> I find it difficult to blame the governor of a state with a $26 billion budget deficit in 2011 for cutting this. How many people were thinking about pandemics then?
The one who put it in place? Someone had the foresight to implement this program.
It's one thing to forgive someone for not having foresight but it's something else entirely to actively dismantle the fruits of your predecessors foresight.
> It's one thing to forgive someone for not having foresight but it's something else entirely to actively dismantle the fruits of your predecessors foresight.
A pandemic seemed about as improbable then as an alien invasion. What should the government have cut instead? School spending? Social services? How do you think the voters would have responded? Remember that the budget deficit was enormous.
It's pretty hard to defend funding pie-in-the-sky ideas like global pandemics when people have concrete, immediate problems. Just a month ago, the concept of a global pandemic that would shut down a huge portion of the economy seemed insane to 99% of voters.
A pandemic seemed about as improbable then as an alien invasion
People have warned about a global pandemic for decades, and there were a few near misses - Ebola in 2014, SARS, MERS. Bill Gates was quite vocal. It's a 100-year event, something that people prepare against. No sane person builds in the 100-year floodplain!
> No sane person builds in the 100-year floodplain!
Doesn’t that describe most of Florida and the Gulf Coast? In practice many, many people are willing to build on 50-year floodplains, and not in ways that leave a perfectly good house afterwards either. No houses on stilts or anything similar.
Call me tinfoil-hatted, but the ignorant populace is egged on by disaster capitalists, enabled by out-of-control campaign financing in the US. Catastrophe means profits, just look at the bailout package that just went through. Disaster preparedness needs to be overseen by actuaries, but we can't have that.
> No sane person builds in the 100-year floodplain!
Oh, we do that all the time in the UK. They build super-expensive pokey houses with little postage-stamp gardens on 5-year floodplains and all sorts of idiots buy them.
We’ve known that pandemics were going to get more likely as international travel got faster and cheaper, and population density rose and absolute population numbers rose. These factors have been part of the horror stories that epidemiologists tell each other late at night when the lights are out:
“so it was a normal year, and airlines reduced the cost of India to USA flights by 20%,”
horrified gasps (the audience knows where this story is going)
Pandemic might have seemed improbable to you as a layperson, but the medical community has been bracing for this for decades. The less seriously you take it, the less seriously your politicians take it and the less seriously pandemic preparation gets funded.
The one who put it in place? Someone had the foresight to implement this program.
It's one thing to forgive someone for not having foresight but it's something else entirely to actively dismantle the fruits of your predecessors foresight.