Your tax dollars:
What happened to repairs on roads and bridges? What happened to shovel-ready projects to put people to work? It seems to me that the only people put to work here are government-funded scientists who shouldn’t have much trouble finding work. Now, if this were a nurses training program for nurses who are going to take care of millions of old people (including the minority elders), that would make some sense, but researchers?
Here is a story from New America Media (an ethnic news outfit)* entitled “Stimulus Boosts Research on Minority Elders” that caught my eye. Some interesting bits of information in this article:
Green is part of a community-health pipeline at six major universities across the United States that just received a boost from stimulus grants. The National Institutes on Aging (NIA) created the program in 1997 to fill the void in health research needed to bring better care to ethnic elders – and the supply of scientists to do it.
The program — called the Resource Centers for Minority Elders Research (RCMAR) — recently received a $179,000 federal stimulus grant that will help revive a national effort placed on hold because of stagnant federal funding in recent years.
[…..]
“Stimulus money will help fund more research projects that can potentially improve the health of older ethnic populations, while at the same time creating more jobs in health research,” said Wallace, who also co-directs UCLA’s Center for Health Improvement for Minority Elders, one of the six RCMARs.
[…..]
Concern about meeting the unique needs of multicultural seniors grew as NIA scientists realized that the populations of ethnic elders will grow by more than 180 percent in the next two decades, more than double the rate of whites 65-plus.
[…..]
According to a 2008 NIA evaluation, RCMAR trained nearly 200 new researchers in aging, in its first decade, and 95 percent of the new gerontologists were from ethnic groups…
* It always amuses me when a publication (or any organization) brags about how it is geared to this or that ethnic group. Imagine the outcry if a major on-line publication billed itself as a publication for news about white people. Or how about an organization that applied for a federal grant as a minority white group in certain cities in the US!