Hooray for really rich people!
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, are donating $25 million to the CDC Foundation to help address the Ebola epidemic.
The money will be used by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Ebola response effort in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone and elsewhere in the world where Ebola is a threat, the foundation said Tuesday.
The grant follows a $9 million donation made by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen last month. Zuckerberg and Chan are making the grant from their fund at the nonprofit Silicon Valley Community Foundation.
Sure, the money is great and all. So thanks. But… um… we’re the United States of America! We put a man on the fucking moon! (Actually, 12 men!) So you’d think the CDC would have the financial resources to adequately address the Ebola threat without begging for money from billionaires!
Seriously, America! How about taxing the super wealthy sufficient to meet our national needs, instead of just kinda hoping they care enough to gift us money when and if they think we really need it? Wouldn’t that be a much more rational way to run a government?
To be fair, if Zuckerberg’s money had arrived in the U.S. Treasury as tax receipts, a third would have gone to the Defense Department and about $250,000 to federally funded medical R&D (combined NIH and CDC budgets are about 1% of the total federal budget). So lots of things need fixing…
It’s a good thing a 《I》tiny number of《/I》billionaires care. Because the rest are either getting off free or actively trying to drown the CDC in a bathtub.
Goldy,
Why not ask the CDC about their misguided priorities with the money they already have? View the Puddy links in the Drunken Libtard thread!
Seriously, America! How about spending within our means and not wasting our money, in order to meet our national needs, instead of just kinda taking more and more money from everyone? Wouldn’t that be a much more rational way to run a government?
re 3 & 4 — You are both so stupid, you have no way of understanding the depths of your stupidity because that would indicate a certain amount of intelligence — which neither of you have,
@5,
Who is this moron and what idiot room did it crawl out of? From one of the PuddyLinks left earlier
FACTS libtards FACTS!
http://www.salon.com/2014/10/1.....g_america/
The CDC is the new GOP/dittohead pinata. You know, the anti-vaccination folks whose kids go around giving around else’s kids the measles, whooping cough, and polio. I’ll bet my football-pool money that if you examined all of CDC’s for the last 15 years you’d find that not much ever changes; the mission stays the same, the priorities stay the same, and every year the budget is incrementally higher to account for population growth and inflation. According to Wikipedia, 85% of CDC’s goes for grants to local public health programs, so it sounds like CDC is primarily a clearinghouse for federal dollars going to states and municipalities. I was under the impression this is exactly the kind of federalism that conservatives favor, you know, local control as opposed to distant federal bureaucrats doing everything. But never mind that; I’m quite sure — and will bet my basketball-pool money — that these newly-minted critics haven’t a clue what CDC does. (Among other things, they collect statistics on how many kids are shot in schools because guns, you know, are a public health threat.) And that’s really beside the point anyway. For them, this is all about trying to shin-kick the uppity black nester in that white house down on Pennsylvania Avenue in the whites-only part of town.
@4. “Seriously, America! How about spending within our means and not wasting our money”
How do you propose we do that? Please, go into detail. What would you spend our money on?
https://www.warresisters.org/store/federal-budget-pie-chart/2014
another view
https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-budget-101/spending/
Of the programs you current or WILL benefit from, what do you want to cut?
Or do budget cuts only apply to other people?
Actually, the right wing republicans sequester has done more to damage thee CDC than almost anything else. There are emerging infectious diseases all over the globe from MDR Tb in Chile to C. difficile in US hospitals. The right wing doesn’t want to fund basic or applied or even ID research on some diseases in AFRICA! They just want to protect the US from Mooslim Terrorists….until something bad happens and then they scream for the CDC to do it’s job after underfunding them.
Hypocrites!