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

[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: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.

Unemployment

[chill]

I am employed by the Federal Gov't.

The last e-mail I got on Friday was explaining how and where to file for unemployment.

That is, the gov't was telling me how to get the gov't to pay me for NOT working because the gov't couldn't afford to pay me FOR working.

Is this a great country or what!

Re:Unemployment

[chill]

Furloughed is a form of layoff, and that qualifies for unemployment. Just look at the history of manufacturing in the Midwest and all the layoffs at factories as examples.

One of the entertaining bits of trivia is most of the people who work in Washington, DC live in either Virginia or Maryland. However, you file for unemployment where you work, not where you live. It was the DC office that was going to get crushed with the load. (THEY posted a message saying they would be accepting applications ONLINE ONLY -- no walk-ins.)

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.

TERM LIMITS.

[Moderator]

If this isn't a strong case for term-limits, I don't know what is. The FY2011 budget took SO LONG to pass because IT WAS AN ELECTION YEAR and Americans were starting to worry about defaulting on their national debt. Are we really so stupid to believe that in a nation of 300 million people, it takes the same small group of elite warmongers to pass our laws year after year? Many congressmen have been there so long, they are rolling in their own shit. With term limits at least, there is the fresh flow of ideas every election cycle. There is also incentive to do well...with a 6x2 cycle for representatives (6 2-year terms, max) and a 2x6 cycle for senators with the requirement that they first served in the House, there is more incentive for aspiring first-time Representatives to appease their constituents (geographic, not party) so that they can "upgrade" to a Senate seat (and later, the presidency).

It's okay though. Looks like we are going to default on our debt sometime within my lifetime. There's no way out at this point. In the meantime, continue to spend, spend, spend. Let's get that new infrastructure (new bridges, roads, high-speed internet) built for the NEXT government. Maybe then we'll get it right with Term Limits.

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.

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.

There is one happy party in this...

[3seas]

The military industrial complex. As they are still way over funded.
US spends 47% of all world defense spending. Over 60% if you include allies spending, leaving less than 40% divided among many small and or poor countries. So what do we really need this abusive defense spending really for? Defense against what and who?

Are the personal domestic economies really such a national threat?
Or are they just a threat to the military delusions of power elitism?

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.

Re:cutting deficiet should be simple

[The Snowman]

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.

I still don't understand why we need two departments for Defense and Homeland Security. Isn't that redundant? I mean except for the fact that our Defense is actually Offense. Maybe if we renamed the Department of Defense back to the Department of War and renamed the Department of Homeland Security to the Department of Defense we would have an accurate picture.

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"