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.
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.
"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.
I think it's combination of wanting to demonstrate the seriousness of the problem combined with cutting projects that don't have constituancy.
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.
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.
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.
If you wish to comment intelligently, you may need to research first.
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.