The Wall Street Journal’s Sharon Begley gives us a nice bow with which to wrap up a week of numbers explaining how government both keeps us alive and hastens our demise.
On Tuesday, we learned that both household income and extreme poverty are up. Thursday, a report said longevity of Americans is rising rapidly due to spending on high-tech devices and medical research. Today, Begley reports that as a result of one-party government, spending on cancer and other research by the National Institutes of Health is down – cutting off promising research.
Let’s look at the statistical syllogism.
• Longevity rose during a period of unparalleled taxpayer support of scientific discovery that kept at-risk babies and chronically ill elderly people alive.
• The average household income rose because of a political philosophy demanding tax cuts and slashed federal spending.
• Cutting taxes and spending has caused a slowdown in health research, which will keep more people in ill health and costlier to the economy to take care of.
The only fairness involved is that the few Americans enriched by tax cuts and lower federal spending also get diseases and will die a little sooner because there wasn’t enough money to hasten a cure.
