Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 11:31am

Government Shutdown? If Only!

government-shutdown

 

Well, time for a phony government shutdown.  I say phony because all essential, and many non-essential, functions of government will keep ticking away.  The media will be filled with pictures of the Statue of Liberty being shut down and commentators damning Republican members for their “intransigence” in not recognizing that every whim of Obama is eternal law.  All humbug.

The truth is that we have a federal government that could easily be trimmed by 20 percent with most Americans being completely unaware that anything was being cut.   We have one party in this country that still has members in it that have some semblance of fiscal sanity, and another party, that has a Jackass as its symbol, whose elected representatives assume the government is solvent as long as there exists thin air from which to make money appear.  Real protracted deadlock, with the government going into a real shutdown, might lead the way to salutary reductions in spending.  At least it would show the extent of the real budgetary problem.  Instead we have a fake shutdown, that amounts to a lot of sound and fury signifying precisely nothing.

 

Update:  From Investors Business Daily:

The Executive Office of the President “has carefully reviewed its personnel  needs … to ensure that the mission … is carried out without significant  interruption.”

But the letter says during the shutdown it’ll take 12 taxpayer-paid employees  “to support the vice president in the discharge of his constitutional duties.”  Call them the dirty dozen, since they take care of what Vice President John  Nance Garner called “a bucket of warm spit.”

What do these 12 absolutely essential non-Secret Service vice-presidential  staff do, guarantee that Joe Biden doesn’t make a gaffe during the shutdown?

He also gets one staffer for the vice president’s residence. Can’t “average  Joe,” who as a senator famously rode the commuter train with the riffraff from  Delaware to Washington every day, make his own meals for a few days? Or put up  with Dr. Jill’s cooking?

Why are 61 U.S. Trade Representative employees required during the shutdown  “for developing, coordinating, and advising the president on U.S. trade  policy”?

And how many of the more than 20 members of the first lady’s staff, at least  four of whom are paid six figures by the taxpayers, will be deemed  non-essential?

The White House is just a microcosm of the out-of-control growth in federal  government personnel. Shameless federal worker unions already plan to sue to get  paid for days they stay home during the shutdown.

One thing a government shutdown does is prove that millions of them can, and  should, stay home every day.

 

 

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Thomas Collins
Thomas Collins
Tuesday, October 1, AD 2013 9:43am

I saw this heart-wrenching story in the NY Times yesterday:
For the Washington Area, a Second Lightning Strike
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/30/us/politics/government-shutdown-would-hurt-economy-of-washington-area.html?hpw

“When it became clear sequestration wasn’t going to be resolved, we stopped putting money in the kids’ college fund and put it in an emergency fund,” Mr. Nudd said, adding that he had started looking for a job outside the government. “We’ve cut back on a number of things. We canceled cable, we got rid of our land line, we cut out luxuries, the housekeeper’s not coming — things like that.”

Boo [expletive] hoo.
Company towns have been dying all over the country for decades — at least government can’t be outsourced overseas — or can it?

“After three years of frozen pay, unpaid furloughs, huge increases in retirement costs for new employees and the threat of massive layoffs at the Department of Defense and elsewhere, Congress and the administration need to keep their hands off of federal employees once and for all,” said J. David Cox, the national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents about 650,000 federal employees.

Gee, and you mock Tea Partiers with signs telling the gov’t “keep your hands off my Medicare”.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Tuesday, October 1, AD 2013 10:10am

“For the Washington Area, a Second Lightning Strike:”

Not so!

In fact, US median household income has dropped 7% from 2006 to 2012. Meanwhile, DC median household income has soared 23%.

I need to go to DC two or three times a year. Unlike the rest of us, the the restaurants and saloons are packed, housing prices are near 2006 bubble highs, and everywhere you look are cranes and new construction.

Last one out, pull the plug.

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Wednesday, October 2, AD 2013 4:25am

There is no crisis.

“The U.S. 10-year yield increased four basis points, or 0.04 percentage point, to 2.65 percent at 5 p.m. New York time, according to Bloomberg Bond Trader prices. The price of the 2.5 percent security due in August 2023 fell 11/32, or $3.44 per $1,000 face amount, to 98 22/32. The yield rose as high as 2.66 percent. It dropped yesterday to 2.59 percent, the lowest since Aug. 12”

Foxfier
Admin
Wednesday, October 2, AD 2013 10:35am

“Targeted” cuts– to make sure that folks notice the shutdown.

On the upside, they’re being so obnoxious that it’s annoying folks, and even NPR has pointed out that the gov’t has shut down more than a dozen times in the “youth vote’s” lifetime.

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