"In an adversarial political system, such failures seem increasingly inevitable. One side spends all that it is given intending to come back for more, intentionally starving vital things of secured funds so that they can have a better case for more funding. The other side looks at that and says they’re not falling for such tactics, they’d rather not fund the vital things. And so it goes."
This sort of seems like victim-blaming the Democrats who are trying to get new funding passed and underplaying the unique craziness of Republicans not interested in funding pandemic preparedness. I haven't heard of any other adversarial political systems shutting down covid funding mid-pandemic.
I can see the argument for that, but as I explained before, we allocated actual trillions for Covid and somehow we had basically no funding in reserve, they spent all of it. Also, they have the votes and have passed a ton of 'stimulus' or other spending with no Republican votes under Biden, so I'm confused how they let this happen or why they should get to blame anyone else. It's not like Rs refusing to play ball is surprising.
Do they have the votes to pass a bunch of stimulus? Seems like back when they did there was no problem with finding money for covid, but they haven't had them for quite a while now. My understanding is that both the lack of renewed covid funding and lack of progress on the rest of the Democratic agenda (aka BBB) have hit the same wall of Manchin not wanting to vote for anything that doesn't have Republican support.
Manchin seems to me to be a lot more nuanced than that but isn't being taken seriously/literally enough, but not my area of expertise. What I do know is if you give yourself futures where you must pass things that's at least partly on you - see the debt ceiling, which keeps being put not that far into the future, for reasons of... optics? I don't even know.
I don't get what's up with the China numbers. Our world in data has daily case numbers hovering around 2000, but two of the articles linked give numbers much higher than that.
Do you have any comments on this study I've seen making the rounds about COVID and brain function?
Not impressed.
"In an adversarial political system, such failures seem increasingly inevitable. One side spends all that it is given intending to come back for more, intentionally starving vital things of secured funds so that they can have a better case for more funding. The other side looks at that and says they’re not falling for such tactics, they’d rather not fund the vital things. And so it goes."
This sort of seems like victim-blaming the Democrats who are trying to get new funding passed and underplaying the unique craziness of Republicans not interested in funding pandemic preparedness. I haven't heard of any other adversarial political systems shutting down covid funding mid-pandemic.
I can see the argument for that, but as I explained before, we allocated actual trillions for Covid and somehow we had basically no funding in reserve, they spent all of it. Also, they have the votes and have passed a ton of 'stimulus' or other spending with no Republican votes under Biden, so I'm confused how they let this happen or why they should get to blame anyone else. It's not like Rs refusing to play ball is surprising.
Do they have the votes to pass a bunch of stimulus? Seems like back when they did there was no problem with finding money for covid, but they haven't had them for quite a while now. My understanding is that both the lack of renewed covid funding and lack of progress on the rest of the Democratic agenda (aka BBB) have hit the same wall of Manchin not wanting to vote for anything that doesn't have Republican support.
Manchin seems to me to be a lot more nuanced than that but isn't being taken seriously/literally enough, but not my area of expertise. What I do know is if you give yourself futures where you must pass things that's at least partly on you - see the debt ceiling, which keeps being put not that far into the future, for reasons of... optics? I don't even know.
I don't get what's up with the China numbers. Our world in data has daily case numbers hovering around 2000, but two of the articles linked give numbers much higher than that.
Starving vital things of funding is the Washington Monument Syndrome