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US Government Shutdown Ends
An anonymous reader writes "After more than two weeks of bickering that made the schoolyard appear civilized, Congress has finally passed a bill to reopen the U.S. Federal Government. 'The Senate passed the measure by a vote of 81 - 18, followed by approval in the House by a vote of 285 - 144. The bill now goes to the President, who will make remarks on Thursday regarding the reopening of the federal government. ... Earlier in the day, Speaker Boehner conceded that the House would not vote to stop the Senate-negotiated agreement. In a statement, the Speaker said that, after a fight with President Obama over his signature health care law, " . . . blocking the bipartisan agreement reached today by the members of the Senate will not be a tactic for us." The agreement will raise the debt limit until February 2014, fund the government through January 2014 and establish a joint House-Senate committee to make spending cut decisions.' CNN adds, 'Obama, for one, didn't seem in the mood Wednesday night for more of the same -- saying politicians in Washington have to "get out of the habit of governing by crisis." "Hopefully, next time, it will not be in the 11th hour," Obama told reporters, calling for both parties to work together on a budget, immigration reform and other issues. When asked as he left the podium whether he believed America would be going through all this political turmoil again in a few months, the President didn't waste words. "No."'"
I didn't think the Democrats were capable of not caving in.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I suspect it will be massaged over the years to work out little wrinkles, with the end result being a single payer system.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This is not really "the right thing", any more than a hacky bug fix is the right thing. The right thing is to deal with the deficit/debt, as many Republicans want to - but the way they want to go about it is terrible (a combination of threats and spending cuts only). The reality is that until both parties sit down and agree to deal with the deficit/debt with a mix of tax hikes *and* spending cuts, it's going to be hard to make any significant progress on this.
Deal with reality - the world as it is - rather than ideality - the world as you would like it to be.
Maybe a more accurate headline is "US Government Shutdown on temporary hiatus"? It's only a few months funding, and there's no guarantee we won't go through the entire thing again come January 15th...
The bill passed the House, but 144 votes were cast against it -- more than 1/3 of those voting! One can only guess at the careful thought that went into casting those votes. Do these people actually believe that funding "Obamacare" for a few months is worse than letting the federal government default on its loans? There is no acceptable answer to this question. If the answer is "yes," well -- yikes. If the answer is "no," and this is just shameless pandering to the extreme right faction of the GOP/"Tea Party", then -- yikes.
Tax hikes don't necessarily mean increased revenue (they have actually decreased revenue at times). Frankly, the only sure-fire way to pay off this debt is via massive spending cuts. But these are cuts that Republicans aren't generally in favor of.
I second his motion. I wanted a single payer system, not a crazy clone of Romneycare.
The fundamental problem is that the actual cost of healthcare is way too high, mostly because a healthy market cannot be established when the option is pay or die and many of the 'customers' come in unconscious. If insurance could fix it, it would have done so in the last several decades.
While Obamacare has addressed some of the issues like 'pre-existing conditions' and rescission, it falls far short of what we really need.
Depends. A good deal of additional revenue could be appropriated simply by revisiting the corporate tax code. Preventing eg, Apple, from doing a "double Irish with a Dutch sandwich", and hiding $11bn from the us's 30-ish% tax alone is 3bn. (Extend that to microsoft, oracle, and pals as well, and you get the picture.) Playing footsie with investors only works when the market isn't at death's door. In the long run, making those companies pay their goddamn taxes is way better than having debt limit crisis 2014, return of the deficit bomb, both for them, and the world at large, and for the same said investors.
There's plenty of revenue that isn't being properly appropriated. The major problem is the byzantine tax system the US uses, which has more holes in it than a whiffle ball.
We don't really need new taxes, we need to revisit and refine the taxes we already have, and sanitize the tax code. Of course, that would almost certainly never see the light of day, since like term limits, it stands to cost all of the corrupt people on the hill a good deal of money. (Eg, it demonstrates a genuine conflict of interest for them.)
This was a chance to stop the hemorrhaging.
No, it wasn't. This was a manipulation tactic by a minority group of legislators to change the law even though they knew they couldn't really change the law legally (they tried and failed) and knew their tactic had no chance of success anyway. That they were able to do this points to a systematic problem that will only get worse. That they hemorrhaging resources into the military (see: Roman Empire) is only a symptom of that systematic corruption.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hackneyed
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
And nothing of value was lost. Or gained.
Nothing was lost? All the work that the government workers could have been doing during the shutdown was lost. All the revenue from the National Parks were lost. Two weeks food inspections, drug inspections, VA claims processing were lost . Worldwide confidence in the US and the US dollar was lost. US credit rating was compromised with the possibility of higher interest rates on new deficit. Scientific tests will have to be thrown out and restarted.
You might not be personally affected, but plenty of money and confidence has been lost during the past three weeks.
~~
Lol, insurance used to be very affordable before the govt included health care in tax deductions for employers but not for employees. That alone killed the transparency because there is no market for individuals. That means nobody in the whole system gives a fuck how much things cost. Healthcare user, as long as he has one, doesn't care because he doesn't see the bills, employer doesn't care because it's not his health, hospitals don't care either as it's in their best interest to inflate the costs, so who is supposed to put a downward pressure on prices?
Any 3rd party payment system based on spending someone else's money is prone to suffer from overuse and cost inflation. Yes, in theory it's employee's money because it's his compensation but the difference stems from the fact that the employee doesn't have to kiss the dollars in his possession goodbye. Out of sight, out of mind. If it all happens beyond the curtain, he doesn't feel the money was ever his.
Also insurance is about risk management, but in the current form it's far from that. Huge chunk of the cost is about trivial 'maintenance', yearly checkups, flu, etc. These things should be paid out of pocket and you insurance in the meaning of the word should cover only disasters. Recurring costs 100% certain to happen have nothing to do with risk management. Yes, for that reason insurance is a lousy model in case of preexisting conditions but trying to fit a square peg into a round hole as the ACA tries to do won't work and expect to see increases in prices across the board.
More people do oppose Obamacare than support it.... however, those people support the ACA more than they do Obamacare. In additional, ALL of the major parts of the ACA (AKA: Obamacare for anyone without their head shoved up their ideological ass) show a large majority support (some over 90%), other than the individual mandate.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/09/17/1239587/-Obamacare-or-Affordable-Care-Act-Don-t-ask-GOP-to-choose
So...saying more people oppose it than support it is a Microsoft answer...technically correct, but bullshit. As soon as you change the question to do they support the ACA (instead of Obamacare), almost 60% of conservatives change their tune. The real answer is: more people don't know enough about it, or are ideologically incapable of agreeing with ANYTHING that has Obama's name on it.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Wrong Paul. Please pardon the pun.
What amazes me is that those people seriously considered a situation that could have had a devastating economical effect on the US. Things like this cause nations to implode. A bankrupt, non-functional state has time and again led to violent overthrow and civil war. This is what their game of chicken was risking. And when you listen to some of their backers they would welcome this in the hopes to build a different state from the ashes. Only their vision is really frightening.
And yet come next election they will present themselves on TV spots with flowing stars&stripes banner and parade their patriotism in front of everybody who is stupid enough to believe in it.
I feel our definitions of patriotism differ substantially.
20 minutes into the future
Austerity did not work for Hoover, nor Europe recently. It just makes the problem worse. You cannot pay off debt if the economy remains in a slump. Keynesian policy may be counter-intuitive to some, but some things in life are like that. At least pick the middle ground if you hate stimuluses.
If it were the case that it was being overdone, then our inflation rate would be higher than it is. Our inflation rate should be higher to encourage the rich to spend their cash instead of sitting on it waiting for better times. About 2.2% would be nice, but we are at about 1.7% right now (annually adjusted, smoothed over several months).
I realize there is risk either way, but history tends to favor stimuluses over austerity during prolonged slumps. I'll go with the horse with the better record.
Table-ized A.I.
I think when you say "it's opposed by more people than favor it" you need to distinguish between people who oppose it because they think "it's a government take over of health care" and people like me who oppose it because "it's not single payer". The latter group probably prefers having it over having nothing at all.
Austerity programs in other countries have not helped to reduce their level of government debt, the level of government debt has still grown during this period.
Why? Because the population is spending less from borrowed money. The scale of that change in consumer spending easily dwarfs the change in government spending.
If you want to boost the economy, the government needs to drastically *increase* their spending, with the majority of that money spent in ways that will flow through to the majority of citizens. Don't just throw cash at bank managers, that doesn't help anyone.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
You give credit to Clinton for the debt going down.
This was the Internet bubble time. The economy was white hot and tax revenues were phat. You could have put a Teddy Ruxpin in as President and the effect would have been the same.
Slashing the budget during a recession with already-high unemployment is a GREAT way to drive us into a real depression. So yes, doing this soon is a TERRIBLE idea. It needs to wait until the economy is growing.
I agree... If we follow your idiotic advice, that's exactly what we'll get.
So, I take it you've never read or watched "The Grapes of Wrath", and have never heard of The Dust Bowl? Farms didn't save the US from the depression AT ALL. Roosevelt's government programs did...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
First, it is opposed by more people than favor it
That's a curious notion.
The GOP (and the Dems) turned the 2012 Presidential election into a referendum on Obamacare - and they lost.
If most people oppose the legislation why did they vote for the guy who made it his singular legislative achievement; and why did the guy who vowed to repeal it lose ?
The consensus in London once was that the doctors who couldn't hack it in the NHS went to Harley Street.
You might get quicker non-urgent and more hotel-style care privately in the UK, but you'll rarely if ever get better medical treatment. And why would you?
In almost all cases, your problem has been seen ten thousand times before, and a doctor is either competent to fix it or they are not; researchers and advanced specialists are treated well by the NHS and academia, and if they're going to go private, they're more likely to work for pharmaceutical companies, where private industry actually does something that the NHS is not equipped to do already.
The NHS shows that "to each according to his need", where each person is human and "need" can be well defined medically, is entirely workable.
For society as a whole, we single payer countries tend to see better results. But per person, the healthcare in the US is the best. Assuming you have a good health insurance plan.
The last sentence here is the important one. And it means that, if you are either wealthy, or have a good job and no preexisting conditions (especially the kind that would stop you working for a bit) then you're better off in the USA. Or, to put it more cynically, US health insurance is a great deal, right up until the point where you need to make a claim.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
What amazes me is that those people seriously considered a situation that could have had a devastating economical effect on the US.
You could say the very same thing about any big legislation. Many people myself included think this healthcare reform might have devastating long term economic effects on our nation yet it was considered and passed
No, that's really not true.
First of all, according to nonpartisan estimates, the ACA will reduce the deficit. But let's ignore that for the moment and assume that you're correct that it will raise the cost of government by a significant amount.
If that happens, how could we possibly solve such a problem? Could it be that we could...pass a law raising taxes? From their current historically low levels, particularly as a fraction of GDP? And particularly on the super-wealthy?
If I'm reading you right, what you're actually saying is that the ACA will cost money to implement, and cost money into the future as well. But you know what? Doing stuff for people costs money. Helping poor people costs money. Fixing the worst economic downturn and the worst economic inequalities in decades costs money. And I don't mean "costs money that we have to give to the super-wealthy, so they'll be even more super-wealthy." Trickle-down economics is a pretty solidly discredited theory by this point. Empirical evidence just doesn't bear it out.
And if you're one of the "all taxation is theft types," well, then, just screw you. You want to go live in a tax-free wilderness off the fruit of your own labour and no one else's, I suggest you up stakes and find some place in northern Canada without another soul for 50 miles in any direction, because anywhere in this country, you're already benefiting from the results of taxation. It was well over 100 years ago that Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr famously said, "I like taxes. With them, I buy civilization." And that's pretty much the way it works: If you want civilization, if you want to live as part of a society, particularly a modern society, you have no choice but to pay taxes to a central governing body of one sort or another. Because anything else is at least as much a theft from everyone else around you.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
how could they ?
By spending that money in the economy. Creating demand, supporting businesses. ,their extra workers also create more demand and incentive for yet more growth and investment.All of which pay more taxes
Causing those businesses to invest and grow their business, make more profits hire more workers and pay more taxes.
This business, its extra workers, its suppliers
etc.
Or American style, they could use their proof of a regular income to take out loans buy houses get credit cards and do all those previous things turbo charged and on steroids. (When the house prices go up they can then refinance and spend yet more still.)
Or they could take their paycheque leverage it and invest in anything profitable, stocks/bonds/derivatives/etc. and pay extra taxes on the profits
Or they could get lucky and gamble their way to fortune, daytrading, online poker.
I'm sure there are more ways.