What a shame …

Many of you may have read about our president's 2008 budget proposal which he unveiled on Monday and which calls for a staggering $50 billion budget hike for the Pentagon and an additional $240 billion to be sent to Iraq while simultaneously cutting the budget for Medicare and Medicaid, health research and heating subsidies for the poor. (Correct us if we're wrong, but wasn't the war in Iraq supposed to pay for itself with all the oil we were supposed to receive? Wasn't the real reason we went there just so we could get control of the oil?)

It's a crying shame when we have to cut our domestic programs so we can help rebuild another nation. What about our nation? What about our citizens?

Did you know that as a result of this proposed budget, some clinical trials for certain cancers will have to be shut down? According to the Wall Street Journal article, "Funding Fears to Halt Some Cancer Trials," the National Cancer Institute (which provides funding for the cancer cooperatives that enroll patients across the nation in cancer trials) is slated to have a budget cut of about $9M. As a result, cancer cooperatives are shutting down cancer trials and are stopping the study of certain cancers. This is the second year in a row that cancer rates have declined but the reason is because of cancer research and clinical trials. "Many of the trials that led to the approval of those [cancer fighting] drugs by the Food and Drug Administration were sponsored by cancer centers participating in the various cooperative groups."

We agree that cancer societies should begin studying "ways it can support cooperative-group trials, including the possibility of raising private funding" on their own. However, it's a crying shame when they are forced to do this because our president would prefer to spend the money on defense and on rebuilding another nation rather than on this country's citizens.

One other question: why keep the tax cuts during wartime?