Important article about the slippery slope from an underpaid teacher crowdfunding for classroom supplies to a bankruptcy city crowdfunding to clean up its parks. Crowdfunding is great when it funds new products that aren’t getting supported by more conventional forms of investment: Public necessities, by contrast, are not awesome; they’re essential. Roads, health care, education:…
Tag: health
The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills
Subtitle: Recessions, Budget Battles and the Politics of Life and Death. By David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu —thebodyeconomic.com This book came out in 2013, and is frequently cited in discussions of austerity and the damage – short- and long-term – resulting from budget cuts, particularly at the national level. The book is organized in three…
How Austerity Kills
Over a year ago I saved an article that caught my eye – Businessweek, of all sources, reporting on a study connecting austerity and a spike in HIV in Greece: HIV infections among drug users in Greece jumped more than 20-fold in fewer than two years, fueled by a lack of needle exchange and methadone…
Budget cuts hamper Washington State’s battle against whooping cough epidemic
The response to the epidemic has been hampered by the recession, which has left state and local health departments on the front lines of defense weakened by years of sustained budget cuts. Here in Skagit County, about an hour’s drive north of Seattle — the hardest-hit corner of the state, based on pertussis cases per…