From WaPo:
The Trump administration is trying to block billions of dollars for states to conduct testing and contact tracing in the upcoming coronavirus relief bill, people involved in the talks said Saturday.
The administration is also trying to block billions of dollars that GOP senators want to allocate for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and billions more for the Pentagon and State Department to address the pandemic at home and abroad, the people said.
The administration’s posture has angered some GOP senators, the officials said, and some lawmakers are trying to push back and ensure that the money stays in the bill. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to reveal confidential deliberations, cautioned that the talks were fluid and the numbers were in flux.
So … they want to conceal the extent of the pandemic by failing to measure it via testing.
Don’t these guys get it? Or are they so tied up in short-term thinking that it never occurs to them that there are proxies for metrics, such, say, hospitals so full of critically ill patients that they’re falling out the windows? President Trump’s frantic assertions that the virus will just “disappear,” emblematic of magical thinking, certainly is part of this strategy.
I think they can’t think beyond the end of their noses. They’re blinded by their ideology of the virtues of small government and the evils of big government, a sentiment I still get from some conservative friends, and so they push blindly onward, trying to cripple anything that smacks of it.
Meanwhile, people die and the economy continues to deteriorate. There’s a reason the rest of the world pities us.
