-The budget of the entire National Cancer Institutes is about $5 billion. What could be done for curing cancer if it were doubled? It’s easy to find many, many essays and articles about the need to increase funds for cancer research, and it’s far, far more likely that millions of American lives will be protected.
-The government spends about $50 million on ALS research. What could be done with 100 times that? Or even just double that, which is a drop in the bucket by comparison.
-Lyme disease and associated tickborne diseases are estimated to cost our economy billions annually. Federal allocations for Lyme disease funding are still only around $10 or $12 million annually. That’s one quarter of one percent of $5 billion, almost in the noise. CDC estimates the number diagnosed just with Lyme disease every years is around 300,000 people.
-Asthma is estimated to cost the US economy $80 billion a year "in medical expenses, missed work and school days and deaths” Web Link
"According to the authors, the study likely underestimated the total cost of asthma to the U.S. economy because their analysis did not include people whose asthma went untreated.”
I’m guessing $5 billion would more than be enough to create a drug production facility under the auspices of the NIH, FDA, or a federal research laboratory to provide low-cost medications that would save our nation that $5 billion many times over every year. And many lives.
-The National School Lunch Program, often attacked by spending watchdogs, spends about $13 billion to feed 30 million children daily, and about $4 billion to feed about half that many breakfast. $4 billion feeds 15 million American children every day for a year. If properly educated, those children grow up to contribute to the economy.
-Budget of the entire Food and Drug Administration was around $5 billion in 2017.
-Budget of all of ICE is about $5.7 billion annually. The whole organization. ATF has a budget of about 1.3 billion.
-In 2018, the US DOT made $225 million available to help fix the nation’s dangerous old bridges. Web Link
The estimate to do the repair work needed is $140 billion Web Link
I just wish the people who don’t want to spend the money would start talking about how to achieve the goal of border security in a cheaper better way, and those who think the only way to achieve border security is a $5billion wall that will cost yet more to maintain, would look at the goal in more specifics and how to better achieve the goal. All I’m hearing is people on one side seeming to make the case that this expenditure is equivalent to border security, and people on the other side failing to address that, and failing to argue from a place of fiscal responsibility. Meanwhile, lots of ordinary Americans are caught in the middle.
