Penny Wise and Pound Foolish

As John Nichols observes in The Nation, Republicans resisted including $900 million for pandemic preparedness in the economic stimulus package earlier this year.

As the outbreak of swine flu shows, that resistance was foolish.

Maine Sen. Susan Collins spearheaded the opposition in Congress, following the lead of former White House political czar Karl Rove — ostensibly to save money but chiefly for partisan political reasons.

There was no connection, they argued, between economic recovery and pandemic preparedness. Rove even argued that the health sector added jobs in 2008, which (he claimed) made stimulus funding even less necessary.

Oh, really?

Collins was one of three Senate Republicans who voted for the watered–down version of the stimulus package in spite of threats from members of her party to oppose any Republican who supported it. It bewildered me then — and it bewilders me now — why Collins should be sensitive to such threats. She was just re–elected last November and won't have to face the voters again until 2014.

Besides, Maine is no longer the Republican stronghold it once was. Working with Democrats makes sense for a moderate Republican like Collins.

In the wake of reports of an outbreak of deadly swine flu south of the border — and further reports of cases in the United States — efforts to cut the stimulus package by eliminating pandemic preparedness funds seem to be a clear case of being penny wise and pound foolish.

The swine flu outbreak may be something that can be contained, but Nichols quotes one person who is skeptical about that:

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Dr. Anne Schuchat, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's interim deputy director for Science and Public Health Program, explained to reporters on Saturday that, because the cases that have been discovered so far are so widely spread (in California, Kansas, New York, Ohio and Texas), the outbreak is already "beyond containment."

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Nichols rightly points out that "a pandemic hitting in the midst of an economic downturn could turn a recession into something far worse — with workers ordered to remain in their homes, workplaces shuttered to avoid the spread of disease, transportation systems grinding to a halt and demand for emergency services and public health interventions skyrocketing."

To me, this is a reminder of how intertwined everything is — and how tenuous and fragile those connections are.

I know I'm using the word "foolish" a lot in this post, but, frankly, I can think of no better word to describe Republican efforts to save dollars by eliminating funds intended to save lives by preventing the spread of an epidemic — especially when we are not that far removed from the public hysteria brought on by outbreaks of SARS and avian flu in other parts of the world, not to mention concerns about viruses growing resistant to existing antibiotics.