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: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.