Back on February 26th, in the midst of the blame Republicans for Obama’s Sequester narrative, New Hampshire District One Congressperson Carol Shea-Porter tweeted this.
The sequester would automticlly cut 30 million dollars from the section 317 program run by the CDC that sends money to states to support vaccination programs.
Carol thought you might want to know, probably after someone told her to tell you, that cutting 30 million from the Section 317 program would be, like, bad.
So if cutting 30 million would be bad, would cutting almost 60 million be almost twice as bad?
Carol’s a follower. A rubber stamp for the left. So maybe she didn’t know that Barack Obama’s 2013 budget was already scheduled to cut $58 million dollars from the same section 317 program. But based on my back of the envelope calculations Obama’s budget cut to that program would have resulted in 1,314 NH Kids not getting vaccines like measles, mumps & rubella–that is, if Carol’s tweeted figure was even legitimate in the first place.
For our confused Democrat readers, Obama’s 58 million dollar cut to the program that funds vaccines for kids is more of a cut than $30 million from Obama’s sequester, so while the White House was prompting the media and congressional Democrats to blame Republicans for denying vaccines to kids Obama was already cutting almost twice as much from the program himself.
“The FY 2013 budget request for the Section 317 immunization program reflects a program level decrease of $57.986 million,” the administration’s Centers for Disease Control (CDC) budget says. The CDC is the agency in charge of the 317 grant program.
Wait, it gets better.
Here is video of Congressman Andy Harris (Dr. Andrew Harris, M.D.) from Maryland, spanking speaking to Dr. Tom Frieden, the Director of the CDC, on this very question.
At 1:58.
Congressman Harris: “Let me get it straight. Under the presidents cut, of 58 million dollars to the 317 program, you think you can get around that to avoid cutting vaccines to children. But under a sequester, that the President blames on Republicans, you don’t know if you can do that?”
Priceless.
