If you’re not yet outraged over Barack Obama’s decision to shut down the known universe as a way of punishing profligate House Republicans, perhaps the next round in the fight of the century will get your attention. The key combatants in the upcoming battle over the debt ceiling have already entered the ring in anticipation of the Oct. 17 event.
In this corner is Speaker of the House John Boehner, who said this morning on ABC’s “This Week” that the House doesn’t have votes to raise debt limit. And in this corner is Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, who said earlier today on CNN’s “State of the Union” that “If the United States government, for the first time in its history, chooses not to pay its bills on time, we will be in default.”
With the stakes this high, you’d expect that the federal budget (if one existed) would be stretched so thin that you could read the fine print on a union contract through it. Think again.
The government spends as much as $14.5 billion per year on animal experimentation, with some projects siphoning off taxpayer dollars for decades and resulting in the cruel treatment of an unknown number of animals.
According to an analysis of government data, the National Institutes of Health spends between $12 billion and nearly $14.5 billion on animal testing every year. According to NIH documents, about 47 percent of research grants have an animal research-based component. This number has been fairly stable over the last decade.
The revelation has made for some strange bedfellows. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), which usually aligns itself with the liberal fringe, has moved so far right on this issue that the group has petitioned Boehner to “expand the planned 7.8 percent cuts to the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) budget.”
But that would mean cutting funding on experiments to gauge the effects of crystal meth on monkeys or to breed blind bunny rabbits.
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