Why Does Our Government Prioritize Killing Russians Over Saving American Lives?
America is running out of resources to battle Covid. For months, a request by the Biden Administration to Congress for $23 billion of funding to restore depleted Covid programs and prepare for an anticipated winter Covid wave has languished in Congress.
Part of the request was for $5 billion in global preparedness. We know that the more cases overseas, the more likely the development of potentially deadly variants. Helping other countries benefits the entire world and is an excellent and cost effective use of “soft” American power.
That Covid bill is still not moving forward. And if it does, the global part of it will likely be eliminated and the domestic part of it cut to no more than $10 billion.
In the meantime, Biden requested $33 billion of additional military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine. Congress appears ready to approve $40 billion. Because $40 billion makes Congress look tougher than does $33 billion.
Initially, Biden had tried to combine the Ukraine and Covid funding requests, but that failed. And now Biden and Congress have acquiesced to passing a “pure” Ukraine aid bill.
I’m not arguing about the merits of continuing to support Ukraine.
Rather, I am arguing that our government’s first priority is to protect Americans. We have not come close to defeating the Covid virus. It continues to mutate and evade our protections. Thank goodness severity has become increasingly rare due to vaccinations, boosters, and prior infections. Yet, a winter wave of 100 million infections is well within the band of likely outcomes. The good news is that, barring a new, more severe variant, death rates may be similar to the flu at 0.1%. That would mean only 100,000 dead Americans.
(By the way, the current death rate from Covid is still at about 350 per day, which is 10,000 a month.)
The longer Congress waits to act in providing funding for Covid, the more risk we take in being unprepared.
The politics behind our government’s priority is transparent enough that I’m not going to waste either your time or my time discussing it.
There is one word that can sum up our elected representatives in their current approach to the battle against Covid.
Appeasers.
Why? Because protecting the underdog is bipartisan issue, and America has a history of policing the bullies of the world, and Biden has run on being a bridge-building to heal the political divide in this country. As for funding and attending to urgent domestic issues, I blame the Democrats who are unwilling to get rid of the filibuster that stops bills from moving forward in congress because they might want to use it themselves in a later administration. That's like being unwilling to use a fire extinguisher while your neighbor's house is burning down because you might want to use it if your own house catches on fire one day, while ignoring that allowing your neighbor's house to burn to the ground will inevitably lead to your own house catching on fire. MLK pointed out that if you don't stand up for other people's rights even if they don't apply to you, you can't expect them to stand up for yours. Get rid of the KKK-created filibuster and we can make progress while a Democrat is still in the White House and we have just enough congresspeople to have a majority vote.
Maybe you should write a piece about the frustrating fecklessness of the Democrats? For instance, the disappearance of the very effective Child Tax Credit without a ripple or a whimper, or the failure so far of the DOJ to prosecute the previous president, or more generally the capitulation to Manchin and the GOP on Build Back Better, getting rid of the filibuster, etc. Something may be happening behind the scenes, but I haven't seen anything . . .