You wouldn’t know it from the blogosphere, but today is National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day. More than 450,000 African-Americans have been diagnosed with AIDS. Roughly 250,000 African-Americans have died of this disease, still roughly 9,000 every year. Many people living with HIV don’t know their status or otherwise need help. Here are some links if you want to learn more.
Measures to find and help these people are part of that grab-bag of “non-defense discretionary” spending category both parties like to freeze and cut. We could do a lot more.
This concludes today’s unironic public service announcement.
Yeah. We could cut defense spending to a rational level, get out of Iraq, out of Afghanistan and don’t even think about Egypt as a fun place to send elements of XVIII Corps.
Here is Rep. Tom Price R-Ga, with his weird cross-over, talking about honesty (insert unironic chuckle here), in my morning paper:
“People will be supportive of almost any decreases in spending as long as they believe they’re done in an open, equitable and fair manner.”
And here is Krugman in The Conscience of a Liberal keeping us all honest in an “open, equitable, and fair” way:
The effects of race on support for the welfare state are also clear from a comparison across U.S. states. Alesina, Glaeser, and Sacerdote show that there’s a strong correlation between a state’s racial makeup and its policies: Broadly, the higher the black fraction of a state’s population, the lower its social spending per person.”