State Budget Crisis is real and will cost people their pensions and jobs

Jobs are key to the economy

Some politicians would like us to believe that the root of our economic problem — whether it’s our state budget or our national economic crisis — is one of too much spending. These politicians tell us the simple solution is to drastically cut spending — even if it means cutting programs such as Medicare that families increasingly depend on to get by in this stagnant economy.¶ Yet days after Congress passed the debt-ceiling deal, the Dow Jones industrial average continued to plunge. What Wall Street knows is that the solution to strengthening our economy isn’t in partisan stances or sound bites.¶ What our economy needs is to get Americans back to work.¶ How we get there in this state requires our elected officials to put aside politics and show real leadership and address Nevada’s primary obstacles to creating jobs: much-needed tax reform, investing in education and stopping the outsourcing of Nevadan jobs to out-of-state workers.

The infrastructure bank will also solve econ short term independently of jobs

CNN 7-9-11 (Cable News Network, John Avlon - CNN contributer, 3 bipartisan bills that could get the economy moving - Public private infrastructure bank, 7-9-11, http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/09/opinion/avlon-three-bills-economy/index.html)

The bipartisan BUILD Act is a no-brainer that has been stalled for good reason.¶ It would create a public-private bank to seed investment in America's aging infrastructure, improving our resilience and competitiveness over the long term while spurring the economy in the near term. ¶ "In a time of budgetary crisis, the American Infrastructure Bank pays for projects with private money now sitting on the sidelines," attests Michael Likosky, director of NYU's Center on Law & Public Finance. "Every country uses private capital to build projects except for the United States. We are an island."¶ "We are poised for a new era of prosperity if we could gain consensus on the fact that our infrastructure needs to be rebuilt," agrees John Hofmeister, the former CEO of Shell Oil. "It was designed for a time in the past when our country had a different population."¶ Voters look beyond monthly jobs numbers¶ President Obama has backed this bipartisan infrastructure bank bill as more feasible than a version his administration pushed earlier. "President Obama is the biggest proponent of public-private partnerships to hold office to date," argues Likosky. "The Infrastructure Bank is a rare case of a popular bipartisan idea, born in the Beltway, that has been adopted by governors and mayors." It is trickle-down policy-making. It's also smart policy-making that business and labor, Republicans and Democrats, should all be able to agree on.

Ext: Bioterror

State Budget cuts decreases response to possible bio-terror attacks

Proebstle ’11 ( Proebstle, Stacy – Reporter for townsquare media. "Hit With Budget Cuts, NJ Bio Terror Threat Real." Wobmam. N.p., 12 22 2011. Web. 12 Jul 2012. .)

Is New Jersey prepared for a possible anthrax attack or pandemic flu outbreak? A new report by Trust For America’s Health shows major cuts to federal and state funding are threatening the state’s ability to respond to bio terror attacks.¶ “Over the last year New Jersey has cut funds to public health by 15%. Trenton is one of the cities at risk for elimination of money that would help it rapidly distribute vaccines during emergencies” said Rich Hamburg, deputy director of Trust For America’s Health.¶ Hamburg says the bit of good news is that preparedness had been on an upward trajectory in recent years., “This is our ninth report and when things were good nationwide, programs were being funded, we saw that a lot of states over the last few years had picked up flu pandemic plans in which many did not have them at all.¶ The report says:¶ - In the past year, 40 states and the District of Columbia have cut funds to public health.¶ - Since 2008, state health agencies have lost 14,910 people through layoffs or attrition; local health departments have lost 34,400.¶ - Federal PHEP grants – Public Health Emergency Preparedness grants – were cut 27 percent between fiscal 2005 and 2011, when adjusted for inflation.¶ - Some 51 cities are at risk for elimination of Cities Readiness Initiative funds, which support the rapid distribution of vaccinations and medications during emergencies.¶ But the concern is that because of the economic crisis, New Jersey might not be as prepared today as it was a few years ago.¶ “The East Coast is doing much better than a lot of other places, but at some point…and I think we are there now…there will be choices that have to be made. Do we fund 7 of these programs or 10?…and the ones that get cut or lose funding can have a real impact on the public’s health.”

Failure to mitigate bioterror risks extinction

STEINBRUNNER (Defense Analyst) ’98 [John, Foreign Policy, Winter, Proquest//delo-uwyo]

It is a considerable comfort and undoubtedly a key to our survival that, so far, the main lines of defense against this threat have not depended on explicit policies or organized efforts. In the long course of evolution, the human body has developed physical barriers and a biochemical immune system whose sophistication and effectiveness exceed anything we could design or as yet even fully understand. But evolution is a sword that cuts both ways: New diseases emerge, while old diseases mutate and adapt. Throughout history, there have been epidemics during which human immunity has broken down on an epic scale. An infectious agent believed to have been the plague bacterium killed an estimated 20 million people over a four-year period in the fourteenth century, including nearly one-quarter of Western Europe's population at the time. Since its recognized appearance in 1981, some 20 variations of the hiv virus have infected an estimated 29.4 million worldwide, with 1.5 million people currently dying of aids each year. Malaria, tuberculosis, and cholera-once thought to be under control-are now making a comeback. As we enter the twenty-first century, changing conditions have enhanced the potential for widespread contagion. The rapid growth rate of the total world population, the unprecedented freedom of movement across international borders, and scientific advances that expand the capability for the deliberate manipulation of pathogens are all cause for worry that the problem might be greater in the future than it has ever been in the past. The threat of infectious pathogens is not just an issue of public health, but a fundamental security problem for the species as a whole. ¶ In recent years, this realization has begun to seep into international security deliberations. An unintended outbreak of a virus resembling ebola among monkeys at a research installation in Reston, Virginia, in 1989 raised awareness of the natural threat, and several authoritative reports have since called for substantial improvements in global disease surveillance. Concern about the use of biological weapons rose with revelations that Iraq had deployed anthrax weapons during the Gulf War and that the Aum Shinrikyo sect apparently had attempted to attack the Imperial Palace in Tokyo with botulinum toxin, the first putative episode of actual use since World War II. In reaction to these events, the United States has strengthened legal authority to preempt terrorist threats, has established more extensive regulations for handling hazardous biological agents, and has created for the first time special military units continuously prepared to respond to domestic incidents. Internationally, negotiations are under way to strengthen the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC) of 1972-now the central international legal instrument for preventing the hostile use of pathogens-and President Bill Clinton has pledged to complete an agreement by 1998. But these efforts are merely tentative first steps toward dealing with a problem that vitally affects the entire human population. Ultimately the world's military, medical, and business establishments will have to work together to an unprecedented degree if the international community is to succeed in containing the threat of biological weapons. ¶ A CLASS UNTO THEMSELVES ¶ Although human pathogens are often lumped with nuclear explosives and lethal chemicals as potential weapons of mass destruction, there is an obvious, fundamentally important difference: Pathogens are alive, weapons are not. Nuclear and chemical weapons do not reproduce themselves and do not independently engage in adaptive behavior; pathogens do both of these things. ¶ That deceptively simple observation has immense implications. The use of a manufactured weapon is a singular event. Most of the damage occurs immediately. The aftereffects, whatever they may be, decay rapidly over time and distance in a reasonably predictable manner. Even before a nuclear warhead is detonated, for instance, it is possible to estimate the extent of the subsequent damage and the likely level of radioactive fallout. Such predictability is an essential component for tactical military planning. The use of a pathogen, by contrast, is an extended process whose scope and timing cannot be precisely con trolled. For most potential biological agents, the predominant drawback is that they would not act swiftly or decisively enough to be an effective weapon. But for a few pathogens-ones most likely to have a decisive effect and therefore the ones most likely to be contemplated for deliberately hostile use-the risk runs in the other direction. A lethal pathogen that could efficiently spread from one victim to another would be capable of initiating an intensifying cascade of disease that might ultimately threaten the entire world population. The 1918 influenza epidemic demonstrated the potential for a global contagion of this sort but not necessarily its outer limit.

Bioterror risk high

RAPID BIOMEDICAL PROGRESS MAGNIFIES CBW THREAT

WHEELIS (Sr. Lecturer, Microbiology, UC-Davis) ‘03[Mark “Biotechnology and Biochemical Weapons,” The Nonproliferation Review, Spring, pp. 48-53//delo-wyo]

An immense amount of time and money are being invested into these biomedical fields, and the rate of discovery is very rapid. Furthermore, this is a field in which fundamentally new methodologies are one of the principal drivers. Since new methods open up entire new categories of questions, they act to stimulate the rate of progress significantly. ¶ The intellectual base of the methodologies is supported by an immensely sophisticated and rapidly growing micro-scale instrumentation and computational base. The computer-controlled reaction vessels, ultrahigh throughput screens, robotic microarray printers and readers, time-of-flight mass spectrometers, high speed sequencers, and other devices have been critical to the development of the field. So, too, has the exponential growth of computer speed and memory, as well as the sophistication of software, since all of these laboratory technologies depend on computers for the collection and analysis of data. Indeed, bioinformatics is probably now the rate-limiting technology, as the flood of genomic and proteomic data is overwhelming the capacity to integrate and understand it. ¶ The intellectual momentum of this science is immense and clearly unstoppable. Thus a very large number of new, highly toxic compounds with precisely understood and controllable physiological effects will soon be discovered. Many of these will enter production as drugs or as research reagents. The range of known potential CW agents will thus broaden by a very large factor in a very short period of time, and most of them will be synthesized from precursors that are not currently regulated under the CWC.

CURRENT BW THREAT ASSESSMENTS ARE INADEQUATE

MOODIE (Pres., Chemical & Biological Arms Control Institue) ’01 [Michael, Testimony before Senate Subcommittee on Int’l Security, Federal Document Clearing House Congressional Testimony, 7 November, LN]

The emphasis on vulnerabilities that derives from a focus only on a single factor such as the agent has several drawbacks:¶ First, vulnerability assessments, especially those focused on BW, portray dangers that are virtually infinite. As a result they provide no criteria or metric against which to plan. The result is either policy paralysis in the face of an overwhelming challenge or pressure to commit enormous funds that will never be enough.¶ Second, they foster worst case thinking that skews resources toward high-consequence, low probability contingencies.¶ Third, vulnerability assessments transform “what ifs” into tangible contingencies. They provide no sense of whether what is theoretically possible in fact matches the reality of what is likely to happen.

EASY FOR TERROISTS TO GET CBW MATERIAL: STATE SPONSORSHIP, THEFT

STERN (JFK School of Government, Harvard) ’99 [Jessica, The Ultimate Terrorists, p. //wyo-delo]

Terrorists might be able to acquire chemical or biological (CB) agents from governments favorable to their cause. CB agents are proliferating. In 1997 Secretary of Defense William Cohen estimated the number of countries with "mature chemical and biological weapons programs" at "about thirty;' and the CIA claimed that around twenty nations had developed these weapons.2 Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, and Syriaalllistea by the State Department as supporters of terrorism-are believed to possess chemical weapons and at least some biological weapons. Iraq's CB programs are quite extensive (see Chapter 7). The small quantities of CB agents required for an attack wotJld make it very difficult to track the flow of the weapons or their component chemicals to terrorist groups. Terrorists also might be able to steal CB agents from national stockpiles. In Albania in 1997, according to an Albanian military official, antigovernment bandits stole chemical weapons and radioactive materials from four army depots. The stolen materials, the official warned, posed serious health hazards.3

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