How does Congress stay in session during a shutdown? Where does electricity in federal buildings come from if the Federal govt can't pay for it?
However, the military is entirely part of the federal government, as are many other organizations. In the case of not having a budget, the government is required to shut down all functions that are not essential for safety and security. So things like the military, the TSA, and so on can continue to function, but office workers doing jobs like allocating the funding for highway construction are furloughed, put on temporary unpaid leave from their jobs.
This is, of course, terrible for the efficient functioning of government; when the impasse is over, they will have to come back to their jobs and try to catch up. Oh, and in the time leading up to the shutdown, many of them would have been busy preparing for the shutdown, documenting which functions would be considered essential and thus able to continue during the shutdown; because the deadline was no surprise, and there had been many temporary funding bills leading up to this point, there was always a pretty high chance that this shutdown would happen.
Of course, this inefficiency plays well into the politics of one of the parties, who hold a religious belief that private enterprise is always more efficient than government, and so playing games like this that increase its inefficiency help to sell their case and get government functions sold off to private enterprise, who just so happen, in so many cases, to be some of the largest donors to campaigns of this particular party.
Which is beyond ironic to anyone who's worked in the corporate world, but I guess that's for another thread.
This idea they have that private enterprise naturally evolves toward the most efficient system is laughable.
>>This idea they have that private enterprise naturally evolves toward the most efficient system is laughable.
Work in private industry AND government and you might find the comparison a bit more apt, not that I'm a Republican.
Public sector can sometimes seem worse because there's less money sloshing round and people demand it isn't wasted, which effects a lot of bean counting.
We could collectively decide to eliminate a lot of red tape in government, no problem. It's just the effect of unchecked, unsupervised, unaccountable governments that make us want that red tape in the first place. Todays Justification Paperwork is yesterdays front-page scandal...
In fact I think I know of far more cases of private companies doing considerably worse job than what the public sector did.
My city recently switched to a private company for garbage collection e.g. It was an absolutely horrible mess. My home town had a care home for mentally ill people, that got taken over by a private company. They promised to run it cheaper than the government. Except they totally messed up everything. They lost a lot of talented people, who quit due to their poor management. Then they demanded to be paid more than the public solution had charged to do the same job.
So not only were they worse, they were also more expensive. Sure these are just anecdotes. But it puts a hole in the claim that the private sector is ALWAYS better. To disprove the notion of always you only need a single counter example.
I am not against private companies. Just let them compete on equal terms and prove that they can do the job better. Unfortunately our conservative government is often so ideologically tied to the idea of private always being better than they push for private sector solutions even when a company is not able to demonstrate that they do a better job.
In fact almost every case I've seen where a private company does the job cheaper, it is because they give their employees worse conditions and salaries, not because of smarter organization and management.
An entity that can rig the courts, the laws, and the regulations to its favor has an advantage.
Sure these are just anecdotes. But it puts a hole in the claim that the private sector is ALWAYS better.
Yeah, that's just magical thinking nonsense. You have to take the situation apart and look at what the incentives are. Economic libertarian woo is just as bad as alternative medicine woo. Markets aren't magic. They are a particular kind of distributed machine. It sounds like that mental hospital/home didn't have a competitive environment, or they couldn't have demanded more funding.
In fact almost every case I've seen where a private company does the job cheaper, it is because they give their employees worse conditions and salaries, not because of smarter organization and management.
In Washington state in the US, there were private DMV counters at Fred Meyer. AAA auto insurance can also do some of these functions. The customer experience is almost universally better at the private counters, because the private employees have incentives to make the customer experience pleasant, and the state employees have none. If a company can cheap out on its employees as compared to the state, and the level of service stays the same, then the market worked. If a company does that, and the level of service gets crappier, but the company doesn't face consequences, then the market has not worked. I bet, if you tried hard to prove the null hypothesis and looked for circumstances that would interfere with the market, you'd find them.
You really think the garbage collection department has that much influence?
By itself, no, but perhaps the politicians behind the political deals to change the garbage collection department do.
Having said that, "privatized" trash collection creates its own type of shithole - whether it's a single vendor obtaining a city's exclusive contract for politicians' short-term balance sheet gains, or many competing services that result in visits by multiple trash trucks every single day.
If a private service is being chosen, they have that same position. This is not an advantage that government-run pickup has over private pickup.
> For two, they generally get themselves excepted from local regulations (eg noise ordinances) for essentially convenience purposes.
I'd expect similar laws to be in play no matter who is chosen, is that unrealistic?
Unless, the local government actually structures a market and gives people a choice. Then competition can cause the service to clean up its act.
This is a straw-man, nobody claims that private enterprises are necessarily more efficient than government organisations. What is claimed, however, is that a free-market system invariably leads to better processes and products, compared to a government monopoly, because there is a competitive advantage in optimising overheads.
To suggest that government organisations are "often" or even "occasionally" more efficient than private organisations is quite chuckle-worthy.
Either way, it's fairly inefficient; either they were paid for doing no work, or they were not paid and may leave for better jobs or morale destroyed due to that.
10/10 federal policy. #ShootFootNow #AskQuestionsLater
One party believes 92% of this and the other party believes 83% of this statement, for any non-American reading this.
I believe there is a name for this belief, Mammonism comes to mind.
The US system has elevated a denial of service attack (filibuster) to the status of important democratic ritual. This doesn't help either.
("Funding continues as-is" may be rendered impossible by external factors, as in the Greek budget crisis.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconciliation_(United_State...
Then it actually passed and the media (yup, that same media) put out some calculators. I played with those, and realized I was seriously mislead.
Wait another month, when people will get higher paychecks, and see if it's still unpopular.
I really wish the media would stop telling me how to think. Just tell me what happened. Leave out the reactions, and quotes from "other people" telling me what I should think about a topic.
Best I can do right now is read opposing media outlets and contrast them, but it's hard to do.
I said a survey done that early is not indicative of people's true opinion.
Do another survey in a month, and that data should be correct.
Are you arguing for the sake of arguing?
What would be the reasonable thing for the democrats to do right now? They weren’t allowed to see the tax bill. That’s what happens when something has the 51 republicans and it can’t be filibustered in the current environment.
Further, the republicans haven’t even brought a bill forward to be filibustered likely because they don’t have the votes in their own party.
I’m fairly centrist for this site but the republicans controlling every part of the government as well as already using their reconciliation power and blaming the democrats is so shockingly perverse in its cinycism. That’s before you even take into account the duplicity on DACA that has broad bipartisan support up to a meeting with the president last week.
Neither morally or strategically should the democrats budge on this.
And of all issues DACA? It's important to some people, but as a national topic it's pretty minor.
> What would be the reasonable thing for the democrats to do right now?
Realize they are weak and accept it. Then take the offer they were given and do the best they can. But don't hurt unrelated people in the US to try to increase their own strength.
That's a pretty selfish thing to do after all.
Compared to a government shutdown? Yes, very much a minor issue.
Like I said, important in it's own right, but not in comparison to this.
[0] https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/program-information/medica...
Not that you're being biased, at all.
You know, like I'm sure you wanted the Republicans to do under Cruz in 2013?
Shame on the Democrats for opposing the Republican party, as the Republican party did the last eight years. They should just "realize they're weak and accept it [and do what they're told]".
The sad thing about this is that you most likely you think your perspective is eminently objective and unbiased.
It is a contrived emergency so the political parties can try to increase pressure to get pork through that they would not have otherwise in order to get the votes high enough to end the BS.
IMHO, the federal government should be entirely dissolved and the states should have a more loose confederation like the EU has. Federal law and over spending have gone too far. By overspending, I mean how the DoD decided to spend billions that it was not given by Congress. I don't mean any liberal vs conservative notion of how government should spend.
I know this is a pipe dream, but one way it could happen is through a "shutdown" that never stops.
It is very hard to have open borders between states if there is no federal authority. It is also hard for a state to run their own economic policy without their own currency and central bank.
Already American states struggle with running different welfare policies. You see how red states e.g. a freeloading on blue state welfare programs, by dumping their poor people in blue states and enticing companies created in innovative states like Calefornia by luring them with low taxes.
I personally think it would be nice if we could have a wide selection of countries and states following completely different policies. It is good with experimentation and trying new things. In practice however this is difficult, as somebody can just freeload on everybody elses work by creating a tax paradise.
Also, more on point, many government entities have "carry-forward" funds which are available during a shutdown. In 2013 the Executive Branch (Democrat president) discouraged the use of these funds. The current admin is encouraging their use to ensure as little disruption as possible.
You can't blame this on democrats when republicans could have handled this exclusively themselves and had ample time to do so.
This is simply a reflection of the chaos that is the Trump administration.
It is ironic to think of how I told Trump voters before the election, that if you vote on that man you will get noting but grid lock politics, because he is not a uniter. He is not a man who seeks cooperation and common ground.
I got laughed at for this, with Trump supporters telling me they didn't need democrats for anything because they controlled both houses.
I guess it is my turn to laugh then. I great irony that they manage to get themselves into this mess. The democrats didn't even have to lift a finger.
As for opinions, my political golden rule is "never trust a politician". We're veering far off-topic, though.
Edit: as further evidence of the cause of the shutdown, Senate Minority Leader Schumer just caved. The shutdown was a political gamble for both sides; I'm assuming internal Democrat polling found that they were receiving the most blame. Continuing the disruption would be disastrous. (Obvious, considering they effectively blocked the CHIP children's health insurance.)
[0] http://thehill.com/homenews/house/363778-pelosi-were-not-lea...
So, they got something they wanted all for keeping the government operating for another 2.5 weeks. I would call it a solid democrat win.
Also republicans can pass 1 bill per year without the risk of filibuster and they used/wasted it on their tax bill. Thus, any government shutdown is arguably 100% on them.
> Thus, any government shutdown is arguably 100% on them.
Under this logic, all outcomes can be blamed on the majority party in all situations, because tool X was used on Y instead of Z. In a theoretical situation where a supermajority vote fails 59-41, isn't it more logical to blame the failure on the 41 opponents rather than the 59 proponents?
Of course, then you have a situation where politicians (on both sides) will grandstand if the outcome is already decided. For example, if a CR is guaranteed to fail, a moderate Republican will vote against it to appease his base. But if his was the deciding vote, he would vote to pass it to appease his party. Politics...
You say, now. After mentioning how Democrats are to blame at least eight separate times in this thread, and mentioning how Republicans are also to blame... none, until this comment.
Tea Party types found rationalizations for why the 2013 shutdown led by Cruz was really Obama's fault, so I'm not surprised #resistance types are blaming Trump.
The shoreline of San Francisco is a national park (donated when the military base here closed). There's a restaurant on the shore called Cliff House, whose landlord is the US government.
During the shutdown, the government forced the restaurant, a private establishment, to close. The owners and the kitchen staff were not allowed to make a living. And because they aren't government employees, they don't get any restitution when the government is funded again.
Maybe ensuring that the economic hostages of a shutdown will actually suffer is an essential government function?
It wouldn't surprise me if there were a few people trespassing on closed national parklands right now, without incidents. And a few of them might even be furloughed employees.
From a park-management perspective services offered inside a national park close when the park closes. The park-restaurant doesn't get to reopen that park or its services any more than the hotdog vendors force Wrigley Field to open on the weekdays...
Just like a mall closing for safety reasons: even though there is a buck to be made there are also liabilities and requirements. If the park isn't offering its rangers/personnel/management/responsibility then they don't want to be simultaneously advertising to the public that they're open for food sales. They're not open, they're closed.
I presume they made some argument about rangers not being available or something, but there was really no reason it needed to close. It's on a public street, and in a city with emergency services.
This also happened with national parks. They actually chained up the entrances during the shutdown as if people can't access a park if the gov't is shutdown.
(The fact that the dysfunction alone of US government needs a whole dictionary is amusing: gerrymander, filibuster, furlough, ....)
I'm sincerely curious if the executive branch this time is pulling the same sort of shenanigans.
If a mall shuts down, the stores don’t get to stay open. If a restaurant closes early, the waitstaff doesn’t get paid for missed hours. If budget gets tied up in other projects, competing projects get cancelled or deferred. If customer payments are late, new work & paychecks can’t be released to employees.
Edit: Also important to list the high percentage of startups that fail and layoff employees, often employees who worked under market value in exchange for equity.
Good luck blocking access while they're still renting. I can't even plausibly imagine that happening in a strip mall, where the entrance to the store is outside. Which is the best analogy to a park.
Everything else you mentioned was about employees, which is very different from renters.
If US is owner and they shut down the restaurant place, don't they loose money by not making rent?! How is that making sense?
Here is a decent article explaining what is still up and running: https://www.npr.org/2018/01/19/578985305/open-or-closed-here...
Essential workers, such as military, are still required to turn up to work, they just don't get paid. It's not the US Government would stop wars just because they can't pay their bills.
Congress, funnily enough, is actually except from the shutdown and members of congress still get paid, which is a bit perverse in my eyes.
As for things like electricity, I assume they just put it all on credit, it's not like the government isn't going to pay the power companies when they finally approve the budget. I usually have a month after my power bill comes in to pay it.