Money

The Democrats are becoming increasingly desperate as poll after poll indicates that their chances of holding the Senate are tenuous at best. They've exhausted their tendentious class warfare narrative and beaten the "war on women" meme to death. So now it's time to tap into the public's legitimate concern that federal government  agencies (you know, the same federal government that the Democrats tell us can solve all problems) has repeatedly dropped to ball in the Ebola outbreak in Texas.

And what narrative will they use? It should be obvious. The evil GOP cut some CDC funding over the past decade and that's why the CDC seems unable to handle the Ebola outbreak. This claim is so ludicrous that laughter seems appropriate. But too many low information voters reflexively believe that if we just spent even more money, all Ebola-related problems would evaporate.

Eric Boehm shows us how the Dems spun out their new narrative:

“NIH has been working on Ebola vaccines since 2001. It’s not like we suddenly woke up and thought, ‘Oh my gosh, we should have something ready here,’” Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the NIH, told the Huffington Post last week.

He said the agency would “probably” have developed a vaccine by now if it hadn’t seen a “10 year slide” in support for research.The same day, the Huffington Post argued that the CDC and NIH had been “hobbled” by more than $600 million in funding cuts over the past five years.

“There’s no doubt that the deep health care cuts that we’ve seen have made it more difficult to respond in a rapid and comprehensive way to the Ebola outbreak,” U.S. Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Maryland, said on CNN.

Even once-and-future presidential candidate Hilary Clinton got into the act, arguing in an op-ed that spending cuts created by the congressional sequestration “were really starting to hurt” the CDC and other public health agencies.

And by the middle of this week, the issue had turned entirely political.

A new ad from the Agenda Project Action Fund, left-leaning super PAC, outright blamed Republicans for budget cuts that allowed Ebola to become a threat in the American homeland.

The whole thing is meant to reduce public debate over government spending to a single, obvious point: budget cuts can literally kill people.

Boehm goes on to indicate how millions have been wasted by programs within the NIH/CDC, and how the agency spent additional tens of millions on a new headquarters (with a $30,000 sauna) and visitor's center. But it gets worse. Boehm writes:

Though the agency spent more than $2.6 billion on grants for HIV and AIDS research over five years, the CDC acknowledged that many of those grants “have no objectives” or were otherwise useless. They kept funding them anyway.

“Many times the answer is to spend more money instead of redirecting the money or eliminating the waste,” Thomas Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste, a nonprofit that tracks poor spending decisions by Congress and the federal bureaucracy, told Watchdog.org this week. “Programs that are completely ineffective might get cut by a few percentage points or something, but the wasteful spending still exists.”

Prominent Democrats wring their hands that funding is not as high as they would like, and Ebola is, by implication, the fault of those who think that maybe some fiscal responsibility might be in order. Meanwhile the CDC continues to de-focus from it's primary mission of fighting infectious diseases. Again from Boehm:

The agency has received more than $3 billion from a new research fund created by the Affordable Care Act, but has spent only $180 million of that bounty on researching dangerous diseases.

Instead, it has budgeted millions of dollars each year for community grants aimed at convincing Americans to make smart choices about their health — essentially, taxpayer-funded advertising telling you to put down that giant soda and eat more salad.

Yeah, if we just don't drink that coke and eat more lettuce, Ebola will be vanquished in our time.

It isn't money that's problem, it a political party that thinks that money-is-the-only-way-to-solve-problems that's the problem. Vote the bums out!