9/28/13, "As Congress fights over the budget, agencies go on their ‘use it or lose it’ shopping sprees," Washington Post, David A. Fahrentholdt
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9/30/13, "US Government Shutdown: don't blame the Republicans – blame whoever spent all the money," UK Guardian, Tim Stanley
"Okay, so let's get the mainstream media analysis of the looming shutdown out of the way first. The House Republicans are led by a moderate weakling (Boehner) who is being held hostage by a gaggle of Tea Party crazies determined to destroy a humanitarian law known as Obamacare that is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to rescue us from disease, poverty, global warming and Robin Thicke. Obama (Father of the Nation and possibly Jesus, but he's too humble to admit it) and the lions of the Senate are standing their ground. And so the Federal Government faces catastrophe because a GOP alliance of cowards and loons won't see reason and bend to the public will as represented by the glorious Democrats. Prepare yourself for society to collapse as museum workers don't turn up for work in the morning…
The reality is that this crisis has been caused by two things: a) overspending and b) the Constitution of the United States. On the overspend, the US has reached this point of crisis because it has failed to curtail spending effectively – and it has failed to do that because Democrats have consistently refused to make genuinely tough choices (the dreaded sequester was, itself, a plan to delay making a plan that has now started catching up with the President who called for a sequester in the first place). I could recite all those big debt numbers that run into hundreds of zeroes but for a simpler sense of the madness consider the spending spree that has been going on in just the past few days. In a dash to "use it or lose it", The Washington Post reports that,
This past week, the Department of Veterans Affairs bought $562,000 worth of artwork. In a single day, the Agriculture Department spent $144,000 on toner cartridges. And, in a single purchase, the Coast Guard spent $178,000 on “Cubicle Furniture Rehab.”Why the heck does the Agriculture Department require so much toner? Is it 3-D printing wheat? And, while we're at it, if we're being told that the shutdown will only affect "non-essential personnel" doesn't that imply that the US government currently employs a lot of "non-essential" people? If so, why?
Now spending wouldn't be a political issue if one party controlled all three branches of government, but it does not."...
[Ed. note: George Bush overspent badly during his 8 years, bailed out the banks, and destroyed the Republican Party. As a result, almost no Republicans were left in the House after the Nov. 2008 elections. In Nov. 2010 the Tea Party filled the House with scores of new members but a lot of them wanted to do what their constituents elected them to do. The GOP didn't want that. The GOP today has merged with far left democrats and wants the same things they want. The GOP has worked hard to get rid of TP people and in some cases has succeeded. Help from the IRS came in handy. Call them what you want, the Silent Majority, the TP, they're ordinary Americans who see a ruling class that must be replaced.]
(continuing): "The American people voted in 2012 for divided government, giving the presidency and Senate to the Democrats and the House to the Republicans. Republicans in the House are thus not only constitutionally entitled to opposed Democrat spending plans like Obamacare but they actually have both a mandate and a democratic responsibility to do so – a responsibility to represent the will of the people, a majority of whom are against Obamacare. We call this the American Way. A lot of observers don't seem to understand it, which is depressing.
You might say that the American Way is the wrong way, that political partisanship is heading towards a shutdown and – who knows? – the End of the World? But that's not what history teaches us. The US government has shut down SEVENTEEN times in the past. When it did so in 1996, the economy chugged along nicely without that bit of federal assistance and the end result was welfare reform. This from Bloomberg is revealing:
A quick check of the performance of the S&P 500 stock index during previous shutdowns suggests that equity prices might actually benefit from a brief suspension of federal government activities.What a surprise. Life with a little less government activity is just fine."
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Comment: If George Bush hadn't done such a bad job the House wouldn't have been lost and we wouldn't have ObamaCare. So technically ObamaCare is Bush's fault.
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