come from. I would have to know also whether current research programs are being adequately funded. To judge that, I would have to be able to compare private research investments with publicly funded research. That would be a long night.
What one can say after a half hour of searching is that the Bush Administration, and the Republican Congress, have been very generous when it comes to cancer research. That is what you find out when you are genuinely curious. To say something this: "Of course, the standard GOP response would be something like this ...If you want research to help cure your cancer, go do it yourself you lazy bum!", that demonstrates only a lack of curiosity and a jaundiced eye.
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