satyreyes wrote:

Tamago wrote:

Didn't you guys just voted in Obama two years ago?? I thought they had four year terms, not just two.

Yup!  This is our less-exciting midterm election, where we vote for our lawmakers in the Senate and House of Representatives.  Obama still has at least until 2012.    Still, this election is important in that it's likely Republicans will make a lot of gains.  This will make Obama's life difficult, and tonight we get to find out how difficult!

That explains it, while I knew that American elections tended to go on longer than Australian ones, I thought that two years would have been a tad excessive.

Since the US doesn't have compulsory voting, I wonder how many would end up voting for anyone and how many of these voters are the swinging type?

If they start charging for fire services, I suggest you pay it.

Giovanna wrote:

If they start charging for fire services, I suggest you pay it.

Yeah, I'd rather not be that guy in Tennessee.

Anji wrote:

Whats the deal with a "government shutdown" or whatever fuckery its supposed to be?

Heh heh, it's the latest symptom of the fact that there's a wider gulf between left and right than usual at the moment!  Congress can't agree how much money we should be spending, and if no agreement is reached, certain government services will have to be shut down until they have funding.

Government is fricking expensive.  Last year the government spent something like $3,456,000,000,000 (three and a half trillion dollars).  Of that, we paid for roughly two-thirds of it with taxes and other sources of revenue; the rest (still well over a trillion dollars) we paid for by borrowing money from our own citizens and other countries.  We've been borrowing money like this for every year since Clinton, though not usually quite so much.

(The next three paragraphs explain the differing points of view on all this spending; skip them if you already know them.)

Democrats say, "So what?"  The economy is delicate right now, they say, and it needs big injections of money to keep it healthy.  Sure, we're spending more money than we have, but it's all to restore economic prosperity, at which point we'll hopefully be able to pay the mountains of debt we're accumulating.  Plus, what can we cut?  About 80% of our spending is on the military (which Democrats now don't want to cut), or on stuff we've already promised to people (like Medicare, Social Security, or interest on the national debt).  The only thing to do is to raise taxes on rich people to help offset the costs, since rich people can afford it and/or since rich people are pretty much the ones who caused the recession in the first place.  (We couldn't possibly make an extra trillion dollars this way, but Democrats argue that it would be better than nothing.)

Mainstream Republicans say, "No, too much."  They mostly don't mind if we spend more money than we make -- God knows they weren't complaining when Bush was doing it -- but when you're borrowing over a trillion dollars a year, you're doing something wrong.  We can't raise taxes, though, they say, because it will drive investment overseas and/or the rich are already paying more than their fair share.  So we have to cut spending.  Specifically, we have to cut spending on things Republicans don't like, like Planned Parenthood and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.  (We do not spend anything close to a trillion dollars on programs like these, so this would not close the budget gap, but Republicans argue that it would be better than nothing.)

Then there's the Tea Party.  Tea Party Republicans say, "Stop spending money."  It doesn't matter that we're in a recession; if we are spending a trillion dollars more than we make, we need to cut at least a trillion dollars' worth of federal programs.  That means slashing money for education, welfare, Social Security, Medicare, and anywhere else we can find it except war and homeland security.  The Tea Party also thinks we should drastically cut taxes, since it's every American's God-given right not to pay taxes, and this would require more spending cuts.  The Tea Party would ultimately like to see a much smaller government that provides many fewer services and is less involved with the lives of Americans (except in the bedroom, of course) and more involved with the lives of, say, Mexican immigrants.

Anyway, the Tea Partiers were the big winners in the 2010 Congressional elections, and now that they've got a bunch of seats in Congress they're demanding cuts that are enormous compared to anything in the past.  Basically the only things anyone can agree on is that we definitely shouldn't stop dropping hundreds of billions of dollars on Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan and Libya, and we definitely can't raise taxes this year.  All year we've been passing these month-by-month budgets that barely avert shutdowns, and the latest deadline is in about 36 hours.  Either our leaders in Congress will agree on how much money to cut and where it should come from (and President Obama won't veto it), or we'll have that government shutdown thing you asked about.

If the government shuts down, most government employees will be sent home without pay until there's money to pay them.  There are some services (police, fire department, air traffic control) that go on even if there's a shutdown, but anything deemed nonessential (passport authorities, veterans' services, possibly welfare and Social Security) would be likely to close up shop.  It would amount to hundreds of thousands of federal employees finding themselves jobless until Congress gets its act together.  If the shutdown continued for long, state services might begin to be affected, including education, highway maintenance, and lots of other things we take for granted.  A lot of rank-and-file Tea Partiers want this, because it would not only mean that we don't have to pay a bunch of government employees (who Tea Partiers dislike as a rule), but also make a powerful statement that the time for compromise is over when it comes to spending.  Tea Partiers are sort of like the Al Gore of deficits: you can't compromise about something that you think is apocalyptic if unchecked.

Other than Tea Partiers, most normal people pretty much don't want to see a government shutdown, even those of us who are concerned about the budget and think change is needed.  But there's being able to agree that we need to forge a workable compromise, and then there's actually forging it.  Ask again on Saturday. 

That's strange, Prince.  The military is supposed to fall squarely into the category of "public services we keep paying even if there's a shutdown."  Sounds like a shitty situation; good luck!

satyreyes wrote:

That's strange, Prince.  The military is supposed to fall squarely into the category of "public services we keep paying even if there's a shutdown."  Sounds like a shitty situation; good luck!

Actually a lot of the news reports I've been reading have listed military personnel as one of the groups who will get screwed during the shutdown.
http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/20 … paid-later


From The Daily Show: "Democrats want 30 billion in cuts, Republicans want 60 billion in cuts. Rather than compromise and go for 45 million they decide to shut down government services."

Last edited by chrisb (04-07-2011 04:49:05 PM)

I'm confused with what Tea Party's stance on this whole thing... what exactly are they going for? Because I thought they don't want to compromise. I'm not sure what's going on here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxkvqYIzCOE&sns=tw

chrisb wrote:

Never try to understand them.

This is a dangerous thing to say about anybody, even if I get where you're coming from. 

With about an hour to go, the parties agreed on a compromise with a couple billion dollars of cuts.  The agreement only lasts till next Friday, though, so we're still going to be in imminent-shutdown mode until either we find middle ground or we discover there isn't any.  Prince_of_Stars and our other government workers should still get paid, for now.  I suggest that further discussion be in the Politics thread instead of here, since this thread isn't really on topic.