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

not sure who they represent

[Anonymous Coward]

anymore.

I seriously doubt any of us have much in common with any of them.

anymore

Re:not sure who they represent

[SuricouRaven]

It's partly about princibles. The management of Planned Parenthood has them, and isn't happy about sacrificing the option of abortion. They don't like it, but it's a symbol of women's right to control their own bodies, to do as they want with their reproductive capacity. Sacrifice abortion, and you are telling women that they are just incubators - that once egg meets sperm, their rights are revoked.

Also, should PP simply spin off abortion services as a seperate legal entity, it would be very expensive - they couldn't share clinics, so it'd need more buildings, more staff. It wouldn't even solve the problem: It wouldn't be long before someone in government (State or federal) just gets a law passed saying that no government money may go to any organisation that provides any form of money to an organisation that provides abortion. Planned Parenthood subsidises abortion a bit, again out of princibels - the view that those women who can't afford abortion are those most desperatly in need. After all, if they can't afford a single medical payment, how can they afford the expense of raising a child?

Even PP doesn't actually support abortions for their own sake, though. That is why they put so much into distributing contraception. Abortion is something they regard as the option of last resort, but nonetheless an option that must remain available. Contraception and education are plan A - used properly. Plan B is plan B. Abortion? Plan C.

Taking this somewhere more abstract though, you have hit upon a problem in the structure of government. You don't want your money going to fund abortion, yes. But somewhere around half the population of the US doesn't want their money going to fund the continuing operations in Afganistan. There are people in the US who would not want any of their money to go on funding schooling, for they have ideological objections to the government getting involved in the education of children. There are many who would not want their money spent on subsidising corn, many who would not want their money spent on enforcing laws prohibiting pot. I doubt you could find a single piece of government spending that the entire tax base supports. So just because you object to how your money is spent doesn't mean you should have any control over it - if you did, it would be impossible for government to exist at all. They aren't your tax dollars, they are the collective tax dollars of the country - the only right you have to them is the right to vote for representatives who agree with you on how they should be spent.

Awww ...

[WrongSizeGlass]

Without a government shutdown how will the media try to frighten the general public with predictions and assumptions? I'll tell you what the 'almost' shutdown did for the economy - it gave a whole lot of 'journalists' and people who blog something to blather about. It's all about ads and page views, people.

Parties are for colleges

[spaceman375]

"That's how things work in a representative government." No, that's how things work in a schizophrenic government. Nowhere in the constitution is power over the government given to political parties. They were invented solely for overcoming slow communications and lack of education during elections. We have significantly improved both. Yet our "representatives" do not represent us at all; they vote according to who they party with rather than in the interests of their constituencies. You've heard the phrase "across the aisle." What it refers to is the fact that senators and representatives do not sit with others from their own state - they sit in two big camps of Democrats vs. Republicans. They should be forced to sit by state and to completely deny any party affiliation once they are elected. Right now most of a politician's time is spent trying to thwart the efforts of half the government. It's a wonder we get anything done at all the way this beast keeps tearing at itself.

Re:Dang.

[shmlco]

Start with "Defense" spending....

"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. In constant dollars, adjusted for inflation, the regular military budget, not including the add-ons, has doubled from a low of about $360 billion in 1998 to more than $739 billion in 2011. It’s so much money that, as the Bipartisan Policy report points out, by 2009 US spending on military research and development alone, about $80 billion, surpassed China’s entire military budget by more than $10 billion. The budget for the US Special Forces alone is greater than the total military spending of nearly 100 countries; overall, the United States spends about as much on defense as the rest of the world combined."

Re:WoW $38 billion in cuts

[ArcherB]

With over a $1.5 trillion deficit, congrats, you've just reduced the deficit by .025%. The coming forced austerity is going to be a lot worse than if Congress got it's head out of its ass and worked to cut the deficit.

Fixing our budget problems is easy.

1) Take a sheet of paper and divide it into two columns. Title the sheet "Budget"
2) Under the left column list all absolutely necessary for government as spelled out by the Constitution (see 10th Amendment)
3) STOP

#3 is the most important part.

So it goes

[dkleinsc]

As a Kurt Vonnegut fan, my first question was "Who died?"

Then I saw what programs were getting cut drastically, and the answer is abundantly clear: poor people and old people.

You forget part #4

[Cyberax]

You forget part #4: "Defending against roving bands of marauders"
And part #5: "Disposal of bodies of dead seniors"