Slashdot Mirror
U.S. Government: Sorry, We're Closed
theodp writes "CNN reports that the U.S. government shut down at 12:01 a.m. EDT Tuesday after lawmakers in the House and the Senate could not agree on a spending bill to fund the government. Federal employees who are considered essential will continue working. But employees deemed non-essential — close to 800,000 — will be furloughed, and most of those are supposed to be out of their offices within four hours of the start of business Tuesday."
Do they do ANYTHING for the actual good of the country?
Do they receive other benefits? Bummer being sent home in the run-up to the holiday season.
So how about diverting some NSA domestic spying funds to keep retirees from going hungry?
All the news stories have been about "which political party should we blame."
You want to know who to blame? All of the twits who have been cheering on "their team" while this has been going on, instead of pressuring their representatives to do their job. The members of Congress -- in both major parties -- feel no pressure to actually resolve the situation, because they've managed to trick their supporters in the media into giving them a pass while they wasted time instead of actually trying to come up with a solution that has a chance of working.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
... the laughing stock of the western world, right? No other country has such an idiotic system (or as much partisan bickering).
Quoting a post on the Daily Paul:
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
'Murica! Where the government closes when they can't talk it out due to childish behavior from different parties.
I love Slate's take on this. When you read it, substitute "Venezuela", "Uganda", or "Myanmar" for "America".
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
If lawmakers of both houses were considered non-essential we wouldn't have a shut down right now.
It's all fun and games as long as you can play with someone else's income.
The people who steal one third of my paycheck! Who will spy on me? Who will treat me with contempt? Who will give my money to people who don't work? Who will blow up those nasty foreigners with drones? Who will second-guess my personal choices?
And what about the cronies!!? How will they get their schemes funded? Won't someone please think of the cronies!!!?
Sorry, but the way the US political class appear to act is absolutely fucking pathetic.
Because what we really need is anarchy, right? No way that could end badly.
While some congressmen need their salary, most don't. You generally have to be fairly monied to make it that far in politics, meaning that the pay isn't a big deal. Also the lack of pay is something of a hollow threat as in all cases I know of, they authorized pay for employees retroactively after the shutdown.
That aside, if they were furloughed, they'd be prohibited from working meaning prohibited from resolving the situation.
A more effective solution would be to force them to work. Something like in the event of a shutdown they are required to stay in Washington and be in session 12 hours a day, 7 days a week until it is resolved. I think that would be more likely to work.
However, it is all academic since congress would be the ones who'd have to make that law (barring an amendment) so it won't happen.
If this happens in Australia (upper house repeatedly blocks bills from the lower house) we sack them all, and hold another election. It's called a double dissolution (because both houses are dissolved simultaneously).
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
I was there for the last shutdown.
By statute, email was not sufficient for notification. Every employee had to show up to the office and be given a formal-on-paper memo telling them they were furloughed. Remember, by statute, the in-person delivery of a notice on paper was required. That meant that *every* field employee had to make there way back to the office the same morning to receive their paper. Special Agents were called off of stake-outs. Employees permamently assigned to work from home or from desks at non-government entities had to leave their normal workspace and come into the federal building that was, theoretically, their place of employment...even if they *never* set foot in that building under normal circumstances.
At the last shutdown, every federal building was packed. There wasn't room for all the people who were forced to show up all at the same time. Halls were lined with people standing around because they had no place to sit. Friends gathered in groups of 4 or 5 around the desk of the one guy in their group who actually had a desk.
All of this may have been changed in the meantime.
However, post-9/11 we used to discuss the prospect of another shutdown and always concluded the same. Congress would be stupid to do it. The mechanics of the process made every federal building in the nation an incredibly enticing, super-target-rich environment for any nut job with a bomb or a gun who wanted to go out in a blaze of glory.
We tended to think that putting all government employees in central locations, metaphorically under a giant banner that said "All terrorists attack here. Multiple high-value targets present. High level of success guaranteed." was so stupid that even Congress wouldn't do it.
Of course, we might have been wrong about that.
A victory for the British Empire!
When are they *not* coming for more money?
You are not old enough to remember a time when you could go to a local government-funded university, like City College or U California, and get a college education basically free, without going $40,000 into debt.
Sometimes the government collects taxes and uses it to pay for government services that are worth far more to the taxpayer than the cost of the taxes; sometimes government wastes the money.
It's the job of an intelligent citizen to figure out which is which, not to cynically demonize government and shut it all down.
Well, looking at the US deficit and debt, one could argue that the Tea Party might be loonies but at least it isn't their policy to spend their grandchildren's earnings.
It wasn't Bill Clinton's policy to spend his grandchildren's earnings either. He left office with the budget in balance.
It was George W. Bush's policy to spend that surplus on tax breaks for his billionaire friends, and then spend $3 trillion for a war in Iraq for the purpose of (what was it again?), most of which went to his no-bid contractors like Halliburton. Bush left us in debt that your grandchildren will be paying for.
The Tea Party is funded by the same loonies that got those no-bid contracts.
Imagine the Republicans are in the same situation some time and a democratic congress adds a clause into a budget enacting gun control. Fair?
Because there is a whole class of work items which can be postponed, but you still want to be done eventually - purchasing (for example, buying equipment and supplies for troops on deployment - sustainment won't happen, so you only get whats stockpiled right now), training positions (you do want those essential people to be on top of their game, right?), cleaning jobs (offices and government buildings need to be cleaned, the public traipsing through the DMV are a messy bunch), assistants to the essential personnel (for example typists and secretaries, who take a lot of workload off the essential personnel so they can get on with something more important than actually typing out that letter, putting it in the envelope and posting it).
Not to mention all the museum and library staff, a lot of them are in the "non-essential" class as well...
The non-essentials include people and positions which make the work of the essentials easier and more fluid, and sustainable in the long term.
There is also a lot of cruft, I will grant you that, but equally there is a lot of good that will be missed.
for putting a band of priviliged whackos into power in the House of Representatives.
They aren't representative of this country, and exist as a legal loophole that allows gerrymandering to be practiced.
Oh thank god this comment is marked as informative and not insightful.
Actually you will feel something. It'll be like boiling a frog. At first it'll just be a few rich folks getting hammered on the stock market, then it will be questioning the credit rating of the country, then there's the knock on effects to the economy of not just taking 700000 people out of the workforce, but government contracts and other spending which underpins many businesses all over the world will be on hold too. Long term expect another recession.
Ultimately if it continues you WILL feel something. Either that or you have some kind of inability to feel anything in which case I take it all back and your comment deserves the informative mod point it got.
Roughly 16.7tn in debt. I.e., $16,700,000,000,000 and growing by a couple of trillion a year. Let's say that all the employees no longer getting paid are on $1,000 a week on average. Hell, let's be generous and make it $10,000 a week. That's $7,830,000,000 per week. Or 125 weeks to save 1 trillion from this. Assuming no other negative impact to the economy.
The govenment will still be going backwards by roughly 2 trillion per year.
Sure, its a symbolic guesture, but...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
In the corporate world, after every merger or takeover I've seen, non essential employees are shown the door. If we can do without for a day, why not a week, why not a month, let's go for all year. The worst thing will be having to fondle yourself at the airport.
And that works out really well for corporate mergers where immediately after the sum value of the two companies typically drops. Then there is what non-essential means in the corporate world vs the government. This is more like outsourcing you engineering, IT. It works at first and then after a few months everything turns to shit.
It's the job of an intelligent citizen to figure out which is which, not to cynically demonize government and shut it all down.
When you find some of those, let's start a country together. Meanwhile, I'm stuck in this one with a vast number of people who have absolutely no conception of what government does and very firm opinions about how it should do it.
Any praise that I have of Clinton is highly qualified.
The Democrats are awful. They're willing to do things that are bad for the country so they can become millionaires.
But the Republicans are really crazy. They're willing to destroy the creditworthiness of treasury bills. They're basically willing to destroy the country and the legislative system because they don't want to follow a law that passed.
Actually you will feel something. It'll be like boiling a frog.
No, it won't.
By non-essential they only mean that for the short term. For example, according to the BBC, the people who process visas and passports are now on furlough, so obviously that can't go on for very long.
Really? Air traffic control, we could leave that to the airlines, right? Or maybe you'd like 50 different collections of rules. How about NIH, anyone in your family get a really nasty disease lately? Surely your state will fund and coordinate that research. How about the CDC? You like plagues like salmonella raging across the land with no agency in charge of nailing down the culprit so more people don't die. How about EPA? What do you need clean air and water for. How about Social Security, Grandma can come and live with you, right? Medicare? You'll be happy to afford her medications so she'll live to ripe old age under your tender loving care. NTSB ring a bell? They are the folks that figure out how companies managed to kill of your mother by not paying attention to safety.
The list goes on, but shut it all down because they are "non-essential" and "counterproductive". Your motto must be, "I don't think, therefore I am not".
Add "dangerous" to that list.
Not just to stability in the ME and to US relationships with long-time allies.
More dangerous by orders of magnitude to US citizens' lives and freedom than the "terrists", or even any other hostile country, could possibly be.
Violent crime in the US, including gun crime, is at historic multi-decade lows (despite increased gun ownership, but I digress) according to official stats, yet the number of people killed by police (particularly unarmed people) and the number of para-military "SWAT" raids has steadily and rapidly increased over the last few decades, along with the prison population.
"National Security"? Ha!
*Real* national security would necessitate, in part, dismantling and/or massively-downsizing much of the myriad of current alphabet-soup domestic security/intelligence/enforcement agencies and departments, like DHS, TSA, and NSA for just a few examples, and either eliminating them outright, or at the least, stripping them of all but the barest minimum of powers and capabilities/infrastructure, like no more giant domestic data centers and "USS Enterprise bridge"-styled data/surveillance "command centers" at taxpayer expense to satisfy out-of-control and delusional sociopathic megalomaniacs with God-complexes, who also just happen to be US Generals.
Speaking of Gen. "Make it so!" Alexander, back in my day they used to send two big hospital orderlies with a net, a straight-jacket, and an ambulance for such people and placed them in mental institutions.
These days they hold high US political and/or government/military/intelligence positions.
I vote we simply wall-off all of Washington D.C. with all Federal government political/lobbying denizens inside, and make it a giant mental asylum ala "Escape From New York" and then throw a nationwide month-long block-party in celebration, using just a tiny fraction of the savings to the entire country.
"..And nothing of value was lost..."
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Do you REALLY want to grant root access to the clowns in charge of the US ????
Hell, they make 1-week cram-course MCSE's look good, in comparison. . . .
1. None of the essential services, such as air traffic control, will be shut down. You'll still be able to hop into your G5 and fly to Paris for dinner tonight.
2. OSHA, on the other hand, will stop inspecting your refineries, so some of your human resources employees may need to work a little harder to replace losses due to on-the-job mortality and morbidity.
If the #1 and #2 above do not apply to you, please ignore this post, it's not your government that shut down.
There have been fewer votes on federal gun control (for *or* against) in the past decade than there have been attempts to kill the ACA ('Obamacare') in the past year. This, despite it being virtually identical to the plan proposed by Republicans while Bush was in office.
There have, likewise, been fewer votes on the death penalty, abortion access, segregation, pot use, and same-sex marriage *combined* (again, for or against) in the past decade, than attempts to repeal the ACA in the past year.
Democracy isn't about throwing a fit and refusing to do your damned job (passing a budget) because the *other guy* got something you didn't like.
The Republicans shut down the government; the government did not shut itself down. Only one Republican voted "no".
They want the President neutralized. His only "victory", passing Bob Dole's idea of national health care (insurance by private companies in fenced markets), is baneful and hurts their very souls to behold. They will kill people to negate that minor win.
This isn't a government malfunctioning. This is a coup. The second one in six years. This, ladies and germs, is a test of national memory. Can we remember what happened only a couple of years back, at least, if we can't remember Gingrich doing this in the 90s?
As for Jon Stewart and all the other False Equivalency pundits: NO, this is not a failure of "Congress". Congress is furious, except for the representatives of the Confederacy still trying to win the Civil War.
Strangely, neither party, once in power, actually reduces spending.
I'm just going to assume that you have no idea what is actually going on. Clinton balanced the budget and reduced spending. Actually started paying down the National Debt. Idiot Bush raised the deficit and started spending money like a lottery winner and exploded the deficit again. After that idiot ran out of time in office, the deficit started shrinking again under President Obama. The Democrats actually try and reduce spending, get it under control, and then the Republicans mess it all up again, then another Democrat has to come in and fix it again.
As for the current debacle, the Republicans are acting like petulant children who didn't get their way, and are trying to hold their breath until they can make the president look bad. Some of these idiots were actually reelected on a platform of making the president bad. It's shameful and despicable. The idiot Republicans would actually flush the entire country down the toilet if they thought it might get more of them reelected. They are an embarrassment.
And I'm sick of having to pay high insurance premiums because uninsured poor people go to the emergency department (their only means of seeing a doctor when something happens), then when they can't pay their exorbitant bills, the hospitals charge everybody else more money to cover those costs. I'd rather see the money spent on getting everybody covered. We already spend more money per person on so called healthcare than any country that actually provides universal coverage.
Seriously, just make it a federal crime to tell a lie on the house or senate floor, and start throwing these morons in jail. Then maybe something useful can actually get done.
Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean that they're not out to get you.