The Government Shutdown

We are now in the fourth day of the government shutdown, with no sign that any side is willing to compromise. According to the news reports I have heard the main sticking point seems to be that a minority faction wants to defund the Affordable Care Act, in spite of the fact that it’s law, and was voted on by Congress after much heated debate. The argument seems to be that the country can’t afford it. Well, if the figures I hear are close to accurate, we are wasting more money with the shutdown than the Health Care Act will cost. 

The correct way to change the Health Care Act is to propose a bill doing that, and try to get it passed. Not shut down the government, potentially throw the country back into depression, and with the debt ceiling limit (that Congress kicked down the road 2 years ago instead of solving) looming in a couple of weeks, causing a major default on treasury bonds. 

But, apparently in their minds, this all pales in importance with who can win the pissing contest between the anti and pro Universal Health Care factions. No one seems to realize that if even some of the doom and gloom predictions about government defaults come to pass, health care will become the least of our worries. How about worrying about where to get food, gas costing $10 a gallon, and no electricity or utilities.

I suppose we only have ourselves to blame, after all we elected those self serving people to congress after we saw what they did about the debt ceiling 2 years ago. I’d call them idiots, but even idiots know enough not to cut off their nose to spite their face.

I’ve already blogged about health care so I won’t say much except that we need to get the greedy people and companies out of trying to milk the system and get costs in line. If we do that Universal Health Care won’t cost us any more than we pay now.

What do we need to do to get congress in line? Well a million man/woman march on the capitol with torches and pitchforks might do some good. While I don’t approve of lynchings, the threat of a few might get their attention. Otherwise, we need to remember this debacle next year when elections come around and throw the bastards out. I also expect a reduction in my Federal taxes for all the days they have been off work.

To prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future there are a few reforms that need to be made:

1. No rider can be attached to any bill that does not have a direct connection to the main intent of the bill. This would prevent the sneaking in of pork-barrel projects and special interest legislation as riders on other legislation.

1. Election reform needs to make it possible to make a serious run for national office without needing to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in order to have a chance to win. This would prevent the purchase of Congressmen by special interests.

1. As rapidly as possible, change the ability of the government to borrow money so that it has to run a balanced budget like many states do. This will end the periodic fight over the debt ceiling as well as being a good fiscal policy.

1. Any bill that spends money, has to include a source for funding that expense. This will add a lot of transparency in how we pay for those government services.

1. Like most corporate and household budgets, the Federal budget needs to be a continuing thing, with periodic reviews, but funding for ongoing agencies doesn’t automatically go away at the end of the year. Specific projects should be funded for a specified period (possibly multi-year) and automatically terminated.

Of course in order to get these changes in place, reason will have to prevail and the greedy will have to back down. If that can happen, world peace is possible too. 

I do have a lot of faith in the American people’s ability to overcome insurmountable obstacles. Maybe we will realize that we really can get along quite well without the government, Wouldn’t it be ironic if Congress just bickered themselves out of a job.