California once had mobile hospitals, ventilator stockpile but dismantled them
msn.com
msn.com
Also, 880, 101, and Coleman are all gridlocked during rush hours.
Doesn't the Civil Air Patrol still use Reid-Hillview?
It's already scheduled to be closed.
Some NIMBY found out that avgas is leaded, and it was game over. Nevermind the million single-occupant cars per day on the adjacent highways.
It's already scheduled to be closed
https://archive.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=44979
I think state and federal government should work together to create and fund independent state/federal agencies to handle the storage, handling, and certification of stockpiled goods. It'd probably pay for itself fairly quickly.
Edit - That could be a problem for many politicians. I imagine a lot of pork comes from replacing expensive equipment and supplies.
I find it difficult to blame the governor of a state with a $26 billion budget deficit in 2011 for cutting this. How many people were thinking about pandemics then? How many voters would have chosen to keep this program or discontinue it?
We are about to enter another deep recession and similar cuts will be made, which may seem unwise to people a decade from now.
"In televised remarks Monday, Newsom said the state will lease beds in struggling hospitals around the state and is eyeing convention centers, motels and state university dormitories for use as hospital wards. One such lease, in Daly City, may cost the state as much as $3.2 million a month for 177 beds."
Making small investments for the future is what economics is all about.
This isn't economics. It's politics.
How could you sell something like pandemic preparedness in 2011? How could you present a long-term picture, knowing what was known in 2011, and argue that such a thing was a budget priority compared to jobs and social services?
I can't imagine that any politician in 2011 would have been taken seriously when talking about pandemic preparedness, given the context of the massive recession that we were still climbing out of.
Hopefully quite a few, considering the H1N1 pandemic was just two years earlier.
The article mentions this was also for earthquake preparedness, which any California government should be thinking of.
Guess we should just give up on any emergency preparedness if a recession makes cutting these programs blameless.
I think it's combination of wanting to demonstrate the seriousness of the problem combined with cutting projects that don't have constituancy.
The one who put it in place? Someone had the foresight to implement this program.
It's one thing to forgive someone for not having foresight but it's something else entirely to actively dismantle the fruits of your predecessors foresight.
A pandemic seemed about as improbable then as an alien invasion. What should the government have cut instead? School spending? Social services? How do you think the voters would have responded? Remember that the budget deficit was enormous.
It's pretty hard to defend funding pie-in-the-sky ideas like global pandemics when people have concrete, immediate problems. Just a month ago, the concept of a global pandemic that would shut down a huge portion of the economy seemed insane to 99% of voters.
People have warned about a global pandemic for decades, and there were a few near misses - Ebola in 2014, SARS, MERS. Bill Gates was quite vocal. It's a 100-year event, something that people prepare against. No sane person builds in the 100-year floodplain!
Next up in California: AR1Kstorm.
Doesn’t that describe most of Florida and the Gulf Coast? In practice many, many people are willing to build on 50-year floodplains, and not in ways that leave a perfectly good house afterwards either. No houses on stilts or anything similar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARkStorm
Interesting.
Oh, we do that all the time in the UK. They build super-expensive pokey houses with little postage-stamp gardens on 5-year floodplains and all sorts of idiots buy them.
“so it was a normal year, and airlines reduced the cost of India to USA flights by 20%,”
horrified gasps (the audience knows where this story is going)
Pandemic might have seemed improbable to you as a layperson, but the medical community has been bracing for this for decades. The less seriously you take it, the less seriously your politicians take it and the less seriously pandemic preparation gets funded.
Nobody would have bought that a month ago. In 2011 you would have been laughed out of the room.
California should have reestablished this later, though. Unfortunately, everybody forgets once the crisis is gone.
You don't have the case where some nitwit edges out a reasonable candidate in the primary and then wins the general simply because they have (D) or (R) next to their name.
In California's case, if we send two Democrats to the general election, the Republicans get to weigh in on which they find more acceptable. It forces the candidates to the actual center.
It would work that way for two Republican candidates as well, but a whole host of Republicans simply quit after we un-gerrymandered the state.
If you wish to comment intelligently, you may need to research first.
Getting rid of funding for pandemic preparedness in favor of funding a high speed rail system to nowhere does seem particularly short sighted in retrospect.
It would be nice to point at the source, rather than a repost on msn.com: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-27/coronavi...
It depends on the economics and politics of the day. Richard Nixon (R) was a gun control advocate. Most Democrats were on the wrong side of Civil Rights.
Different day, different context.
It isn't surprising that the government would be caught flat-footed by anything that wasn't needing a regular response. Long-term thinkers only get voted in by accident; the public prefers charisma.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickgleason/2019/04/16/no-ca...
If the market doesn't (pretty much fully) recover within the next six months, the entire CA pension system is going to be catastrophically insolvent.
Should the CA tax payer pick up the bill for promises made to state employees that were never expected to be payable? We’ll see how that goes. Either way the tax payer and the pensioners lose.
>the public prefers charisma.
Democracy is not really tuned to long term thinking. It's tuned to "the next election cycle", and in places like California elections are happening all the time.
1. Preferential voting rather than first-passed-the-post, which is an idiotic system designed the maintain the status quo; and
2. Mandatory voting. The level of voter suppression in the US is simply staggering.
But having a multi-party system doesn't really solve anywhere near as much as you might think. Other countries have this. Israel being one. And there you have single issue and single interest parties who hold a disproportionate sway because they only care about one thing.
In Australia at times we've had a small party (2-5 sEnators out of 76) who hold the balance of power and whatever pet issues they have have to be addressed, which is fine if you agree with them but not so fine if you don't. In times passed this has included the Australian Democrats (whose bargain with the Howard Government to pass GST also led to the downfall of the party in big part) and the Greens. But it could just as easily have been One Nation, a dog-whistle anti-immigration, pro-White party that looks like a real "pioneer" in the Trump era.
1. Current system allows running over budget too easily
2. Many costs are difficult to cut (like unionized state employees)
3. Alternatively, the low hanging fruit is cut very fast when budget requires balancing.
WTF? How difficult is it to keep the reserve as FIFO buffer in respirator supply chain? You probably don't even have to take them out of standard shipping container.