No U.S. Government Shutdown This Week

A Reader writes "If you were hoping for a government shutdown today, you are going to be disappointed. In a last-hour cliffhanger, Democrats and Republicans managed to agree with each other enough to keep the government funded for the rest of the current fiscal year. Since the budget bill that finally passed was a compromise, no one is happy with it. So it goes. That's how things work in a representative government."

Comments

Woo progress, not!

[CrackedButter]

This image says it all really - http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/2011-spending-trillion-cartoon.jpg. As an outsider looking in, it's obvious to me the government really needs to cut military funding. Our UK government has done. Apart from a cool info graphic on the NYT a few months back where you could pretend to make the necessary cuts yourself I've never see this mentioned anywhere else in the US media.

Re:Woo progress, not!

[shmlco]

No, it's Defense. As I pointed out above....

"According to figures Wheeler compiled for The Pentagon Labyrinth, the military’s base budget of $549 billion in 2011 is just the starting point for calculating military dollars. Adding in war spending ($159 billion), homeland defense ($44 billion), Veterans Affairs ($122 billion), interest on defense-related debt ($48 billion) and other items pushes the total to more than $1 trillion a year."

One trillion dollars, 2/3's of the entire deficit in one great big pile. That's more than the 2010 numbers for Medicare AND Medicade combined. That's more than Social Security AND the interest on the federal budget. Add it all up, and the US spends about as much on defense as the rest of the world combined.

We overpay for super-high-tech planes and ships that are so expensive, they can't even be sent into combat (B2, Virginia, littoral combat vessels). We can not afford this. Defense spending as a percentage of the GNP broke the USSR. It can break us.

But you got to love it when, instead, people latch onto "entitlements". SS needs work, but is it an "entitlement" to expect to collect some form of social security insurance after you've paid into the program for you entire life? Is it an entitlement to care for our sick and elderly, whom our health insurance compaines refuse to insure because doing so is too expensive? Or is it our responsibility?

Re:Woo progress, not!

[DavidTC]

Sorry to have to fix your math, but the deficit is 14 trillion dollars.

Uh, no it's not. The debt is 14 trillion. That is how much we owe.

The deficit is how much we spend each year over revenue. It's currently about $2 trillion, despite the few idiotic cuts the Republicans are pretending is the end of the world if we don't pass.

Interestingly, you're also wrong. 2010 numbers aren't out yet, but 2009's figures say that Defense was 20% of the budget, whereas Medicare, Medicaid, and all other entitlements except Social Security came to 33%. (Social Security came to an additional 21%.) ALL interest (remember, the government doesn't break out interest by what the loan was for) comes to 8%.

And here is THE LIE. Repeat it enough, and everyone believes it.

Hey, idjit. Those programs are self funded. You can't cut Social Security and magically have more money, because that program collects taxes to fund itself. Cut the program, the taxes are cut.

Same with Medicare. Medicare is insurance...people pay into it, independent of income tax, and then they get money out. People are hardly going to keep buying fucking Medicare is if it doesn't provide benefits.

Both those programs take in more money than they spend, or at least, they take in more money on average. (Right now, they're both struggling, but luckily they have money saved up.) Are you suggesting that we should continue to operate the tax collecting part of social security and medicare without actually providing the service? No? Then what the fuck are you suggesting, then, when you claim they're a bigger dent on the budget than the military?

The only part of the budget that can be 'cut' is the part that takes general tax revenue and spends it on things, and the biggest part of that the military, by like 70%. You can't cut things that collect their own money and somehow end up with more money.

dd in multi-year costs of Medicare and Medicaid (like interest on THAT money.)

Christ, you're stupid. Medicare, like Social Security, has collected more money than it spend, so it has a negative impact on interest, because the Federal government uses money from it, at no interest, instead of borrowing from banks.

Medicaid, OTOH, while not self-funded, costs $208 billion a year. Which is probably about ten times the yearly operating costs of the 20 B-2 Bombers. (Which are, of course, a very small amount of the armed forced.) Considering that US is paying $5 trillion in interest a year on $14 trillion, interest on $208 billion would be something like, oh, $70 billion.

Re:Woo progress, not!

[DavidTC]

I think I shall leave you with an analogy for all you feebleminded fools out there:

We are a struggling household. We don't make enough to pay our armed security guard to follow us around, and we're way in debt.

However, fool like you have, herp derp, discovered that we're spending about $430 a month on upkeep of the house next door. You see, the house next door is owned by an absent owner, who gives us $500 a month to maintain the house, plus covers the time we spend ourselves.

We've been using that extra $70 a month to keep from having to take out as many loans to cover the costs of our armed guard, who is more and more insistent he needs new guns and bullets, although we technically are eventually required to spend it on the house next door.

So, herp derp, why are we spending so much on the house next door? Let's just go to that guy, tell him we won't do it anymore, and keep the entire $500 a month for ourselves! WOoooooo!

...what do you mean, he's not going to keep paying us to maintain it if we don't, you know, maintain it? Oh, and he wants all the money we borrowed back?

Social. Security. Is. Not. An. Expense. Cutting it cannot help the budget. Anyone who even slightly pretends it can either a fucking goddamn retard who shouldn't be allowed to vote, or a deliberate liar.

Re:Woo progress, not!

[DavidTC]

You're right. The deficit is $2 trillion, and the debt is $14 trillion.

Mathematical mistakes are not important. What is important is not actually talking about adding bananas to fix our damn apple shortage.

I buy all kinds of things from the government that don't provide benefits to me, but that's not the point.

So, essentially, what you want to do is repeal social security, but then pass a law adding back the social security taxes that people pay.

So, to put it another way, you want to raise taxes on the lowest income brackets under the guise of 'cutting entitlements'. That is either your plan, or you haven't thought this through at all, haven't actually sat down and thought about the actual words you are saying.

Aside from your misunderstanding about how insurance works, the deficit is a problem in the FUTURE when there's more old people taking out of Medicare and Social Security than young people paying in. At that point, it stops being self funding. The Social Security Administration puts that date at 2014.

No, the Social Security administration says they will have more expenses than income at that point, and start using the money they've saved over the last half dozen decades. Social security actually will run out of money in about 2030.

And that has absolutely no bearing on anything, at all. The fact an self-funded program might run out of money means we need to fix it at some time, or do something about it, or even end it, but it UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES means we can somehow 'save money' by reducing it. That money, and actual government spending money that we can spend to pay down the debt, are not the same money.

You are attempting to save money by bitching about how much the neighbor's spend. The neighbors who are living within their means, and will be for several more decades, and oh, by the way, you're borrowing money, interest free, from to kept your incredibly unbalanced house in order.

Everyone who even mentions social security in the same breath as getting the budget under control should be utterly ignored in any discussion at all, because social security is not part of the fucking budget. This is constant FUCKING INSANE LIE that the media refuse to call people on.

It is utterly insane. It is not something that can be debated, it is not something that there are valid points of view on. We collect social security taxes independent of the budget, and spend social security money independent of the budget. Nothing it does can impact the budget, but the right wing and morons who believe them have conflated the hypothetical future social security budget problem with our actual real general budget problem, and managed to utterly dupe people like you into thinking those issues are related.

Actually, maintenance on ALL military equipment combined cost $283 billion for FY2010. There's no way you can credibly say that 1/10 of that goes to B-2 bombers. I made an honest mistake with the debt/deficit numbers. Where did you get the estimate that it takes $21 billion per year to fund the B-2 program?

Maintenance costs don't include operating costs or any development costs, so that's not very relevant. Nor does it include training or manpower or the actual nuclear support system required to keep the bombers armed.

However, you are correct, I was thinking total operating costs (the aircraft development alone was $60 billion.) over the last decade, but put yearly because I halfway changed the comparison. We spend about $2 billion a year on those stupid things that we can't use.

$203 billion is closer to the amount that we spend each year on our wars.

Re:I have absolutely no problems with govt shutdow

[jhigh]

Congress has to continue being paid according to the 27th Amendment, which prevents any law that varies the pay of members from taking effect until an election takes place. This is to keep them from engaging in any shenanigans with their own pay. If you allow them to suspend their pay between elections, you can bet that they're going to use that logic to increase their pay at some point in the future.

cutting deficiet should be simple

[fermion]

If this were not about a basic hatred for Obama and all he represents, cutting the deficiet should be simple.

Medicate Part D was never funded. That is $64B and growing, or probably close to a trillion dollars of deficiet spending over the next 10 years. Repeal it or fund it. Could save $30B in the current budget process.

The department of education has grown widely since 2000. End NCLB and other unfunded mandates that infringe on the states right to educate it's population. DOE in an advisory roll is fine and history tells us it can be funded without deficit spending. So cut it's budget, maybe $10b in the current budget process.

Department of homeland security has also always been funded by deficiet spending. Cut it. Return the decision making to the civil servants that actually work. The last thing we need is another administrative layer. If the Tea Party wants small governement, this is the place to start. If we want screeners and the like, put it under the other agencies and shift administrators from other less important projects. Saving in the current budget cycle may $10B.

That is our $50 in deficit spending. We could do $100B but that would require a cut to the military, which they have already said they can do because they admit they waste massive amounts of money, and a tax increase to cover war operations around the world. Ultimately Obama is going to have to do what Bush I did with Reagan tax cuts, which is to end the Bush II tax cuts. Can't do it untile 2012 budget cycle, but much of the projected deficit comes from them.

Re:Dang.

[Almost-Retired]

No its not operational folks, its been broken, spending far more than they had for 40+ years now. This 37 billion they brag about cutting is equ to your cutting your weekly grocery budget of $100, by about .025 cents. That's 2.5 hundredths of a cent folks. What is really needed is to cut it by 20 or 30 bucks so there is something left to pay on the principle of our national debt. And even if they do manage that, the next 3 generations of working folks will never see the day where they don't owe 6 months worth of a years income just to pay the interest on this debt. That's pure BS folks, and even my great-grandchildren are old enough they can tell you that.

But its not going to get fixed without good people running for office, and a revolution in truth telling in the MSM so the sheeple are well enough informed that they will vote the good people into office. That's asking a lot, but its the only way it will get fixed without a lot of bloodshed.

Every time you catch the MSM in a lie, hold their supporting advertisers feet to the fire, it works, see the current Glenn Beck situation playing out as we watch.

Cheers, Almost-Retired out.

Re:not sure who they represent

[farmanb]

Just take a look at the list of 'riders' on the bill and it will become clear who they represent:

http://www.ombwatch.org/files/budget/OMB_Watch-HR1_Policy_Riders.pdf

It's pretty clear they're not interested in balancing the budget. The republicans are only interested in gutting those agencies responsible for enforcing pesky regulations like wetland preservation, emissions/dumping of hazardous material, the clean water act, etc., defunding institutions like NOAA and anyone else doing any sort of climate studies and generally gutting a wide range of social services provided to low income and middle class Americans, while simultaneously providing criminally large tax breaks for corporations:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/business/economy/25tax.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1,
http://sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=67562604-8280-4d56-8af4-a27f59d70de5

That isn't to say the democrats are much (if at all) better, but it should be absolutely clear exactly who the republicans represent.

Re:not sure who they represent

[Anonymous Coward]

I found this line particularly representative:

The deal also adds money for one of Boehnerâ(TM)s favored projects, a program that provides low-income District students with money to attend private schools.

There you have it folks: in a budget that is designed to cut government spending, a person who is supposedly in favour of a smaller government inserts a rider that funds his pet projects with public money. This is at the same time as he's simultaneously removing funding from women's health projects, yet lacks the necessary reproductive organs that should really be a pre-requisite for anyone who should have an opinion about it.

Oh and by the way, just so we're clear that I'm not trying to simply take a dig at the GOP, I'm absolutely certain that if anyone wanted to dig through the bill they could certainly find many more examples of this sort of two-faced pork barrel politics from politicians on both sides of the fence. In fact, I hope people find lots and lots of such examples and then use them to get rid of these wastes of skin.

Re:Awww ...

[Third Position]

Considering Belgium has been doing fine without a government for months, I'm not seeing a problem with a government shutdown. Probably it's the best thing that could happen. It's caused enough trouble already.

Re:not sure who they represent

[Graymalkin]

By this argument anything that pays for an externality somehow directly funds Planned Parenthood. Your tax or utility payments are paying for trash pickup at Planned Parenthood, as are the other tenants in the strip mall where an office is located. Shit you're paying for a Planned Parenthood abortion right this second because you've paid taxes that paid for the road leading to the strip mall where an office is located. In short you've got a bullshit argument.

Like many non-profit organizations Planned Parenthood maintains sectioned off budgets. The money raised for abortion services (counseling et al) is 100% separate from the rest of their funds. Government subsidies to the organization can never be put into the abortion services fund nor can money from that fund be used to pay their electric bill. If we defund the 97% of the organization that isn't involved with abortion services they can't just shift money from that fund to pay the utility bill, the bill will just go unpaid or the office will close.

It seems obvious that you don't care about poor women since you didn't bother really researching services PP provides. In your mind you've equated the whole organization with abortion and are willing to fuck over millions of women not getting abortions there because of it. Without free condoms from PP there will be more unwanted pregnancies and therebwill be no counsellors available to tell the girls there's options available besides abortions. It's not like back alley abortions won't still occur. Your short-sightedness is actually very dangerous.