Opinions on the U.S. federal government shutdown

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by DonRotolo

Yeah, I can't say that getting (cheated) out of a few weeks' pay wouldn't hurt. But maybe if everyone was working instead of furloughed, I'd see it different.

The problem is it's illegal for these employees to work, yet they're not fired so they can't get new jobs (putting aside that finding employment is far from trivial). Yeah, we're paying them to not to anything, but it's far better than forcing them into this weird job limbo, especially those living paycheck to paycheck. It's not fair to have them suffer.

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This whole shutdown is a joke. I'm often critical of both parties, but I don't see what the Democrats could do differently here. If they "compromise" (really, give in) here by gutting the ACA, the precedent set has long lasting consequences. The Republican tactic of "we'll be obstructionist crybabies who shut down the government until we force the majority party to do what we want" will be totally validated. And every two months this will happen again and again.

It's important to remember that the Republican proposal is to defund the ACA for a year in order to kick the budget can down the road two months. So they get this ridiculous leverage five more times a year? Keep in mind we're already in a sequester. Our budget is already a stone's throw away from Paul Ryan proposals. They have most of what they want in terms of spending cuts, already, before any of this happened.

Now throw in the fiscal cliff. Raising the debt ceiling lets us pay for stuff we're already spending money on. Keeping it the same does not magically make the US spend less money - we've already spent it. We would just be deciding not to pay our debts and default. The debt ceiling is a procedural artifact that's been handled dozens of times without incident. That this is even an issue is just horrible.

The important thing to take away from the crisis here is that this kind of poor representation, procedural power trips, and the radicalization of both party members (especially in the House) are all consequences of the way the government and US elections are set up right now. Congress has a poor approval rating, but if you ask Americans what they think of their representative, they are held in much higher esteem. These representatives have a vested interest in grandstanding, meaningless symbolic gestures, and policy radicalization, lest they lose a primary election. When the general election comes around, demographics decide the result more than anything - the biggest threat to individual representatives is in primaries. Combine this effect with the ever-increasing policy consistency of each party (remember when there were liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats?) and this kind of thing is just going to happen again and again.