While most people believe that the National Institute of Health (NIH) should receive funding from Congress, there are also many people that find this option infeasible. Those whom are opposed to adding new funding to the NIH argue that this money needs to go to defense spending in order to keep our nation safe against terrorists and other external threats. President Obama has proposed a $582.7 billion budget for defense spending in his Fiscal Year (FY) 2017 budget. In this budget, he argued for a quadrupling of our military expenditures in Europe to $3.4 billion to prevent Russian aggression against our NATO allies that have large ethnically Russian populations (Boyer). This extra spending would allow for “continuous U.S. armored brigade rotations”
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But what this fear mongering fails to inform the public is that only 3,264 Americans have been killed by terrorism at home and abroad from 1995-2014 (American Deaths in Terrorist attacks). This number includes 2001 where 3003 people died in one day on 9/11. In 2014 alone, 1,779,754 people died from the top nine diseases studied by the NIH (Death and Mortality). The American people need to be less worried about ISIS and more worried about their health. That starts with these candidates needing to stop pushing war hawk agendas put in place by the military-industrial complex and begin focusing on issues that truly affect American citizens; that issue is their wellbeing. Sending troops to the Middle East has cost the US $4.4 trillion and after interest accrues on the loans that we took out for these wars, it will have cost us over $8 trillion. On top of that money, the US has spent over $170 billion on the reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan (Baum). If the government can afford to rebuild these countries, then they can more than afford to provide greater funding for the NIH. Had only a fraction of this money been spent on the NIH, who knows how far ahead we would be when it comes to biomedical research. More important than the money, these wars have cost our country the lives of over 6,800 of the finest American men and women some of whom were undoubtedly aspiring doctors, scientists, and researchers (Baum). These candidates need to think about how they may be remembered president, whether that be that they invaded a Middle Eastern country and stuck our troops in a perpetual war, or the president that cancer was cured under. If a president heavily pushes for greater NIH funding, the facts show that new cures and treatments will be found by researchers, the economy will perform better, and people will live
But what this fear mongering fails to inform the public is that only 3,264 Americans have been killed by terrorism at home and abroad from 1995-2014 (American Deaths in Terrorist attacks). This number includes 2001 where 3003 people died in one day on 9/11. In 2014 alone, 1,779,754 people died from the top nine diseases studied by the NIH (Death and Mortality). The American people need to be less worried about ISIS and more worried about their health. That starts with these candidates needing to stop pushing war hawk agendas put in place by the military-industrial complex and begin focusing on issues that truly affect American citizens; that issue is their wellbeing. Sending troops to the Middle East has cost the US $4.4 trillion and after interest accrues on the loans that we took out for these wars, it will have cost us over $8 trillion. On top of that money, the US has spent over $170 billion on the reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan (Baum). If the government can afford to rebuild these countries, then they can more than afford to provide greater funding for the NIH. Had only a fraction of this money been spent on the NIH, who knows how far ahead we would be when it comes to biomedical research. More important than the money, these wars have cost our country the lives of over 6,800 of the finest American men and women some of whom were undoubtedly aspiring doctors, scientists, and researchers (Baum). These candidates need to think about how they may be remembered president, whether that be that they invaded a Middle Eastern country and stuck our troops in a perpetual war, or the president that cancer was cured under. If a president heavily pushes for greater NIH funding, the facts show that new cures and treatments will be found by researchers, the economy will perform better, and people will live