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Republican-led Senate proposes big budget boost for NIH

This is fiscal restraint? The Senate, under the leadership of the Republican party for the first time since 2006, has proposed a $2 billion increase in the 2016 budget for National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The House Republican leadership hasn’t shown much restraint either, proposing $1 billion boost in the 2016 budget. And this in the context of a flat budget for NIH during the period from 2006 to 2014 when Democrats controlled either both or at least one house of Congress.

Since Congress completed a 5-year doubling of the NIH budget in 2003, the agency’s funding level has fallen more than 20% below the 2003 level after taking into account the rising costs of biomedical research.

This is once again evidence to me that the Republican leadership in Congress really has little interest in reining in the out-of-control federal budget. They talk a conservative game during elections, but when it comes time to write the budgets, the Republicans in charge of committees become spendthrifts to support the pork in the government agencies they are assigned to manage, and are almost always centered in their own districts.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

3 comments

  • Al

    Nothing is going to change until there’s a third party.

    We’ve tried to work within the Republican party, but no matter how many we elect to the party nothing changes. This is because both parties are big government parties whose primary donors benefit from a bigger government.

    At this point, we have nothing to lose. It’s time to break off. I think everyone would be surprised how well a third party would do.

  • Cotour

    I think we have to be realistic and realize that America and the worlds course is being set right now for the next 100 years and beyond. I think we can trace it back a long ways but it really began in earnest during the papa Bush administration and his 1000 points of light speech set it off, right up to the current administration and the leadership of both party’s and their “secret” agreements that no can know about until they are agreed upon.

    This course appears to include the concerted diminishing of the Constitution and the everyday individual citizen model in exchange for a multinational corporatized style model where government is subservient to those corporate entities. We seem to be about to be delivered by our own elected officials.

    From The Library Of Economics And Liberty:

    “As an economic system, fascism is socialism with a capitalist veneer. The word derives from fasces, the Roman symbol of collectivism and power: a tied bundle of rods with a protruding ax. In its day (the 1920s and 1930s), fascism was seen as the happy medium between boom-and-bust-prone liberal capitalism, with its alleged class conflict, wasteful competition, and profit-oriented egoism, and revolutionary Marxism, with its violent and socially divisive persecution of the bourgeoisie. Fascism substituted the particularity of nationalism and racialism—“blood and soil”—for the internationalism of both classical liberalism and Marxism.”

    While we are distracted by gay cakes and Caitlyn Jenner. We should all be embarrassed, we are playing patty cake while they are playing 3 level chess.

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