WHERE OUR TAX MONEY GOES.
We all know someone who has cancer. We have all lost friends, relatives, family, to cancer. We have suffered, cried, for these loses that have made our lives miserable.
Most of us also know someone who has Alzheimer’s. We might have seen a family member struggle with this nightmarish disease. We have also seen people with little donation cans collecting pennies and nickels to fund research for these diseases. We know that these diseases can affect all of our families and us included. What we do not know is how much of our tax dollar is spent by our government on funding research for these two problems. These diseases affect thousands of Americans every year.
I did a little research and found that the National Cancer Institute reports that government funding on the four most prevalent cancers, Breast, Colorectal, Lung, Prostate has been declining from 2005 to 2007. Totals went from 1388.3 million in 2005 to 1367.7 million in 2007. Roughly the drop was about 20 million in the three years. The money that we are looking at is about one billion and a third for each year. But I ask why the drop of 20 million in three years on cancer research?
Alzheimer’s research shows the same decline in funding .The national Institute of Health states that since 2003 the funding has also declined. Rough figures show funding of about 750 million per year.
All these figures should interest us because all these diseases can affect us directly. We must also remember that inflation and the declining dollar are robbing the funding for research in a much greater degree. Everything costs more but obviously not research according to government funding.
However nothing I have said can make your hair stand up until you realize that our government has spent about four trillion of our money on the war in Iraq. This war in Iraq we got lied into by the Neo-cons. The war in Afghanistan is costing us two billion per week for about ten years. We must also realize that the Soviet Union, using the most ruthless and cruel methods lost in Afghanistan and ran out of there. So the bottom line is that we got lied into the Iraq war and have not learned from the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan
The fact that should make us angry and wake us up is that our government allocates only two billion on cancer and Alzheimer’s research for the whole year, yet it has spent about $5,000,000,000,000 [that is trillion] on two stupid wars. The irony of this is that we get the shaft, are short changed, and are now asked to sacrifice and balance the budget. There is something wrong. Please call your congressman, ask him how such a travesty of justice can happen in America.
We have to also ask ourselves how many health benefits would be discovered, how much education paid for, how much infrastructure could have been repaired, built, if we had not embarked on two insane wars and spent the four trillion tax dollars in America.
Valentine Krumplis
www.repairmanualforamerica.com
