Swine Flu Diverts Attention
by Big Dog on Apr 28, 2009 at 02:25 Opinion, Political
A great deal of attention has been given to the newest outbreak of the flu mostly because this is a strain that is not commonly associated with transmission among humans and there is no vaccine. While it is well and good to pay some attention to it one must wonder why all the CDC warnings and the elevations of threat levels. I certainly understand the travel restrictions but the reality is that there are only 40 confirmed US cases and no one in the US has died (as of this writing). Mexico has handled the issue fairly well and there have been just over 140 deaths in that country.
In the US each year about 36,000 people die from the flu and about 200,000 require hospitalization.
I think that the fervor over the flu is designed to take our attention away from the bad news that has come out lately. GM is getting rid of Pontiac (if you have a low mileage one put it away) and that will result in the loss of 21,000 manufacturing jobs. GM and Chrysler are preparing to file for bankruptcy and this will cause a lot of turmoil in the automotive industry. Ironically, Ford, the only one of the big three not to take bailout money, is doing OK, not great, but better than the others.
The Swine Flu scare is also a great cover for Congress who can work on passing more and more spending packages and enact things designed to give us universal health care coverage without the public debate. They can take advantage of this emergency to pass even more items to drive us ever closer to Socialism.
The Obama Administration has shown that it is a smoke and mirrors operation. They manufacture one crisis after another in order to tire people and wear them down. Then they can keep passing stuff unnoticed and before you know it, BAM, we have all these expensive things and even greater tax burdens. The economy was a crisis that we had to act upon immediately or we might not recover. Then it was not as bad as he thought. Of course, he came to that conclusion after spending a couple of TRILLION dollars to fix the spiraling economy. The stimulus will not kick in for some time. We are seeing some signs of working out of the economic downturn now. This means that things are turning around before the stimulus has had a chance to affect things. If we had done very little or nothing we would be turning around and we would have saved a couple of TRILLION dollars.
But Democrats had an “emergency” to exploit. Let us not forget that George Bush helped put this in motion. I did not agree with it then and I don’t agree with it now. I think the difference is Bush was making an honest attempt to fix things and not taking advantage of the situation. Obama is taking advantage of the problem to nationalize the banks and take over companies.
The Swine Flu, as of right now, is not a cause for alarm (just as Obama said). It is something we should keep an eye on and we should take the basic steps to prevent transmission of the disease. The number one way to do that is to wash your hands. Wash them frequently and the transmission of disease will be drastically reduced. Your mother told you to wash your hands for a reason.
The flu comes each year and makes a lot of people sick and it kills quite a few. These Swine flu reports might be sentinel events indicating a larger problem ahead. We need to keep track but we also need not lose sight of what is going on around us with regard to our politicians.
They will use this “emergency” to their advantage as long as we let them get away with it.
The CDC is tracking the outbreak and has a sign up for Swine Flu updates. There is also good information about the disease and what you can do to reduce your risk. Take the time to read it but don’t let the flu take your focus away. We can worry when it looks like this will become more widespread. Let’s keep an eye on it but let’s keep in mind that thousands get sick from the flu at any one time during flu season and they don’t go bananas like they are right now. This could certainly get worse but as it stands right now, it is a minor outbreak.
The sleight of hand artist The Amazing Obama wants you to look away.
How do the open borders folks feel now? ILLEGALS with swine flu could walk into this country at anytime undetected and spread the disease. This is what you get when you don’t uphold the law.
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Tags: crisis, emergency, gm, politics, pontiac, swine flu
The smallest voice in the debate about the economy was the crowd calling to do nothing. I’ve seen a pretty good mix of folks who trust monetary policy over fiscal policy and the other way around and folks who want both. You won’t find many credible economists that called for doing nothing as many conservative bloggers seem to do.
You act as if Obama simply made up the financial crisis to get lots of money spent. That’s a joke. No, this was and still is a crisis. As the cover story from the Economist puts it this week: there are signs of recovery but the worst thing for the world economy would be to assume the worst is over.
But when monetary policy has been used already and confidence being a factor it’s really hard to say that the stimulus has no affect just because the largest parts of the money aren’t spent yet. Recovery will take years even if it has already started and job creation will be very slow. To say we never should have spent the stimulus simply because the stock market has risen is wishful thinking.
You like to quote the Obama administration about not letting a crisis go to waste but something similar can be said about you as you start to blame the swing flu on illegals using Glenn Beck style imagined scenarios where Mexicans are secretly crossing our border disease ridden and infecting Americans. Right. Never miss a chance to blame a problem in America on illegal immigrants and keep the anti-immigrant sentiment disguised as anti-illegal-immigrant sentiment at full throttle.
Adam,I have worked with more illegals than you will ever meet, and while I like them, it does not mean that I think they should be here illegally. They have brought more than the swine flu here, they have brought drug resistant TB, which, if it changed just a little bit, would be really scary.
But the Barama team wants you to be watching the flu, so you won’t see things like the loosening of the rules and regs governing oversight of union leaders, who are now free to steal money from their members, as some have done.
They don’t want you to ask why, when the stimulus was supposed to create jobs, all these jobs will go to union people, at union prices. Five times as much work could be done on projects such as roads if union prices were scrapped and competitive bids were accepted, but no- Baraqma has to grease the unions down- talk about a crooked scheme- and you chide Republicans- Democrats know how to steal on a grand scale.
The amount of money hiz lowness has spent just in the first 100 days is now at 4.6 trillion dollars, with more coming- Hey, Bamma famma fo famma- I WOULD LIKE TO OPT OUT OF YOU USING MY MONEY. I don’t think you are intelligent enough to use it wisely, and I’m just judging you from your paltry, but egregious record. I think you have had enough.
What would happen if we could get enough people to take ALL their money out of the banks that took the tarp, and put it into banks that were NOT under the government thumb- would that be a baby step away from government control?
I think it might.
How do you get to $4.6 trillion spent?
That was the amount the GAO had released, regarding the “First Hundred Days” of Barama, if you roll all the stimuli, budgets, Tarp (350 billion), and ancillary bailouts, that is the figure- I’l believe them- my calculator doesn’t have that many places for zeros.
I cannot find the GAO talking about a figure like that and it still doesn’t seem correct. If you added all those up it would be way more anyway.
I think the budget and stimulus add up to more than 4.3 TRILLION.