Bearing in mind that ~40% of american's could not come up with $400 to cover emergencies, this is going to become more prevalent in the next few days / weeks as people will simply not be able to afford gas to get to their unpaid work. I read an article today discussing how TSA workers in HI are living in their cars in the airport parking lot as they cannot afford to commute. The FBI just cancelled its internship program due to the shutdown.
An administration official recommended that all those affected simply take out loans but unfortunately banks don't lend to people without an income nor to those who have recent delinquencies on their credit due to no income.
I feel very bad for these real people being affected by political showmanship.
I've seen too many people say, "Oh, government workers should all know this stuff happens all the time, and if they don't have months or years of savings in the bank then it's just their fault".
It's really sad that instead of being compassionate, too many are focusing on what "should" be instead of what is the reality for many people. Like you point out, the reality is that most people don't have savings. They should in theory; but life rarely lines up with should.
I too feel terrible for people being hurt by these comparatively wealthy politicians playing games with their livelihood.
When I was a kid, my dad was deciding between two engineering jobs; one for the US Department of Commerce and another in the private sector for a big aerospace contractor.
The private sector one paid more, I remember, but my mother brought up to my dad something interesting: You're less likely to get laid off, and you'll always have more job security, with the stable paycheck provided by a government job.
It's weird to think about it, but at this point in time, the United States Government may be one of the worst major employers in the country. Two missed pay periods, unstable leadership, no yearly budget, massive deficits, constantly changing its mind.
In fairness it's not really the finance department and the ceo, it's the ceo and the board locking horns. And the ceo and the board decided to shutdown the whole company until they get their little tiff ironed out. (Which, yeah, was a pretty dumb idea. But the ceo and the board are kind of known for having dumb ideas.)
This is 100% the CEO's decision. Remember, he rejected a perfectly good funding plan that was put forward by his own allies back in December, before his enemies took over the board on January 3.
The President makes budget requests to Congress before the budget committees plan and submit their appropriations bills.
The perfectly good funding plan did not include the budget requests the President made. Whether you agree with his politics or not is immaterial. It is not 100% his decision.
Right. It's the majority leader's decision to override a veto or keep putting bills on the floor. This is a multi-level catastrophe fabricated by disgusting people.
And the Congress is by no means required to give the President everything he asks for.
The perfectly good funding plan was given to Trump by his allies when they controlled both houses, it was the most favorable plan he could ever possibly get. It even had some wall funding in it. It was 100% his decision to veto it, and 100% his stupid fault for thinking that he could get more concessions from his enemies than he could from his friends, right after those enemies won the House by the largest popular vote margin in history.
I commend you for being motivated but this doesn't match the actual facts.
President Trump has not vetoed a single bill during his term of office thus far. Go look this up if you do not believe me. Please see spurcell93's sibling comment to yours in this thread.
No, he didn't, he called Paul Ryan and said "if you don't give me XYZ demands that Mitch McConnel wouldn't let me have I'll veto the bill and shut down the government" and then Ryan flopped around like a fish and then the shutdown started. It was still Trump's veto that started the whole thing, the fact that it was threatened instead of exercised makes no difference.
The Senate failed to pass a compatible budget bill because Democrats refused to include any funding for a wall.
> Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, of New York, pledged to continue the discussions, but said it was clear there are not enough votes to pass a spending measure that includes funding for a wall along the nation’s southern border.
I think you're mostly right, so please don't take this the wrong way, but I think you might be overstating your case to say that GP's take is a complete fabrication. There were veto threats involved that led directly to the shutdown, specifically pertaining to a stop-gap that would have run till February 8th.
In a corporation or other well designed systems there's a clear chain of authority. In the US we have two different branches that can both claim to have a mandate from the people that can get into fights. The designers of the US constitution did better than I would have with the information available to them but we've had lots of sorts of democratic republic tried since then and now we know that US style presidential systems usually end up falling apart fairly quickly. We're lucky that we had Washington as a good example of temperance and then then the weight of tradition keeping our system afloat.
And a few years after Washington we'd have the current vice president and the former secretary of the treasury engage in a duel to the death! Claiming temperance is what kept our system afloat is probably a bit of a stretch. The American political system is literally designed to be dysfunctional. This is what checks and balances are all about. One clique wants A, one clique wants B. If they can't come to a compromise then nobody gets anything. The idea was to keep the government small and avoid a tyranny of the majority.
What's really changed since then is that government has grown unimaginably larger than the forefathers ever imagined possible, let alone intended. And we've also massively increased the power of various branches. For instance, that the president alone can now unilaterally deploy our military throughout the world is just insane and arguably completely unconstitutional. In any case it completely destroys the entire system of checks and balances that our system, and country, was built and prospered upon.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by system such as ours failing, nor that our system was kept afloat by tradition. We started a revolution against a heavily centralized mercantalistic monarchical empire to create a decentralized capitalistic democratic republic.
The problem with "nobody gets anything" is that it's unworkable in the long run and sooner or later someone decides to just ignore the rules with popular support. See How Democracies Die for a book length treatment but I believe that's an uncontroversial statement about the political science consensus.
I'm not saying it's temperance that keeps the US together (except for the first 8 years) but rather tradition. Long standing institutions tend to amass legitimacy over time.
It's not so much that we have a larger country these days as that we have ideologically distinct parties. We had real ideological distinctions between the Democractic Republicans and the Federalists in the old days and in addition to what you mention there were people considering a military coup if the election of 1800 went the wrong way. Thankfully the Federalists imploded and for a long time parties were mostly patronage machines, though you did have the pro-science, pro-religion, pro-treating other races with respect party versus the pro-freedom, pro-small government, pro-treating other religions with respect party as sort of vague ideologies. Except for the bit where they polarized over slavery and we immediately had a civil war. After progressive reforms made patronage less of an issue the two parties were both still ideologically mixed until the South defected to the Republicans and things have been polarizing ever since.
Right now we're in a situation where the most conservative Democrat in Congress is more liberal than the most liberal Republican, a situation that is basically unprecedented. I don't expect the current system to break soon, hundreds of years of tradition is pretty resilient, but if the current level of partisan divide and constitutional hardball continues it will break down eventually.
No, it really is the finance department. Boards vote on the CEO and serve as his advisors and that is certainly not the correct metaphor.
More importantly, Congress sets the budget through the House and Senate budget committees, which then draft and pass appropriations bills. This is the point in the process where we are stuck.
The President is saying "bring me budget bills that have the things I want and I won't veto them" and Congress is saying no. It's nothing new really, barely anyone knows basic civics and so people are letting their emotions drive their opinions.
Both parties here are playing games that affect peoples' lives and are both worthy of blame.
The US Treasury Department is most analogous to the finance department of most corporations. Which, incidentally, is also shutdown right now because the board and the ceo told them to close. (Just as an additional point of fact, the finance department of many organizations does not set departmental budgets. That's not how it works. One of the reasons they exist is to, "finance", projects. Which could involve the use of any number of financial vehicles.)
Congressional appropriations bills are exactly how projects get financed in government. All this does it make it all the more clear to me that you don't know how this process works.
You still have provided zero justification for Congress being the "board" even though it is a terrible metaphor.
Relax guy. We can just agree to disagree. No worries.
I just thought that since the Founders' intended congress to act as a check and balance on the president it's pretty much analogous to the boards that act as a check and balance on a given ceo in your average corporate structure. It also seemed reasonable to view Treasury as the finance department.
But seriously, no worries if you see things differently. No biggie man.
That is the point in the process where we are stuck now, but not where the sticking began a month ago. Trump had a perfectly good budget on his desk, written by his allies and passed by Republicans, and it even had wall funding in it, and he vetoed it because it wasn't enough. Then the government shut down. Then the Democrats took control.
It never reached the President's desk because the Senate failed to pass a compatible budget bill when Democrats refused to include any funding for a wall.
> Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, of New York, pledged to continue the discussions, but said it was clear there are not enough votes to pass a spending measure that includes funding for a wall along the nation’s southern border.
The house only passed that bill because Trump called Paul Ryan personally and said he would veto the bipartisan budget that was on the table and passed by the Senate. This is no fiction, it is Trump's shutdown
Everyone knows Trump's refusing to sign a budget without wall funding, that's no secret.
The part you left out is that the Democrats blocked a bill with wall funding, even before they took over the House. Trump never "had a perfectly good budget on his desk, written by his allies and passed by Republicans".
Both parties put this issue ahead of the continued operation of the government and both are responsible for the shutdown.
> In a real business, the finance department and the CEO wouldn't be locking horns over what to use company money for and it would never block payroll.
(1) Congress is more like a board of directors than a finance department.
(2) Internal issues would never be allowed to block payroll except in the most extreme cases in a normal business because there is an external actor, the government, which will impose severe consequences for that. A business operating in an environment without that external force would not be unlikely to delay payroll.
If the government was run like a business it would have merged with the Chinese government by now.
It almost certainly would have shut down half the state governments due to poor performance.
And it would have declared bankruptcy and not paid any of its workers or maintained any of its infrastructure.
There’s a reason government exists. The greatest strength of private industry is any one institution is allowed to fail, without destroying the system. The government is needed where that does not hold true. That’s why the Too Big to Fail companies are such a threat to capitalism and private industry. They break the fundamental Darwinian impulses that makes private industry such a great creator of wealth and ideas.
What's interesting about your statement is, I believe, that's one of the reasons why Trump was elected. There are a certain demographic of people who want our country to be run more like a business. These people likely thought Trump would be able to do so, given his "business acumen".
I'm not sure what the current situation says about this concept, if anything. Maybe the government is its own beast and can't be run like a business at all -- not saying that Trump was the right guy for the job, but wondering if any CEO type would be?
We see the same situation publicly play out in business whenever a large or powerful newcomer moves into an already entrenched industry--like Sony did with Hollywood, Netflix did with TV production, Amazon and Apple did with music and book distribution, etc. Maybe this is less a shock if you consider that our politicians are working for separate competing "businesses" with competing goals, instead of, as one may have assumed, for a single business that has a single set of goals.
The government could be run like a business but it never will be for two reasons. First, it can make its own rules. And second, there's no competition. If you don't like what it doesn't you can't find a competitor, unless you leave the country.
Yes, you can vote, but voting only changes so much. If you're changing CEOs and radically changing direction ever 4 or 8 years, it's not likely any large scale reform will ever go long enough to have any effects.
And as we've also heard a lot recently, the entrenched bureaucracy isn't easily or quickly reformed.
Yes, but this country is a country, and countries need continuity, and they can't provide even that. The People ought the install a strikebreaker in the White House.
If the country was run like a business, they wouldn't be in business, they would be bankrupt.
The purpose of a business it create wealth. The purpose of government is to take wealth. Government does some useful functions with the wealth it takes, but extremely inefficiently. Private enterprises which are profit motivated consistently outperform government on budget, quality and time.
>It’s sad seeing people actually disagreeing with you.
It's because of a high-status meme that's gone around that "Governments Aren't Households" followed by a pedantic lecture about a few dimensions where they have interesting, but not fundamental differences. And it's true: reliable, trusted governments e.g. suffer lower costs from going into debt, and are able to recapture some of the expenses. Plus, they can default in a way that's technically legal (inflate away the debt).
But none of that changes the more important, relevant similarities:
- There are limits to how quickly you can accumulate real resources to pay off debts.
- There are severe consequences to being unable to pay debts.
- There are debt levels that are dangerous to have and which prevent you from raising funds for real emergencies.
All of these are true and relevant for both governments and households.
Yes, you can debate how close you are to the breaking point, but you can't simply avoid the comparison entirely just because Governments Aren't Households.
First, many of the problems the government tries to solve are not problems with easy solutions. There are no businesses (that I know of, anyway) out there with the goal of providing free education to every child in a community. Or feeding and housing disabled people. And so on. THe failure of the government to perform better in these areas is sometimes referred to as "inefficiency", but what are we comparing government's performance against? Is there a baseline for how well any entity can do fighting a war on poverty?
Second, often, the government has goals fundamentally different from making money, eg in fighting and winning wars. We complain about the F35 being a bondoggle. But that's only true if you think the government's goal is to acquire a better fighter aircraft than China or Russia for as little money as possible. But that isn't exactly the government's goal. The government wants to acquire a fighter aircraft that makes winning such wars most likely -- in other words, it is maximizing the likelihood of winning wars. The cost of that maximization is clearly secondary. To a business, any expense past what you need to beat the competition looks like waste. To the government, any step you didn't take to maximize your chance of success looks like risk.
Third, the government holds itself to legal ethics standards that, inevitably, slow it down. Take government contracting. When the government lets a contract, it can't go to the obviously best qualified business and write a check. It has to advertise. How long it has to advertise for depends on the size of the contract, but it's rarely less than 90 days. It has to fairly evaluate all proposals. It gives extra points to small or minority owned businesses. It then writes a contract that is in keeping with the Federal Acquisitions Regulations (the FAR), which is a body of US Law that literally takes up an entire row on the bookshelf. Most of that law was written to protect businesses from potentially unethical government behavior, given that the government is more powerful than any business it is likely to contract with.
For instance, the interaction between the Contracting Officer's Representative (the COR - the primary liason between the government and the contractor) is strictly limited to reduce the ability of the government to ask for special favors. Violations of the contract or the law surrounding it as a result of behavior of the COR can result in the COR being personally liable, which is to say: if you, as a COR, result in either the government or the business losing money, they can come after your house and your retirement, all the ay up to the value of the losses. If the government loses a million dollars, the COR can be held liable for that amount. As a consequence, there's little incentive to streamline the way the government works with contractors, and every incentive in the world to make sure every t is crossed and every i dotted.
This list can go on and on. The ultimate reason the government is less efficient than a business is that it isn't one. It isn't solving the same problems, it isn't operating by the same rules, and it doesn't have the same incentives.
Yep, my dad spent his entire career as first a contractor for the FAA, and later an FAA employee. Modest pay compared to private sector, but the stability balanced that out. Worked in the same place around 30 years, in a low cost of living area.
When I finally got around to getting my CS degree, I took my first job offer, in a private industry. But the first chance I got, I took a contractor job for the FAA, to chase that same stability.
Now, my dad's working for no pay, and I'm watching contractors around me getting laid off or having their hours reduced to 12 or 16 per week to stretch the leftover contract funds through the end of February. I got only a small cut myself, to 36, but the ax could come down any day. So much for stability. I'm not looking to jump ship and find a private sector dev job, but my 5 years of experience is with technologies and tools that the private industry has largely left behind, or in niches that also require domain specific skills I don't have. I feel like I'm almost having to start from scratch if I want to get my income out from under the capricious nature of modern politics. My dad on the other hand has pretty much resigned himself to accepting things as they are, since he doesn't think there's much of a market for 55yo project managers who only know about air traffic systems.
All that said, I expect a lot of contract workers in particular are going to start avoiding government contracts in the future, and considering they already don't seem to be getting much of the best and brightest, I wonder how they are going to manage to maintain any momentum in developing new technologies for air traffic safety.
>Why are these public jobs considered "god-given rights"? I work in the private sector. If I don't get paid, I have to find a new job. That apparently doesn't apply to public sector employees anymore. Is there some sort of immutable compact I've missed here?
You think the employees are saying - "working is my right, gosh darn it, pay or no pay?"
They work not because they feel entitled to the job but because (a) not coming in to work has been criminalized and they could go to jail, and (b) people would die if they stopped working. This isn't hyperbole - there are hundreds of organ transplant operations happening every day. The most hardy organs die in about 2 days, the most fickle need to be implanted within 6 hours of extraction. If flights stop, that's it - the patient dies. That's a single example off the top of my head.
As a final note - even if all of these folks quit their jobs today, it's not like there is an extra 2 million available positions out there, ready to absorb the new labor force.
A lot of people have a hard time showing empathy for others. Part of it can be due to immaturity or being overly sheltered, lack of social skills, etc. It's easy to be critical of others that make bad decisions but EVERYONE makes bad decisions, being imperfect and making mistakes is part of being human, and what might be easy for one person might not be easy for another person.
I don't think it is that it isn't understood that people make different lifestyle and economic decisions and we all pay for our decisions somehow no matter what they are; The sensationalism, victimization blaming, and "woe is me" that a small minority and media raise. No one is entitled to income, a job, or having others pay for their expenses. It is a "take the lump, become stronger, make a plan for now and later, accept it, move on" situation. I feel empathy but can parse the humanity from economic decisions. That said, workers should be paid during a shutdown.
> No one is entitled to income, a job, or having others pay for their expenses.
According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, of which the USA is a signatory, they do. Namely:
Article 22.
Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.
Article 23.
(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
(2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
(3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for
himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
I think you read this too quickly. It doesn't say anything about being entitled to a job. It says people have the right to work.
It's not saying the government owes you a job, but that the government can't stop you from working. There is protection against unemployment, but that does not imply the protection must be absolute because, of course, that's impossible.
I think we were tripping up over my use of "entitle" - which I simply mean as not required to receive, without first giving. So, for example, because I exist does not simply mean I am owed a job, owed income, etc. I'm getting off topic a bit from my original intent, however.
"No one is entitled to income, a job, or having others pay for their expenses."
This can only be interpreted as a description of what you believe the values of your society to be. Of course, some people have contracts that in fact entitle them to work. But that is not what you mean. You mean that, in the abstract, society does not owe you a job, or a way to provide for yourself, or help if you need it.
The Declaration of Human Rights is also a set of moral statements. It is not law, it is a description of a fundamental set of values that the signatories agree are their own too. It does not go in the direction of "just because you exist, you are not entitled to anything". It goes in the direction of: "the point of society is to give people opportunities to life fulfilling and meaningful lives and sometimes they need help".
That might be relevant if the things enumerated in the so-called Universal Declaration of Human Rights were actually rights. Or universal. Or at least not riddled with internal contradictions and subjective qualifiers...
Article 22
> in accordance with the organization and resources of each State
So basically each State decides how serious it is about this. Apparently the organization of this State permits shutdowns and furloughs, which is enough to satisfy Article 22.
> of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality
Subjective to the point of meaninglessness, but there is plentiful evidence to support the notion that one's dignity and personal development can survive in the absence of a government job. Or any job, for that matter.
Article 23
> Everyone has the right to work
No one is being told they aren't allowed to work. The right to work does not guarantee gainful employment in your preferred field or with any specific employer.
> to free choice of employment
Neither is anyone being told they must perform any particular job; everyone is free to choose from among the positions available in the open job market. At this time that simply doesn't happen to include any government jobs, at least not if you want to get paid. There are plenty of private positions available, though.
> to just and favourable conditions of work
Subjective. Unless you're being coerced, your choice to remain is sufficient evidence for me that you consider the conditions "just and favorable" compared to your next-best alternative, which is all that anyone can reasonably expect.
> and to protection against unemployment.
Here's the first part that might actually be considered a statement of entitlement to income and/or having others pay your expenses. It would be unreasonable to expect this protection to last forever, though. It comes with the expectation that one is actively seeking new employment. "Protection against unemployment" is not UBI.
> (2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
Non-discrimination does not guarantee income, a job, or paid expenses, so long as these are doled out (or not) equitably, so this part not applicable.
> (3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration
There's that subjective "just and favorable" language again. No one reasonable is going to guarantee a livable income for yourself and your family merely on the basis of effort without regard for whether the work is actually productive. If you and your employer come to a voluntary agreement on the terms of your employment, that proves the resulting terms "just and favorable" enough to suit you—and no one else's opinion matters.
> and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
The conditions to make this "necessary" are not defined, so we can just say it's never necessary and ignore this clause altogether. There is always another option.
Nobody is entitled to a job. But if you work you are entitled to pay. The truly egregious thing here is all the people that are required to work without pay, preventing them from getting a different job.
No one is entitled to income, a job, or having others pay for their expenses
That is an assertion, not a statement of fact. Christian values actually teach the exact opposite, and that's why Jesus said that one cannot serve God and Mammon at the same time.
You're drawing the wrong conclusions. Christianity teaches the duties of people towards others, including people are slaves. It doesn't talk about rights, because it's smart enough to understand you can't have a right to a finite resource.
Christianity always only talks about what you need to give, and never says anything about what you need to get, including anything you get from God, which is always undeserved and only happens through His mercy and generosity.
This is even acknowledged obliquely when Christ states that we will always have the poor. By saying that we can't serve God and Mammon, He's saying that we cannot make money for money's sake, but must use it justly in the service of God.
You could say that every human being is entitled to dignity because we are all descended from Adam, who was created in the image of God. Whoever acts as if that weren't the case is a serious blasphemer.
Somewhere the Jewish Sages made that argument because someone considered the weakness in the Golden Rule: what if someone treats everyone with meanness and expects the same in return? It would make an awful society.
Sure, but any material effects of being entitled to dignity require a positive action from others.
We are still talking about the responsibilities of people to treat others in this way. I think it's much more important in some circumstances to think less of rights and to think more of responsibilities.
It would be equivalent to say you have the right to be treated with dignity by other human beings, but again this is saying other human beings have a responsibility to treat you with dignity. If other human beings didn't exist, then you couldn't be treated with dignity by them, hence it's a responsibility of them, and not something inherent to your own being.
The "inalienable rights" to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, don't require other people to do anything for you to retain those rights. It only prohibits them from doing certain things to you. It's a restriction on them, rather than a responsibility, and therefore, your right isn't contingent on them existing in the first place.
Pfft, according to you? Calling it an assertion suggests the statement lacks some form of support from reality. As opposed to the very clear fact that humans in the world are not entitled to income, a job, or having other pay for their expense.
Christian values having nothing to do with this and bringing religion into the mix won't help the discussion.
You can't be "entitled" to a finite resource. It's a logical contradiction. Any rights you might have can only restrict others in preventing you from trying to obtain those things.
You don't have a right to a job, but I also don't have a right to try to prevent you from getting a job.
This is obvious in the phrase "pursuit of happiness". There's no right to happiness. You can't be restricted from pursuing happiness, but there can be no guarantee you'll get it.
Similarly, you can't be restricted from trying to get a job, but there can be no guarantee you'll get it.
So, no, no one is _entitled_ to income, a job or having others pay for their expenses. If there are no jobs, or no income, or no others to pay, how can you be entitled? That's the logical contradiction.
A right isn't something that forces someone else to do something. That's the definition of slavery. If you have the right to receive something from someone, then that someone is, at least in part, your slave.
But if you have the right to pursue your own ends, no one has a right to try to stop you. These rights are restrictions on what people can do to you, not things they are forced to do for you.
They can't just walk up and kill you for no reason. They can't just lock you up, or enslave you, for no reason. They can't stop you from doing what you want to do, for no reason.
And again, the only reason is if you, in turn, are infringing on the rights of others, and even then only in way that is governed by the rule of law.
I used the word "entitle" - which I'm not discussing rights. Nor really, broadly applying to any group. I simply mean we're all on our own, responsible for ourselves, nothing is due anyone (not applying to federal workgroups) - but we have the capabilities and rights to pursue our personal best interest (within the law/morality)
American shutdowns were invented when someone realized that the Antideficiency Act probably prevents the government spending money if Congress failed to pass a budget. We could, if we wanted, amend that act to provide for an automatic continuance of funding, but we haven't.
Deadlocks like this are definitely a feature of our system that Westminster-style systems resolve differently, but shutdowns are an artifact of an old law more than the constitutional organization.
(ditto the "debt ceiling", which only exists because of a stupid statute)
Other countries have a "If we have no functioning democratic government the budget is the same as last year" clause as well as a "In the event the government can't do it's job, the civil service (when it's called that) keeps the lights on"
Continuity of government is kinda the #1 priority of government as everything else they do is subordinate to that.
> Continuity of government is kinda the #1 priority of government as everything else they do is subordinate to that.
Well, to be fair, anything that is considered "essential" for the government to do is not, by definition, shut down.
Obviously, there will be differing definitions of "essential", but the continuity is there.
That said, amending the appropriate legislation to prevent this nonsense from being necessary when branches of government are at a stand-off should be the desired goal.
Yea, and if we did the continuance bit, we'd end up always running on automatic continuance funding, because that means all the politicians can continue to not do the hard work of negotiation and compromise.
I like the 'triggers an election' thing. Puts the right pressure in the right place - if people in place can't get along and come to a reasonable compromise to keep the country working, then the people need a way to make some changes.
The government runs on continuing resolutions when they can't decide on a real budget pretty often already. It's not great, but it's way better than parties being able to hold government workers hostage over policy priorities.
The US system is so archaic at this point, the founding fathers never anticipated the federal government budget being this important to the country. Provisions for dealing with something like a shutdown just aren’t in the constitution other than 2/3 supermajority requirements for veto override or impeachment, which is a recipe for gridlock.
Many US states have much more sane budgeting systems and manage to run even under divided government without issue.
Yea, because the feds were supposed to only handle post roads, the military, and free trade between the states and tariffs on international commerce.
The modern welfare state, where millions of people are immediately hurt by the federal system grinding to a halt and stopping, would have been anathema to the framers. Nevertheless by popular vote such programs have been federalized and now we have a constitution that doesn’t support their smooth operation.
> The modern welfare state, where millions of people are immediately hurt by the federal system grinding to a halt and stopping, would have been anathema to the framers.
So too would have been the dominance of corporate interests in the political system. But here we are.
The United States went from a inhospitable backwoods outpost isolated from the entire developed world to the most powerful nation in the world in somewhere around 200 years. These numbers sound larger because we don't live very long but relative to the span of civilizations we are an unimaginable success. Many countries today have e.g. restaurants that predate our country by hundreds of years.
This is important for two reasons. The first is obvious - we did something very right. I don't think there's any single thing you can pinpoint as the secret sauce so I think it's very important to learn from and consider our entire system, its motivations, and rationale in a comprehensive but holistic fashion.
The second reason is perhaps even more important. Do you know what every great superpower before America has in common? They no longer exist. And in many cases not only do they no longer exist, but their former territory is in shambles. It's amazing, and disconcerting, to imagine that Spain was once a global superpower. The point of this is that it's critical to learn from the past, lest we repeat it. The stories may change, but the fundamental problems and decisions that nations face remain quite similar.
In 1910, for 266 years the Qing dynasty had ruled the most populous and, for a substantial period of time, the richest and most sophisticated country in history. Defenders of the dynasty pointed out its illustrious past and how, in the face of trying modern times, China needed to turn back to the traditions that had made it so successful for so long.
Same reason you’d want to understand the intent behind the design of a software system before you modify it. Afterwards, though, you still go ahead and modify it to meet new requirements.
Anyway, extending the franchise doesn’t really have anything to do with the prominence of the federal government, whereas the increasing power of corporations does.
The argument is that the modern software system has become so complex, worrying about what the intent of the original design is almost pointless. Say a single-user app that was originally written in assembly for PDP and has now evolved (or wrapped) into a multi-cluster, multi-zoned gRPC service - how important is the original intent when it was never designed for the current use case?
If you want to do good engineering work on a complex system, it's imperative to understand and remain laser-focused on what the system as a whole is actually trying to accomplish. The original intent is never irrelevant in that context. In fact, it's the foundation for evaluating all the subsequent decisions that resulted in "a multi-cluster, multi-zoned gRPC service".
Sure, but why do we hold the Founders in a particularly high regard? Instead of, say, countless 20th and 21st century politicians, scholars, and technocrats who have a lot more influence on the government as it exists today, most of whom who don't have views nearly as revolting as the Founders.
Who's likely to be able to bring a software system from 16.7.1 to 16.7.2? The team who built 16.7.1, or the team who wrote the pre-alpha version twenty years ago?
In many cases (including, I would argue, the current American political system), the people who wrote 16.7.1 are merely technicians without any coherent vision for long term purposes or principles. Why do we still talk about the Unix philosophy?
I follow what's happening in the craft beer world, and some brewers are up in arms due to the fact that the government has to approve labels for all beers that are sold across state lines, or else they could potentially face career ending fines. How on earth did we get from a limited federal government to one that acts as a morality police for beer labels?
Are craft brewers not capable of measuring ABV? Is the bureaucratic approval of a label any guarantee of a particular ABV for beer bottled using that approved label? Lots of ridiculous BS is contained within an overbroad interpretation of interstate commerce.
So we should leave those things to the states as was originally intended. The courts should never have tolerated the Federal government being allowed to do things which are not specifically enumerated in the first place.
There's nothing stopping Congress from amending the Antideficiency Act or just passing a law that would provide for an automatic fallback appropriation if there's no new budget.
Agreed, however as your link discusses there are important reasons the anti-deficiency act was passed.
A permanent fallback appropriation would remove congress’ ability to reallocate or reapportion spending without a 2/3 majority vote in both houses to override the presidential veto, something that seems unlikely in the modern party system.
Also military funding has to be reappropriated regularly under the constitution, a permanent military appropriation is unconstitutional. “To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;”
Yes, this is a feature of Westminster systems, although it's actually possible to have a change of government in that situation without having fresh elections if enough MPs "cross the floor" or a coalition flips. We're extremely close to that now in Brexit.
Interestingly that’s how the US worked too until the Carter Administration, and the decision to do it the current way is controversial. It seems like there might actually be nothing stopping us from doing it the same way right now.
Not necessarily. There are examples of stalemates in Europe when government could not be formed in years. For example in Belgium but also other countries. In those cases what would usually happen is there would be an interim government of bureaucrats / experts (university professors etc) appointed to lead the country until new election or until political parties can form some sort of a coalition.
In the US a significant portion of one of the two major political parties believes that the vast majority of the government fundamentally should not exist. Do other western countries face a similar challenge?
The big difference is that in Belgium if the government can't come up with a new budget the old one remains in force. You don't have the annual circus with spending re-authorizations for projects that span multiple budget periods and for infrastructure that needs to be maintained.
Lack of compassion/empathy is a much bigger problem than we can imagine, I realize it more and more as I grow older.
If we pause for a minute and watch the words and actions of people around us (or even our own) intentionally, we can see how little empathy a lot of us have.
As I've grown older, I've come to this conclusion. It is a moral imperative to be compassionate and have empathy, to be prepared and not surprised whatsoever when those you interact with have neither, and have enough strength and resources (physically, emotionally, financially, politically) when those without are harming others and you must intervene.
You should love your fellow human, but be prepared to punch a bully in the face.
Empathy is a fairly limiting mechanism actually, it doesn't scale at all -- as they say "one death is a tragedy, million deaths is a statistic", that's how empathy works. Empathy makes people feel bad for 1 person not making ends meet because of delayed payments, but they don't feel 800k more bad because 800k people are in that situation. Using feelings to arrive at conclusions at those scales simply doesn't work.
There were studies where people felt less urge (willing to spend less on charity for example) to help 100 people out of 10000 than to help 10 people out of 20.
We should have less empathy and more reasoned compassion and we should try to consciously scale it appropriately.
> EVERYONE should have min 3 months of income in savings.
It surprises me how few do though. I do. Six months or more in fact. I'm in a relatively well-paid job (senior-developer-come-local-database-export) as of course are many of the people around me, in fact some should be much better off, but there are those among them who get edgy if a mistake makes our pay late by a day because they have bills payments going out soon - they have little or no cushion or emergency fund.
The grads I can understand: they are young, they have debts from student lives that they are paying off, and even if those factors are not true/significant they aren't paid as well (they will be, we promote them fairly quickly if they show the relevant aptitude & attitude, but not yet) and they've not been working as long so haven't had the same chance to build up an emergency fund.
But people who have been working for years and have partners who have decently paid jobs too? I doubt they are paying much into a pension either. In a couple of decades they are going to have a nasty "surprise"...
Of course non of this would make a monthly paycheck or two being completely delayed a worrying experience. Even people successfully following the standard 3-month+ advice would be feeling insecure at that point.
I have coworkers like that too, guys who've been working for much longer than me (and getting paid more), without savings. We're not working at a minimum wage job, how do they even manage to spend all of that? Do they not plan on retiring one day? You can't possibly work till the day you die
Oh, that part is easy. I could spend everything I have and more very quickly. It takes a little forethought and willpower (and perhaps paranoia about the future) not too!
In no first world country should you be afraid that your child will die because you can't pay your electric bill because you're not getting paid for a job you're forced to work.
> A Kentucky family whose main source of income was lost because of the partial government shutdown worries they will soon loose the ability to care for their 15-month-old daughter who needs special equipment to stay alive.
Honest question: I still don't understand how the "federal workers must work during furlough" thing doesn't violate the 13th Amendment. What's the story there?
It’s not that they literally must work. It’s that they can be fired for not showing up despite going without pay. Any private employer could also try this, although it’s questionable whether or how long people would put up with it. When the government is the employer, there’s some level of confidence that at least you’ll get paid in the future, whereas with a private employer once they stop paying on time they usually are going to continue to have trouble making payroll until they fold.
Typically people do not go to work while living on their emergency fund. That is why it doesn't sit well when we tell the government employees that they should be living off their hard-earned savings while they work for us for free. It's not an emergency, it's madness.
To some extent, people work for the government because of the stability. You are not going to wake up one morning to find that the United States Government is out of business, so an emergency fund seems less essential than if you were working at a startup with 3 employees.
With government work no longer being considered more stable or reliable than the private sector, the one advantage that the government has used to recruit workers and pay them less than average is gone. That means government work is going to go un-done, or they're going to have to start paying employees more to make up for the risk. That only hurts us taxpayers.
I agree about the ridiculousness of the cause of the temporary income loss. It's still an emergency for the individual/family and therefore an instance for which the emergency fund exists.
Preferably, actual emergencies, not manufactured ones. Property damage/maintenance, healthcare, travel to visit family in an emergency, money to cover expenses if evacuated due to a natural disaster, I can think of more. Certainly job loss fits into this but federal workers are not losing their jobs at this point; it's an untenable situation.
Depending on how big your company is, you might need already one month saving alone for any hickup on payment.
I'm not assuming that i will lose that money.
But yes in general if i have emergency money, its out of scope and it doesn't 'hurt' directly when i actuall have to lose it. Thats the point of it. But still when i lose it, i have to replace it later right?
Part of the people saying that are, at this point, just parroting the party line from the White House, which is basically “Suck it up” and “Get a loan” respectively. Part of it seems to be a general lack of empathy, and some of it is glee from people who think that the first step to a better world is destroying the government.
All told, it’s a lack of individual capacity for thought, lack of empathy, and in many cases a true lack of imagination. Never underestimate just how far beyond the capacity of some it is to truly imagine circumstances other than their own, especially when that limited capacity makes them feel better about themselves.
the whole debate is beside the point anyway. If federal workers all magically had 5 months savings then the shutdown would just go on for 6 months. Or until it caused unbearable hardship for other groups like food stamp recipients. It's a game of chicken, the whole point is to cause a ramp up of pain and suffering until one side caves.
Food stamps run out in March which generally sets a deadline to any shutdown. If it reaches that far the side that relies on the foodstamp vote will end up being forced to agree to practically anything. Even setting pragmatic politics aside, when the food stamps run out you're likely to see urban riots, looting, and so on that would rapidly force a the same concession in any case.
I would be extremely surprised if the shutdown reached February since the closer we get to the March, the more leverage this side loses.
Not to mention, if having months of savings in the bank in case of shutdowns is a requirement for holding a government job, working for the government just got a lot less appealing.
This whole event is going to lead to long term loss of talent.
Completely agree with you. Yes you should have savings for six months or whatever that may be, but just because you should, doesn't make it right for you to engineer a situation where you put everyone who didn't into an extremely difficult situation.
I'm not trying to blame government workers and I'm definitely not defending the stalemate over the shutdown, but this kind of thing happens all the time in the private world, and people are just expected to deal with it.
Businesses go under all the time and people are laid off. It's unfortunate, but as someone who works for private companies and not the government, I've been unexpectedly laid off before, and understand that this could happen at any time (and no, I'm not really prepared for it either).
So, I feel sorry for the workers as well, but this is one of the risks you have to take to have a government job over a private one, and certainly not the only one.
Even ignoring compassion, you should at least be worried that events like these will make people more reluctant to work for the federal government, meaning the government will have to offer more payment to cover the risk, and thus taxpayers will have to pay more for the same services.
Edit: Or maybe not -- if the result of the 80s ATC strike is any indicator, the result will be more like "do nothing about pay, kvetch about the shortage of people willing to work for the federal government".
It's really sad that instead of being compassionate
I think it's city-to-city. Some cities are just grumpy toward people who experience misfortune. Others are not.
In one city I was in recently, the churches organized a round-robin nightly banquet for furloughed federal workers so they can get a good meal, and household supplies, and help with their basic bills each night. In Las Vegas, the city is putting on a big picnic in the main park this weekend for federal workers with free food, supplies, and support services. When I paid bills online this past weekend, almost every bank and utility web site I went to had a banner across the top reading "Affected by the federal shutdown? Let us know so we can help."
I haven't seen this everywhere, though. It depends on the type of city in which they live.
That people drawing their livelihoods from the public sector should be allowed to continue doing so is itself a controversial political position. The size of government is a campaign issue and a key difference between the parties every election cycle.
I was wondering if federal workers have an equivalent to 401k that they can take a loan from (TSP I think it is called)? Or are there a large number of affected employees that don't participate in this program?
This facility does exist but it also requires a repayment schedule to be set up. Even this assumes the system and people behind tsp.gov are actively processing loans.
besides a lack fo compassion, there is also a systemic effect at play: large numbers of people are being put under (financial) stress at the same time. empathy goes down under stressful situations, so it's eaiser for peers to lack empathy for competitive reasons (claiming a leg up from others' misfortunes). this is the whole "poor whites are the most racist against poor blacks" phenomenon (an induced systemic effect rather than some innate feature of poor white people).
this is not to excuse the lack of empathy--as humans, we should strive to feel for and help our neightbors--but not everyone immediately realizes what's going on, which hampers the ability to recognize the multifaceted situation and appropriately guide themselves through it (having empathy for those who seem to lack it can be wholly beneficial too).
politicians--people who wield power--should be held to a higher standard however. criticism must shape power lest our freedoms be eroded.
> I've seen too many people say, "Oh, government workers should all know this stuff happens all the time
The thing is: it doesn't happen all the time. In the last 20 years there were 3 government shutdowns. Before Trump took office we were down to one shutdown in 20 years.
Yes, and also, they're just wrong about this "happening all the time." The tactic of shutting down the government for political gain is a recent (and clearly more common) strategy. Before the 90's turned politics into warfare, shutdowns were very rare.
On one hand, I understand Ross’ reasoning. If my company were to go to a bank with a federal guarantee, we’d get a very cheap loan.
On the other hand, he thinks an average individual’s response to missing paychecks should be to seek a low interest loan against a government guarantee. That’s comically out of touch. I’ve been working in finance my entire life and I’d have a tough time working through the loan application process.
That’s the type of advice you’d hear a private wealth manager give to his wealthy client. Wealthy people are often asset rich but cash poor so they’ll take out bank loans to finance short term cash flow needs. No doubt Wilbur Ross has availed himself to these services and is shocked that government employees haven’t taken advantage of such conveniences.
Reminds me of Mitt Romney's comments in 2012 about borrowing money from your parents:
> “We’ve always encouraged young people, take — take a shot, go for it. Take a risk. Get the education. Borrow money, if you have to, from your parents. Start a business.”
After being in the US for so many years now, earlier i used to feel such comments were blatant lies that obviously people with their own agendas do.
However now i feel that some people really live in such a bubble that they do not have a basic understanding of the society they are living in and what 'average', 'above average','middle class' etc. means
> On the other hand, he thinks an average individual’s response to missing paychecks should be to seek a low interest loan against a government guarantee.
Uh, if that's what he thinks it is deluded in a way you omit: there is no government guarantee. There is a tradition of backpay after a shutdown, not a legal guarantee. The commitment to pay is the budget, whose absence is the entire reason there is a shutdown.
If you got to any bank website at least the ones I bank with, there is a flashing notice on the front page, if I were a federal worker who needs assistance due to shut down. I am sure, certain workers have easy ways than others but to say that at least some banks have not stepped up is incorrect.
That's true, but the only way you'll be able to pay is if once things are rolling again you have that much extra cash. I don't know how tight people live.
Also, it's hard to structure that kind of loan, since you have no idea when repayment might take place. The only comparable thing would be a student loan, where you can defer payments until you have income.
Some banks may be giving out loans, but they aren't going to be for everyone. Not everyone is 100% guaranteed to be able to return to their job after the shutdown. Banks know that.
Not everyone is directly a Federal employee, there are tons of contractors and people who work for contractors who won't get back pay and aren't guaranteed anything.
Just checked my bank website, you are right. Site does not go into specifics as to what the assistance is but optimally it is a bridge loan that can get implemented quickly.
These workers are still going to get hammered by late payments etc. and potential evictions but it is good to know at least something is being done.
I’m curious what the interest rate is. Because if you’re already tight enough to need a loan, the interest is gonna cut pretty deep, even if it’s a relatively low rate. My fear would be predatory terms targeted at a vulnerable group.
Some banks are setting up low interest loan programs only for federal employees. They are low interest and are focused on amounts of 2-3 time your paycheck.
Granted the rate things are going that might not be enough.
Not to mention that low interest loans are sort of predatory in this context, despite being lower than market rate interest rates. I understand that they have a profit a motive, but it doesn't make them the "good guys" in this scenario. There really are no good guys during a government shutdown.
> There really are no good guys during a government shutdown.
The Canadian air traffic controllers who sent a bunch of pizzas to their American counterparts were pretty good.
Also I would argue that people who keep reporting for work when they aren't getting paid and doing their job to the best of their ability aren't too shabby either, no matter what the pundits say about how prepared they should have been.
Seriously, I'd imagine most of the people impacted who need the loans don't necessarily have the income to cover an extra loan payment when this is over.
Those are credit unions aimed at federal employees. Which means that a large chunk of their ownership is people affected by the shutdown. That’s not charity so much as helping themselves. Which is still great, obviously, but I wonder how it is for affected people who don’t belong to federal employee credit unions.
kinda depends on the interest rate... look at it as an insurance for the bank against some of the people defaulting on the loans and it isn't predatory.
This feels like disaster capitalism. They are inflating their image by saving the day when it is a responsibility of the state to ensure this doesn't happen and to not use shutdowns as a negotiation tactic. If anything they are just prolonging people getting angry enough to do something about it.
In many states FBI has run out of replacement tires for vehicles, DNA swab kits, trace evidence filters. FBI can't pay for translator services, etc. They can't pay for informants.
This probably isn't the place, but I don't want them paying for informants. There is no vote I can cast to stop this practice. Effectively, I have no choice but to have the money I work hard for taxed and used in this fashion.
>An administration official recommended that all those affected simply take out loans but unfortunately banks don't lend to people without an income
I think bills have been passed already guaranteeing back pay for federal employees, so it's a bit more complicated than "no income" for federal employees.
However, everyone else who is a contractor or otherwise tangentially dependent on government employment...
And of course getting back pay at some unknown future date doesn't put food on the table now or keep you from losing your house or car.
Well, to add a bit more context to it, the administration dismissed the issue, saying that people should just work with grocery stores and banks in order to survive.
Full text:
> Local people know who they are when they go for groceries and everything else. So I think what Wilbur was probably trying to say was that they will work along — I know banks are working along. If you have mortgages, the mortgagees, the folks collecting the interest and all of those things, they work along. And that's what happens in a time like this, they know the people, they've been dealing with them for years, and they work along. The grocery stores...and I think that's probably what Wilbur Ross meant.
So... mortgage holders are just going to say "oh, you're on furlough... ok, we'll hold your payment schedule and just rewrite the terms once you have pay again."
WTF is the disconnect here? Defaults are going to spike and I can't imagine that any significant percentage of them would be forgiven.
And I haven't seen a grocery store run 'personal credit' since maybe before the 50s at best? Pre-Depression?
Somebody is breathing that Washington nitrous oxide again.
>And I haven't seen a grocery store run 'personal credit' since maybe before the 50s at best? Pre-Depression?
The ridiculous out-of-touch callousness of it all aside, I remember my parents having credit at a small neighborhood grocery in the 90s-00s. It's not necessarily a relic of the 50s.
Banks don't loan people money for free. They're not a charity. Besides it is pretty absurd that banks have to solve government mess that they have no part in.
This is unrelated, but you cannot live your life (in a happy way) being broke virtually all the time. If you are having major problem because a paycheck is missing, you are broke. Very few escape the trap, even if your salary increases, your expenses do too. Not a way to live.
If another person had suggested to get a loan it would have seem more reasonable. You lose a couple of hundred or maybe tens of dollars but at least you get the rest. However, having a billionaire, labeled as out of touch, and presumably teams of lawyers that do his loan paperwork say that...
Not to mention contractors. Plus restaurants and other services near federal buildings that the workers use. If people aren't working they aren't going to dry clean suits or go to lunch for example. Those people aren't getting loans.
It seems like this will have far-reaching consequences for the government's ability to hire, too. They don't have the ability to promise a steady job with steady pay anymore so they're going to have to pay more for labor.
There's multiple organizations offering 0% interest loans because the backpay is guaranteed by the US federal government. Not ideal but there really shouldn't be any government workers worried about paying their bills
* Are senators/house reps being paid? If so - Why?
* If the government is going to shit on people like this - then why are those people required to pay a tax (which is money extracted from the population to pay for services which the government provides - if the government refuses to provide those services, then why would you be obligated to pay a tax - thus the shutdown should be filed as an exemption during tax season)
* How in the fucking world is it that someone can "shutdown" the government in the first place??
* If you had a CEO who was embroiled in this much scandal - wouldn't you question "So, what is it you'd say you actually do around here?"[0] -- What is the actual NORMAL day-to-day expectation of a POTUS which has not been done bythis POTUS in the course of his employment?
* How can you claim to be a country based on rule of law with such shenanigans? Such that it undermines the willingness of the people to follow the rule of law in ever aspect of the spectrum.
Ha - Yeah thats the point... Meaning - Why isn't this a larger talking point? (Aside from the fact that we have more millionaires and billionaires in political positions than ever - so they are frankly the 'working-class' who would not be impacted by a pay furlough)
> we have more millionaires and billionaires in political positions than ever
I was curious about the numbers on this in terms of congress members. It doesn't appear that anyone in congress specifically is actually a billionaire as of 2016[0], but over half of them are millionaires as of 2014[1]. Of course there are non-congress members that are billionaires (Trump, DeVos, Ross, some governors, etc)[2].
I hope not too off topic, but I'm puzzled by shutdowns.
Every other country I can think of has a system where if the finance is not agreed, the previous budget just continues. The budget sets the yearly amount for each department and it runs on until another budget changes how much everyone gets. Sometimes a new department gets created, sometimes something is abolished. Everyone gets their salary and services run on. Even if the finance bill is defeated, or even if they can't agree a government at all.
So how is it so easy for the US to simply run out? It naively seems like something both sides would want to fix pretty quickly. Is there some unseen advantage doing it this way? From news reports it seems to be all downside.
Largely the US worked this way (there were funding lapses before, but people still worked & were paid), but Jimmy Carter in his infinite wisdom had his attorney general issue guidance that in times of funding lapses, no salaries could be paid. He was tired of some prior shutdowns during his administration and wanted to bring some pain into the picture to force republicans & democrats to sign funding bills & make compromises.
One reason that this happens is that it's effectively designed to happen at this point. In times of split government its effectively impossible to pass legislation, so this is the easiest hostage to take in order to try to extract something from the other side.
The recent interpretations of the anti-deficiency act (https://www.gao.gov/legal/appropriations-law-decisions/resou...) means that the government can be shut down unless functions endanger "life" or "property". Congress could amend the anti-deficiency act to fund the government at previous levels, but that would remove the shutdown process as a political cudgel.
Our current government is holding a gun to its own head in an attempt to negotiate. It's children vs adults and the children have all the power. What "should" be done is unlikely to happen. :(
This is an answer, but what are the politics of it?
Eg you could make an argument that government only maintains things (ie property and life) for the public good, therefore all state employees are required lest they endanger life and property.
You could certainly make the case that air traffic controllers are essential to life. Try landing planes at a busy airport without them.
1. This is a "partial government shutdown", so only some agencies (homeland security, state, SEC, etc) are affected. Some agencies like the Department of Defense are not affected and funded at previous levels.
And
2. There are different levels of "federal workers":
- "Essential" employees: government workers whose job are deemed to endanger "life" or "property", so they are working without pay and told to report to work. These people will (very likely receive back pay once the shutdown ends)
- "Nonessential" government employees: people who are not currently working and not receiving paychecks. These people will also most likely receive backpay once the shutdown ends.
- Federal contractors: janitors, drivers, caterers, temporary staff, part time staff, paid interns, etc are not currently working and will most likely not receive backpay once the shutdown ends.
Note that with very few exceptions (like congressmen/congresswomen/senators, etc) most people in the federal government who are affected by the shutdown are not getting paid currently at all, even if they are told to show up to work.
Just to clarify on your second point, specifically re: essential employees.
Essential employees will 100% receive pay (no "very likely"). By law, they must be paid when the government reopens. No essential employee has ever worked and not (eventually) been paid for it.
Nonessential employees will receive pay almost certainly. While legally, since they're not working, they could not be paid, paying them takes an act of Congress. In every shutdown, all nonessential personnel have been paid for the time they would have worked once they return. It would be unprecedented for them not to get paid, and there would be huge backlash if they weren't paid. I'm sure most of them are expecting it and not making other arrangements.
Contractors working directly for the government aren't working and won't get paid as you said, however if they're working through a firm, they are most likely working at their employer's office on another project and being paid normally, assuming there's work.
Most democracies run a parliamentary system, where the head of government has to have the support of parliament. There's no separation between government/executive from parliament.
The point being that if a prime minister can't reach an agreement with parliament on some core issue (like annual budgets), they cease being the PM. Usually this means a new election.
The US's checks and balances means that parliament and government can be in opposition to eachother, and prevent eachother from doing what they want. The president/government can veto legislation and parliament can de-fund government.
This current manifestation is an odd one because the President is de-funding government, which is de-funding his own stuff. This is because the convention of "shutdown" already existed.
Well don't look too hard at the UK right now. :) We have a government and PM that is effectively stuck there (thanks to the coalition's broken Fixed Term Parliaments Act) but unable to bring legislation through. They even lost a vote on the last finance bill, and the huge Brexit defeat. Either would normally have brought the government down.
Belgium famously managed with no government for well over a year, without apparently making big decisions like finance or defence changes.
The practical politics of it is that there is one party that's become ideologically opposed to all non-military Federal spending. From their point of view the automatic shutdown is a feature.
I believe (and I hope someone corrects me if I'm wrong) but the Anti-Deficiency act [0] is what is causing most of the issues. It specifically forbades going over the budget allocated by congress and has ramifications if it does. In general, the shutdown affects mostly non-essential federal workers, but part of that is their pay, so the offices that pay the necessary workers are not issuing checks...
But, let's be clear, this isn't the government running out of money, it's the government not agreeing on how to spend the money it has.
It's actually all bureaucracy and generally the budget bills are mostly simple continuances of the former... however, in recent years, this has become a game of chicken with legislatures. They are using federal pay as a pawn in negotiations to get their pet projects passed.
In this particular case, instead of going the normal legislative route of passing a bill to allocate funds for the "wall" trump has both inflicted harm on federal workers and DACA recipients in order to coerce the legislative body to fund 5.7 billion in the wall. How did he do this? He first rescinded protections for a group of people and then vetoed a normal budget bill.
Specifically in Westminster systems (like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK) the budget is a supply bill, a bill where the government asks for money.
Supply bills are automatically confidence motions, which means that if they fail to be passed then the government (i.e, the Prime Minister and their Cabinet) is said to have lost the confidence of the House.
If this happens, the Prime Minister loses the right to govern and a new government must be formed. Usually this means an election, but in rare cases the opposition parties can form a coalition that has the confidence of the House. This process is mediated by the Governor General or (in the UK) the Queen.
But in all cases, until a new government is formed and they manage to pass a budget, the old budget remains in effect. There's no scenario in a parliamentary democracy where failing to pass a budget will cause the bureaucracy to shut down.
In the US, I could see that being weaponized. One side doesn't like the results of the last election, so they force an impasse to get a new one. (In particular, I could see the Democrats trying this after the election of 2016. Perhaps the Republicans after 2018, though I think their motivation would be less strong.)
And in the US, I could see that tactic succeeding, unless the voters were willing to punish gaming the system that way. I see no evidence that US voters are responsible enough to do so, however.
Theoretically you could end up in a loop where the people vote in Party A in a minority government, then Parties B+C oppose a budget bill, an election is held, Party A is re-elected into a minority government, and Parties B+C oppose a budget bill, and so on.
But it's important to recognize that blocking a budget is a risky manoeuvre. In all likelihood the above cycle would never happen more than once or twice because people find elections irritating. If people think you called an election frivolously then voters will punish you at the polls; in the above example people would eventually get pissed off at B and C and break the cycle by giving A a majority so that they can pass their budget without opposition support.
The important thing is that in the Westminster system (e.g. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK) if Parliament loses the ability to pass important bills then it results in an election. It keeps the opposition parties honest insofar that they have to be confident that they would actually gain in the polls in order for them to force an election by blocking the government. They can't just block things without repercussions.
Honestly the last thing I want when we reach a budget impasse is for a full roster of rookie congressmen managing it. Thats ripe for abuse and you'd be getting rid of a lot of well seasoned people who know how to work around red tape to get things done and make deals.
For a well meant opposing viewpoint, flushing longer term congresspeople could mean the breaking of many lobbyist ties, shadow coalitions, and other impediments to reasonable progress. I've proposed before that campaign contribution amounts be publicized, and let people vote out the ones who have been too heavily 'bought'.
The allure of limits is not without dangers, to see how this has played out in a different arena examine California's State Assembly and how term limits affect(ed) things. For one thing Lobbyists don't have any limits.
> flushing longer term congresspeople could mean the breaking of many lobbyist ties, shadow coalitions, and other impediments to reasonable progress.
You think lobbyists and interests groups having all the people experienced with legislation while members of Congress are all neophytes that get booted out after a handful of years (and then with job experience most relevant to legislating, which they can't do any more, and lobbying...so what is it they are going to be setting tthemselves up to do afterwards?) is going to make things better?
I would be more in favor of removing any campaign contributions and publicly funding elections of candidates who get X signatures. For instance a Congressman might get 200k to campaign while a president might get many millions.
Would cost us a few billion a year but would probably save us at least that in pork barrel spending.
I'm Canadian. It means something really different to "trigger an election." It's the expected behaviour because we don't have formally scheduled elections. There are a few different things that can trigger an election here, including a "no confidence" vote in the parliament.
I had to refresh my memory on how this works up here, but generally our parliamentary system is designed to refresh itself when it becomes dysfunctional:
I don't know how it might work in the American system with the "balance of powers" or if it might be abused but generally our unstable minority governments resolve to a more stable majority after a few election calls.
> unstable minority governments resolve to a more stable majority after a few election calls.
And before that time you get parties that have to work together to keep things moving, forcing compromise, and giving the less represented groups more power for a time.
In my opinion, the US can afford to do that. Both because it has big control over its population; and that people are relatively wealthy and banks are happy to help. Try that in another country and you'll very likely get an instant uprising with either salaries paid or the government thrown overnight.
In my country this happen with bus drivers (delayed payment of 1 day) and the drivers went on an instant strike. No pay, no work. It's that bad that for many, no payment means their life halting completely. So you can't afford it.
Some people do not realize how good it is in the USA.
They don't want to stop the harm to citizens, because then they can't blame the harm on the other guy. And since they aren't harmed by it in any way, there's no real problem with doing it.
> Every other country I can think of has a system where if the finance is not agreed, the previous budget just continues
That's called a continuing resolution. And in the USA, Trump defeated it December 2018.
They don't want a continuing resolution, so it doesn't happen. Its about that simple. Lawmakers can write the law however they want. Why would the Republicans decide to shoot down the CR this time? Politics.
To be fair: Democrats filibustered the CR in 2018 as well, which led to a short shutdown earlier in the year.
Yeah. You've got short-sighted "warriors" on both sides, trying to score cheap political points while the country burns (mostly figuratively, so far).
Can states do recall elections? Because maybe that's the answer. If all 50 states held recall elections for all Senators and Representatives, that might concentrate minds in DC a bit...
It doesn't matter how bad the individual politicians are.
There's one side that is clearly in the right. There is only ONE side which is pushing for a clean continuing resolution, to end the shutdown.
The other side is asking for concessions before they end the shutdown.
Obviously politicians are opportunistic scumbags. That's why we elect them to represent our districts, so that they return more money to our district. That's the design of the system. You have to look beyond that and focus on which side is actually pushing the correct morals (which changes from debate to debate).
It is clear which side is pushing to end the shutdown with no gains to either side, and it is clear which side is asking for a $5.7 Billion Wall before the shutdown ends.
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Politicians will be scumbags for now, and probably for the future. Its our job as citizens to form opinions about their behavior.
> Can states do recall elections? Because maybe that's the answer. If all 50 states held recall elections for all Senators and Representatives, that might concentrate minds in DC a bit...
We literally just had an election like 4 months ago. The new Congress literally just entered DC this month. Every House Member was up for re-election.
This is what the country voted for. Face the facts, this is Democracy at work.
I'm not looking for replacing any of the current Congress (yet...)
I'm looking to send a message. "Stop acting like two-year-olds. Stop playing stupid political games and get something done. If you won't, you risk being removed before your two-year term is up." And if that's not enough for them to stop acting like idiots, well, then let's actually hold those recall elections.
But it will only work if most or all of the states do it.
That's a 91% reelection rate for the 2018 election. People like their Representatives and Senators. I dunno what kind of fantasy world you're living in. But house members and senate members have overwhelming support in the districts they represent.
We all hate EVERYONE ELSE's senator or representative. But that opinion holds no bearing. We only can elect our local representative.
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As I said earlier: this is democracy in action. This is the reality of our system of government.
The Democrats were elected to stop the wall. The Republicans were elected to build the wall. The people have spoken, and we've entered a contradiction / deadlock situation. This is what people wanted and what people voted for.
It annoys me to no end with people saying "Vote them all out". You have to recognize that people actually like their local Representatives. What people don't like is the Representatives from other parts of the country (ie: The part where you have to make concessions and work with someone different from you)
It absolutely is easy for the US to fix. In fact I would go so far as to say the only way for this to occur is a concerted effort of bullshit over decades. Firstly, shutdowns didn't used to occur, it used to be that agencies would just operate as usual on the assumption that if nothing new were passed then the previous budget should stay in place. Then the AG under Carter decided to imaginatively re-interpret the existing laws (read: Couldn't actually get legislation passed to implement this) to say that anything not specifically funded by congress is defunded (except for whatever the president happens to consider expedient at the time like the police force and the army, except not all of the army, like the coast guard because reasons).
THEN rather than Congress passing legislation to say "If nothing else just always stay at past funding levels" Congress instead decided this was a great political tool to whack each other of the head with to negotiate new budgets.
At any point the government could just re-open. The reason shut downs happen is because both the Republicans and Democrats think it's in their favour politically for a shutdown to exist. In this case: Trump thinks he can make the case that we need funding for a border wall (despite controlling all branches of government for part of this shutdown) and that democrats will fold because they don't like dysfunction. Democrats think both that: they can't fold on the border wall because it legitimizes the Republicans using the shutdown to leverage whatever they want, and the border wall is unpopular so a longer shutdown just damages trump more and more.
The only way this resolves is for one group to become so unpopular they fold, or for Trump to shred the constitution and spend the money despite not having the authority (the so called 'State of Emergency' powers)
My understanding as an outsider is that I think the problem is with the debt ceiling. Legally the president (who proposes the budget) needs approval from Congress to borrow beyond the debt ceiling. The US government has for quite some time run a budget deficit, so the only budget that can apply would be a budget with significant cuts in government spending. As such, even keeping the existing budget ticking would exceed the debt ceiling.
To supporters of one of the parties, this is the point. They want the government to run a balanced budget and this is a way of holding it to account. This is also why the debt ceiling can not be removed or extended enough to not become an annual issue.
To both parties, this is a useful tool to hold over an opposing president. Currently, if one party controls Congress and it is not the president, they still don't have too many options short of impeachment to reign a president in.
Additionally, a congress vote is not enough here, the president needs to sign it in, which is how Trump is able to use the mechanism to demand his wall gets funded here.
On the other hand, in most Westminster inspired systems, failure to pass a budget triggers a new election. And the executive power to not sign in a bill usually has much more strings attached. So this deadlock cannot occur.
While the debt ceiling issue is also frequently in the news, that is not what's going on here. In this case, the government has the money, they're just not allowed to spend anything.
In the US, unlike many other democracies, budgets expire. So in order for the government to continue functioning normally, the legislative branch has to pass a new budget bill before the previous one expires, which did not happen in this case.
The federal government must run a deficit. Balancing the budget would be a disaster for the economy. Watch this short video https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LxJW7hl8oqM
It gets even better because we have the fights over budgeting of the money. But when it comes time to actually pay for the things that were budgeted we get to have the same fight again.
This is so broken. The terrorists have taken over our government.
Really, every other country? Even Somalia, North Korea, or Venezuela?
I find that often when people criticize the US by saying "no other country has this problem!" they are mainly thinking of parliamentary democracies in Western Europe.
It's true that the US system doesn't function as well as most European countries. It functions better than most countries in the world.
Countries are on a spectrum of institutional competence from roughly Venezuela to Iceland. The US is somewhere in the interior of this spectrum, and not on one of its endpoints. I'm not sure why people find this so incredibly surprising. Do people just think that because the US is wealthy and powerful, it somehow "ought to" rival Western Europe on every other index of development?
That simply isn't the case -- the US is deeply dysfunctional in many ways and should be thought of in comparison with other deeply dysfunctional countries. Somebody can't "just" decide to fix its problems overnight.
First off, the FAA should be privatized like it is in Canada and other countries, then it would not be beholden to a non customer.
Second shut downs are structured as they are because Congress does not like the check and balances the Constitution tried to establish between branches of government.
By making shut downs painful on the public, the employees of the government to include its soldiers, they can force a President to accept whatever budget they come up with. There is no line item veto, Congress would never dare give up that power. So it comes down to putting sufficient pressure on any Administration so they understand who is boss.
They simply ran into someone who could call their game and honestly its the best result ever. We worry all the time about Administration overreach in this country with each change in whom is elected but the real overreach has always been the US Congress. The two parties do everything in their power to keep the game to themselves which means making it nigh impossible for anyone but them to change the rules.
Even without the shutdown, the U.S. air traffic control system may experience greater strain in the years to come due to a generational deficit in the number of new air traffic controllers being trained and staffed: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kathryncreedy/2016/01/28/contro...
Anecdotal, but I've had several friends who went to school for air traffic control give up and find work in other industries because there weren't any openings for them in ATC.
I didn't go to school for it, but I did manage to apply for an opening, get through the initial screening, and go to the academy as a trainee. Washed out in the finals by a few points.
From what I saw of the entire process, the biggest issue they have is the strictness of their hiring process. It's very bureaucratic, in the interest of fairness, but also very harsh. They get tens of thousands of applicants, but only have enough throughput at the academy for a few thousand students per year, and they wash out around 50% of those students. Then more wash out at their respective facilities.
The kicker is that when they bring in current/retiring controllers to act as instructors at this academy, they put them through the same course, with the same final, and only about 2/3 of the instructor candidates pass. In other words, their program is so strict that a third of people actually doing the job couldn't qualify to even start the job at a trainee level.
I was told, while there, that the final exams simulate a level of traffic somewhere between a level 9 or 10 tower. Trainees who complete the academy get sent to towers below level 8, and have to succeed there before being able to transfer to a higher level tower.
If I gave them some benefit, I'd say the idea was to get the best of the best into the low level positions so that as many as possible would progress up to the top levels, but when they can't even fill their low levels because they are cutting half their hires at the academy, it seems like they might be overdoing it.
List of facilities and their levels, for those curious what kind of airport warrants a given level.
I’m glad to see this. The shutdown has been too “business as usual” for most Americans, while others are expected to work without pay, which is ridiculous.
Strictly speaking, their pay is delayed - they will be paid for all the work, eventually.
Still, regular employees should not be going through this, though.
1) essentials, who are required to work and will indeed likely be repaid
2) non-essentials, who are not allowed to work and will not be repaid. They've effectively been forced into an unplanned month-long+ leave of absence. To be honest I feel worse for this group, though it sucks for everyone.
ETA: this is inaccurate, was thinking of contractors. Though I do wonder how hourly workers will be handled.
That's not quite right. We won't know how pay works out until there's an appropriation ending the shutdown, but in past shutdowns both essential and non-essential employees have been paid what they're owed (I'm not quite sure how this works for hourly workers).
Which is to say we'll have forced some people to work for no pay, and paid others for doing no work. (Yes, the pay is in fact just delayed. But "no pay" is pithier.)
I can jump in here as I've been a contractor, my wife is still a contractor and back-pay for contractors doesn't typically happen (Tim Kaine I believe introduced a bill including contractors). It could but it probably wont.
On the flip side, different contracting agencies handle things differently. Some will let you take Leave and go in the hole while others will subsidies the shutdown for you.
As always it's complicated, but it's a good assumption that someone in the contracting chain is losing money.
Non-essentials EMPLOYEES are going to get paid. They have in every other shutdown. They essentially are taking a paycheck delay in exchange for a 30+ day vacation.
I believe the resolution is the implementation of the pay guaranteed by the 13th Amendment. The Amendment just says that they must be paid while the resolution says when and how that will happen.
> None of the contractors will be paid, as I understand it, only permanent federal employees.
There's no reason Congress couldn't include back pay under some formula for contractors or employees of contracting firms who lost money due to the shutdown, but historically they have not done so (but, again, this is already the longest-ever shutdown and it may be so by much moreso than it already is, so it wouldn't be entirely inconceivable for Congress to decide extraordinary measures were warranted to address it's impacts.)
Conversely, Congress is not obligated to issue full back pay to furloughed federal employees, though it has in past shutdowns; it may also not be required to do so for those forced to work during the shutdown (though, again, it always has); though because FLSA applies to most federal employees those covered employees are definitely entitled to at least federal minimum wage for the time they were ordered to work. While it seems less likely, the extreme length of the shutdown could lead a particularly stingy Congress to decide back pay beyond what is minimally required is unaffordable.
In general a long-term contract with the government is an almost-guaranteed deal, except in very rare cases like these. It's completely reasonable for contractors to have arranged their finances expecting to be working.
(Obviously no job is guaranteed, but most Americans still only have enough cushion for a couple months.)
Though of course the underlying risk is that few contractors are going to want to work for the US government again, making it a lot more difficult to fill some positions where skills are scarce.
The knock-on effects of this shutdown are going to be around for years.
Not sure why I am being downvoted - I run a consulting business myself and I wake up every day knowing that I may be asked not to return to work the following day - for any reason.
The reductio on this argument ("why not just pay them for the year in a lump sum on December 31, 2019?") makes it obvious how inadequate it is given two pay periods have already been missed.
There are real financial costs being created (late fees, etc.) that the government is offloading onto its employees. This is dishonorable.
Not necessarily those who have been furloughed from working. Those who are currently working without pay will almost certainly be paid, the others expect to be but there are no guarantees.
It's not lying. People are being called to perform highly valuable full time work without any pay. This work is involuntary, because regular employees would be terminated and lose competitive status (adverse government action), and Coast Guard employees (who are paid by DHS not DoD) would face UCMJ charges for not working involuntarily without pay.
> This work is involuntary, because regular employees would be terminated
Being fired for not doing your job is not evidence of slavery. It's just called "normal."
Furthermore, I'm going to assume that you know the difference between "without pay" and deferred pay. If you know the difference and still choose to blur the lines intentionally I can only assume that you are lying as well.
Members of the Coast Guard are not allowed to quit. They are under UCMJ rules.
EDIT: For those that don't know the Coast Guard is not part of the Department of Defense. They are under DHS and are not getting paid and are not allowed to quit.
The USCG may not be part of DOD, but it's still part of the US Armed Forces.
The US Supreme Court has historically deemed conscription to not constitute involuntary servitude as banned by the 13th Amendment. I suspect the same logic would apply here.
The members of the Coast Guard were not conscripted. I don't know if that changes anything for you. But the salient facts are the Coast Guardsmen are not being paid and are not legally allowed to quit. So, according to your previous statement you agree that slavery is an appropriate word in this case. Also, one must contend with the fact that while conscription is not illegal they were paid for their services.
The same concept applies - "national security requires you, a member of the armed forces, to serve, whether you like it or not".
I think it's a travesty that the Coast Guard isn't being paid right now, but it appears clear that the courts don't consider such a thing to be slavery in this particular case.
No, I'm saying the USCG is in a very specific situation that's more akin to conscription than slavery, especially as they're certain to receive back pay when the shutdown lifts.
You made the statement that it'd be slavery if they couldn't quit. I didn't make that claim. You did. I presented a subset of federal workers who can't quit and aren't being paid. According to your statement it follows that this subset of federal workers are in slavery.
It's fine to misspeak or to not have thought about all of the implications of a statement. Just say you are retracting it or modifying it. You can't logically claim to maintain that it'd be slavery if they couldn't quit and then say of the workers who can't quit and are not being paid that they are not in slavery. This is a matter of logic and not opinion.
Say you are modifying your original claim to be it's not slavery because of backpay. Or say that you need to change the original statement in some way. But don't double down and claim your original statement holds when you don't believe the subset of unpaid federal workers who can't quit aren't in slavery!
It appears what you really believe is that workers who aren't being paid and aren't allowed to quit are in slavery unless they are in military type job. You should stop using conscription because no one in the Coast Guard was conscripted.
There are edge cases in virtually any situation. The USCG being part of the military is one example of an edge case, and I believe it's an edge case covered by existing court precedent on conscription - SCOTUS has determined that the US can force involuntary servitude in the armed forces as a special case without violating the 13th.
Its a bizarre thing to see people feel the temptation to lump themselves in with the 30 million actual slaves in this world today just because they work retail.
It's a very old term because labor conditions used to be a lot closer to actual slavery.
It's a very silly thing to compare "I have to work a shitty job at Walmart to make rent" to actual slaves being raped, whipped, having their kids sold, etc. while working in the cotton fields until they died.
Federal workers should start striking. I gather that in most cases they're explicitly prevented from striking, but I think there's a good chance that it's too unpopular to actually punish them.
It's explicitly illegal for Federal Workers to strike, per the Taft-Hartley Act. On top of that, there's not much indication that this administration really cares about what's popular.
Federal workers haven't gotten a paycheck in over a month, suggesting that they should break the law because of the low likelihood of punishment underestimates the lengths to which this administration will go to punish those who oppose them.
Just look at the more than 200 inauguration day protesters who were arrested and charged with felony rioting[0], many of whom are still fighting their cases in court.
Depends on the job. There are some jobs where refusal to do your job may carry significant legal penalties (imagine if airline traffic controllers walked out with planes in the air)
Sure. I'm assuming there's some level of resolution that serves as a transaction. Like maybe a day, or a shift. In your example, I'm talking about your worker not walking out on a flight in final approach, but rather notifying the employer after the shift that she will not be showing up for any future shifts until she is paid.
I don't know the specific rules regarding calling in sick etc for that industry. I know most companies have policies regarding absences, and once you hit a certain point, you can be terminated with cause. (presumably just refusing to come in would be treated worse than just calling in sick excessively) Not only would that make them ineligible for unemployment, but I assume that would impact someone in that industry pretty negatively. (How many different employers are there for ATCs?)
I'm not suggesting that anyone call in sick. That would be a lie. And I'm not suggesting that the stopping of work is permanent like quitting. This situation is one in which the employer is temporarily not paying, therefore there shouldn't be any problem with the employee temporarily not working.
How exactly is being legally forced to come in to a job, especially one that isn't even paying you, not either slavery or at least indentured servitude?
It's only that if you are not allowed to quit. And while this is somewhat pedantic, they are being "paid", but the release of that pay hasn't been authorized. Their situation is total shit to be certain, but comparisons to bona fide slavery are dramatic.
Quitting and striking are different. Sure you could quit, but then when the shutdown ends, you won't have a job at all.
I'm sure some people may consider that option, but others may be hoping to ride it out. Remember, some people want to stay in a federal job due to retirement plans, etc. so they are thinking beyond the short term effects.
This is why many are calling out "sick". I saw an estimate of 10% in some cases. It's not quite as effective as a strike, but it can still make a statement at least.
Genuine, is it very cool when now there's possibly going to be a generational shortage of ATC people in the near future possibly as a direct result of this?
ATC is going to be as important economically and for public safety as police and military. You literally cannot fly commercial flights without ATC. They issue the flight plans, provide the routing, provide clearances for every taxi movement on the ground and every landing and takeoff for every commercial flight in the country.
So what I mean is that whatever argument is made to make it illegal for police to strike (assuming it is), the same argument applies to ATC.
There are many airports that are just a runway and have CTAF (Common Traffic Advisory Frequency) where pilots advise each other of their position, heading, intentions, etc.
ATC can give clearances to aircraft landing and taking off from such airports, but the clearances only apply in controlled airspace, usually starting 700ft above the ground. ATC can also make sure there are no other IFR traffic for aircraft requesting clearances, but if it's VMC (visual meteorological conditions), there could be VFR traffic for the IFR aircraft that ATC is not talking to.
Any flight above 17999 ft in class A airspace requires an IFR flight plan. IFR requires controllers for the clearance, release, and approach clearance. Probably what he means....
Most Jets and planes people have experience with would be flying at those altitudes.
There are many Commercial flights every day to non-towered airports. In backcounty Alaska this is the norm. Clearly you have a big-city bias in your thinking.
The Act allows the President to intervene in any strike that is considered a national security interest. And this has been interpreted in the courts rather broadly.
How many times since early in 2017 have we collectively said something like "I highly doubt that any president would ever dare ..." only to find out that the current occupant of that position has no such qualms?
I don't know about striking per se. But I have been somewhat confused about why all these workers are reporting to work when they're not being paid. If it's purely out of good will and dedication for their jobs, I appreciate that, but I wonder if it doesn't just serve to mask the problem. Employment at will means that every day is a new agreement - I work then you pay. If one side of that declines, then so should the other. I'm sure that one thing at play is that those that continue to show up will probably have better rep with managers when this is over. That's unfortunate and, I assume, technically illegal. But it's all the more reason that if the pay stops, so should the work - across the board.
The government has effectively outlawed it. They could strike but then the strike would be illegal. It's never been tested in court but with the rush of federal appointments (all happening while we've been watching the circus) of conservative judges it doesn't bode well for worker rights.
I think you mean the government has outlawed striking. But I'm not sure the government has outlawed the ability of an individual to not work without pay.
Probably it's a risk calculation. For some, they may make more than if they took another job, and even if they quit, there's no guarantee they'd find work before the shutdown ends. (Plus add in the typical 2-3 week period before they'd receive their first check at new job)
If they refuse to work without explicitly quitting, then they could probably be terminated with cause, which means they'd likely be ineligible for unemployment benefits.
> I gather that in most cases they're explicitly prevented from striking, but I think there's a good chance that it's too unpopular to actually punish them
At the risk of introducing a political topic into this supposedly apolitical subject, why shouldn't any president simply make demands and then shut down the government until his/her political opponents cave? Seemingly this strategy will not work ever again for either party if proper steps are taken. It seems like a terrible abuse of executive power.
The problem is that one party wants the government to continue to run while the other doesn't really seem to care. So the strategy only really works for the other party.
The specific power being used here is the presidential veto, which is an important power of the president which is checked by the legislature being able to overrule a veto if they get enough votes.
In more calm times they could just pass legislation that would end the concept of government shut downs by funding at the previous rate in the event of a failure to agree to new funding levels.
Neither side wants that because it's a good political cudgel.
The democrats have introduced a bill to automatically pass CRs to prevent this. They also haven’t had enough votes to force such legislation through since 2010 - 15 years after the previous shutdown.
Its not nearly an equal cudgel. Generally the democrats want federal institutions to be in operation while Republicans want to disrupt and defund them. This correlates to 9 of 10 shutdowns (one in Bill Clintons term I'd consider him causing it) being propagated by Republicans on either side of negotiations, often with intent to defund some part of the government with the appropriations bills.
Of course, I wouldn't hesitate to blame Democrats - they had the house and senate in 2008-2010 and chose not to go about abolishing the electoral college, ending the possibility of shutdowns, or insuring the loophole that let a Republican congress delay voting on a supreme court nominee for a year was closed. They didn't bring any such bills or amendments to the floor in either house and never voted on any of it, so they can't even blame filibusters.
>they had the house and senate in 2008-2010 and chose not to go about abolishing the electoral college
They had absolutely no way to do that. That would require a constitutional amendment.
(There's another way around it where enough states agree to award electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote, but that also requires action by the states).
Short of another convention, the amendment has to start in Congress. So they could have brought it up but chose not to.
The interstate compact, on the other hand, has enough signers that it is at least plausibly going to be successful. Though there will be lots of legal challenges if it ever gets used, it's not clear they're allowed to do such a thing.
There is a substantial difference on bringing an amendment to the floor for vote and letting all those who disagree with democracy vote against it and have that vote enshrined in permanent record for all to see versus not proposing it at all because "oh no it can never pass with those darn toot'n republicans!".
Its why the US Democratic party isn't seen as just objectively better than Republicans even in intellectual circles. They don't actually represent abject moralistic improvement or they would push such an agenda when they had power, even if it wasn't guaranteed to succeed. They should be pressing it even now, when they have only half of congress and don't hold the presidency, to paint their opponents as against policies most of the citizens agree with.
But they don't propose them because a majority are bought and paid for by the same interests that sponsor Republicans. Talk on campaign trails about fair elections or fixing flaws in democracy or the execution of the government are cheap. When they actually are in power and make no attempt on that front you see their true colors and who their true constituents are.
For all their flaws, at least Republicans constantly brought bills to repeal the ACA to a vote over and over for years under Obama. It was only once it actually had a chance of passing under Trump that they stopped doing it knowing it would self-sabotage their reelection campaigns if rednecks suddenly lost their healthcare in many states. But that doesn't justify the "blue team" never bringing the policies they campaign on to a vote even if they have no chance on passing, because that is the whole reason many people turn out to vote for them in the first place.
Its part of why Bernie is so popular. He has a track record of constantly pushing in committee single payer healthcare and similar policies like increased minimum wage. Even when he knows he has no chance of even reaching a vote with his legislation he still tries because its his job to do so and its what he owed his electorate for what he promised when they voted for him. Hes not alone in it, but hes absolutely in a minority of ethical congressmen willing to do so.
>For all their flaws, at least Republicans constantly brought bills to repeal the ACA to a vote over and over for years under Obama.
That's because they didn't care about actually passing anything because they knew they couldn't. Passing bills they knew Obama wouldn't sign didn't distract from what they were actually trying to accomplish.
When the Democrats controlled both houses, they were trying to pass the ACA, and spending time pushing show bills that have a 0% chance of passing wasn't what they wanted to focus on.
There's no evidence these kind of political stunts are effective, much less the only moral strategy as you are suggesting.
>Its why the US Democratic party isn't seen as just objectively better than Republicans even in intellectual circles
I don't know what "intellectual circles" you run in, but most "intellectuals" I know understand there is a clear difference between parties.
> Of course, I wouldn't hesitate to blame Democrats - they had the house and senate in 2008-2010 and chose not to go about abolishing the electoral college
A majority in the House and Senate isn't even enough to propose an amendment to do that, much less to actually do it.
You don't need the president to reopen the government. The spending bill has to be approved by the president. He has 10 days to do so. But if he rejects it, congress can override his decision with a 2/3 vote.
So technically the processes are there for this to never happen. The problem is that the process relies on people not having malevolent intentions.
But the senate majority leader, and other spineless Republicans afraid of angering Trump's base, are exactly that set of malevolent actors that aren't willing to put country over themselves.
Still partially their fault for thinking the president would. Even if the president changed his mind afterwards they take some blame as their job is to figure this out in time.
> Even if the president changed his mind afterwards they take some blame as their job is to figure this out in time.
That's the most extravagant line of reasoning I've read in this thread so far. And now my brain is in a knot. I understand you're saying parliament should have proactively made their end of the deal worse because the negotiations were a sham anyway. You realize they're still not willing to do that after negotiations have broken down?
In the end you're just blaming them for not having made a different deal earlier. But that wasn't on the table then, and isn't now. So you're just blaming them for not giving in. Which (disregarding the particulars) is a reasonable position. But somehow you've packed it up all weird.
The president is responsible for attempting to take the power of the purse from congress, and congress (to be more specific, one party) is responsible for not putting him back in his place. If congress caves, it's going to get worse in the future. The next democratic president may hold the gov't hostage to get some sweet, sweet carbon tax passed. Heck, they'd even have a better claim about it being a national emergency.
Unfortunately, that logical line of thinking can't fuel the new Two Minutes Hate.
It's a shitty situation and I feel sorry for the government workers affected, but there are clearly multiple parties responsible here. If the plight of these workers were a real concern, if it were considered a real crisis, it wouldn't be happening.
Seems like it’s just delays rather than a full stoppage.
From Newsweek:
‘Flights arriving into LaGuardia Airport were delayed by about 41 minutes as of 10:15 a.m. EST and gate hold and taxi delays were between 15 and 29 minutes, although FAA said it was decreasing. Arrival traffic was experiencing airborne delays of 15 minutes or less.‘
The US system is highly integrated, any slowdowns causes a lot of ripples elsewhere. Plus its not like it will get better at all. Add a few snowstorms and soon nothing will move.
The whole idea of 'essential workers' stinks. At least they ought to be paid. Otherwise, when the gov't stops, it should really stop. Putting continued operation on the backs of the workers is extremely un-American IMO.
Much hand-wringing is being done by well-meaning moderates and centrists here, blaming both the President and Congress, wondering why our system allows for this to happen, expressing solidarity with the furloughed workers. At least the right questions are being asked.
But the fact is that for this to end any time soon, the equivocating masses trying to stay on the sidelines, saying "oh those darned politicians...", are going to have to choose a side. The hardliners on both sides (the people who vote most often) view compromise as unacceptable, so their representatives are going to sit on their hands and vote down bill after bill.
The choice is not between building a wall or not - it is about whether we allow individual actors to use the functioning of the federal government as leverage in political negotiation. It would be the same if Democrats in the House said, "we won't pass a funding bill unless it includes universal healthcare. If you don't agree, you're shutting the government down." Absurd. Continuing government funding with no strings attached is an apolitical opinion, and it's time for centrists to speak up.
> It would be the same if Democrats in the House said, "we won't pass a funding bill unless it includes universal healthcare. If you don't agree, you're shutting the government down." Absurd.
Please don't be dishonest here. In 2013 the GOP was trying very specifically to defund the ACA. The Democrats were pushing clean CRs. Again, it was the GOP trying to use a gov't shutdown to force the Democrats to agree to their wishes.
I believe paychecks were due today. Missing two paychecks can be very painful for a lot of people. I would expect things to cascade pretty quickly from this point.
I imagine there are a lot of couples that met on the job, or followed similar paths and therefore both partners are without a paycheque. I couldn't even imagine missing 4 paycheques as a family.
Oh, no! That wasn't what he meant. The president clarified that he meant to say that grocery stores and banks will work with you and extend you credit.
No. In the context in which he said it, it means what happens in bankruptcies when debt-holders renegotiate terms and vendor contracts are restructured, something that the president is, sadly, well qualified to talk about (and commerce secretary, for different reasons)
I like to pile up on Wilbur Ross as much as the next guy but I’m genuinely curious about that one. I understand that many people involved will be paid once the situation is resolved and that no one expects the US government to crumble in the near time.
Surely, an enterprising bank manager would love to offer (Federally?) guaranteed loans given the circumstances. There has been an explosion of peer-to-peer lending in the last decade, often supported by social bonds from professional relations; they could step up in theory. Charities give, but surely many Americans (less bleeding-heart) would love to make 1% over they spare savings the next weeks if it meant supporting deserving worker, and it came supported by a reassuring institution. Surely make-a-buck-when-you-can is more American than the American Dream itself.
I know very little about lending; I’ve never been in the US for longer than ten days at a time; I’ve never experienced financial hardship and I’ve never managed a bank, so I’m very willing to say that I’m not qualified to know.
What is preventing all those initiatives from unblocking the situation?
The loans wouldn't be federally guaranteed, for any meaningful definition of the phrase.
If you're deemed to be credit-worthy it doesn't really matter, and if you're not it doesn't really matter if you have a federal job. The federal government won't be paying back the banks if the employees fail to pay the loans back.
Interesting thing I discovered when I was concerned about SFO delays is that SFO is one of the few airports in the U.S. that does not use TSA for security...it hires its own private security officers.
Does this mean the airports experiencing a crippling loss of federal personnel could simply hire them onto their own payroll (the same people, even)? In such a case, all airports could keep functioning independent of government aid -- theoretically, anyway.
Leaving our airport infrastructure dependent on the dysfunctional federal government was another downside to the nationalization of most of airport security.
I'd prefer it to be this way. Airports could hire their own screeners, set their own rules, and they wouldn't be as affected by this shutdown. I think it'd be interesting to have airports do the same thing with air traffic controllers, with both airlines and airports kicking in equal amounts of money to employ and train them.
> Interesting thing I discovered when I was concerned about SFO delays is that SFO is one of the few airports in the U.S. that does not use TSA for security...it hires its own private security officers.
Yeah but this article is about the FAA staff, not the TSA or security staff.
SFO's private security has no bearing on this outcome.
On February 7th, myself and my co-workers are supposed to travel half way across the country for a major sales-call/meeting. But if the shutdown is still happening, there is no amount of money that would tempt me to get on that plane. Stuff like this worries me:
"The delays come one day after a stark warning was issued by air industry unions about the risk to public safety. "In our risk averse industry, we cannot even calculate the level of risk currently at play, nor predict the point at which the entire system will break," air traffic, pilot and flight attendant union leaders said in a joint statement."
I can't be the only who feels this way, and the longer the shutdown goes on, the more people are likely to be worried about air travel.
In the short term you might think my company will suffer because of a lost sales opportunity, and that is strictly our loss. But if it happens to enough companies, then it is going to hit the general economy.
Working on major projects means long lead times. The sales that are not being closed this quarter are going to show up as less economic activity in the 2nd and 3rd quarters.
Unless the shut down ends immediately, it seems likely this will have medium-term or long-term consequences.
I am travelling internationally on the 1st and I cannot avoid my trip. Will only be nervous until we cross the US airspace. Moreover, I worry about the upcoming superbowl weekend and the mayhem the airport delays will bring.
Why can't the ATC adopt a funding model like the USPS so they don't have this problem in the future relying on appropriations. Can they basically charge airlines and other traffic for their services to fund the operations. I'm mostly curious if this is actually realistic.
>Why can't the ATC adopt a funding model like the USPS so they don't have this problem in the future relying on appropriations. Can they basically charge airlines and other traffic for their services to fund the operations. I'm mostly curious if this is actually realistic.
I'm not sure if it's economically realistic but it seems politically realistic.
The right should be fine with the idea of a government agency being less tax dependent and I'm not sure what problem the left would have with it. The corporate interests should also have no problem with it because it arguably gives them slightly more control (ATCs being less accountable to the .gov for funding them makes them more accountable to customers). I'm not familiar with how ATCs work but on the surface it seems like it could be a win-win-win.
> ATCs being less accountable to the .gov for funding them makes them more accountable to customers
That's one potential issue right there – would this arrangement put airlines or airports into a position to squeeze concessions out of ATCs that might reduce safety? At the very least, minimum ATC pay would need to be federally regulated.
Why is Super Bowl travel such a big deal? Doesn’t the stadium only seat about 50k people anyway? I understand that the game is exciting, but I don’t see what travel to one venu would be news.
There’s also people traveling for work because of the Super Bowl. The city of Atlanta is granting some exceptions to strip clubs due to the sheer influx of potential patrons and there is almost certainly knowledge among the performing community. Certainly not the only kind of business that will boom for the weekend.
A lot of people come for the atmosphere and other festivities. I'm sure the actual number of people visiting town for the game is closer to 200k than it is to 50k.
For some people (not fucking pats fans though), this is a once in a lifetime chance to see THEIR team play in the biggest game . So yeah, people travel, migrate. For some people it feels like a religious journey. All of your kin are migrating across country for this one event... Just being in the city is cool, you will be seeing rams / patriots jerseys all over Atlanta for the whole week!
That's really surprising to me - my favorite college football team regularly sells out their 100k seat stadium during the regular season. Seems like the superbowl is leaving a lot of money on the table.
Atlanta is the busiest airport in the country, there will be a lot of angry people if this happens at any time. That's not even mentioning the networks effects of a delay at ATL causing delays at other airports around the country.
Good point. Actually that makes me think that it will magically get resolved just in time so that it doesn't interfere with wealthy-people's Super Bowl Plans.
I lived there for a couple of years for grad school, and flew out about once a week in my final semester for interviews. The airport is a super well-oiled machine, it doesn;t really feel different from say, San Francisco. IMO it feels way more comfortable than LaGuardia, which is easily one of the worst airports I've been at in the US.
I hope it feels different from San Francisco, which is a total unmitigated disaster for anyone coming in from an international flight on weekends, and not particularly efficient even for domestic flights.
I listened to a podcast where a guest was talking about this - maybe NYTimes Daily? They said that because the tickets are so expensive there'll be a huge amount of private jets flying in to the area, and suggested that refusing to handle those would put enormous pressure on Trump.
Am I the only one who thinks that air traffic controllers and the airport security personnel hold the key to the shutdown? If airports close down, the shutdown will have to stop immediately, the damage to the economy would be so catastrophic not even Republicans could ignore it.
There's no way the federal shutdown lasts too much longer. The heat is on and too many people feel the hurt now, especially in a place like New York. If I were a betting man, I'd say 3-4 days max.
I think you are probably right, but I think it will end because the admin will declare a border emergency to try and get funding. The senate will then pass a clean bill and the emergency bill will get stuck in the courts. Right now this is only going on because of the admin wanting to save face.
> Right now this is only going on because of the admin wanting to save face.
To be fair, the administration has made several concessions (steel instead of concrete barrier, a multi step funding proposal, DACA extension, etc), while the Democratic leadership has been unwilling to compromise on increased funding for border security. It is on both sides that this shutdown has gone on so long.
I get where you are coming from, but I don't really see how deciding to build the wall out of steel is a compromise, when it was not anything the Democrats wanted. The DACA extension really gets them nothing as DACA deportations are on hold indefinitely any way due to the courts. There is already a surplus of border security funds that went unused in the prior year so an increase again is not a concession for the Democrats.
The shutdown began under a government where all 3 branches were under Republican control when the Admin. refused a bill that had already cleared both houses, the Senate via unanimous consensus. So the shutdown is absolutely the direct result of the Admin. In regards to its continuation, were the Democrats to yield this would set a precedent that a shutdown can be used to force negotiation at gunpoint with real people used as hostages.
I really don't see how this is anything except an attempt for the Admin. to save face over a failed campaign promise to build a wall that would be paid for by another nation. The senate Republicans refusal to approve the same bill they unanimously voted for is the reason the shutdown continues.
If the airports remain shut down, the economic cost will quickly balloon to multiples of the $5.7B requested for the wall. It's literally a rounding error in the budget.
That's one of the things that I find most infuriating. When it comes time to defund something like public broadcasting, it's all supposedly about the cost. When it's time to build a wall, it's a tiny fraction of the budget. We have such whacked priorities.
The 2013 government shutdown cost 0.1%-0.2% of the annualized GDP growth rate per week [1]. If I'm understanding correctly and doing my math right, with a GDP of about 20t $usd and a 3.5% growth rate, that's a 350b-700b $usd reduction in GDP.
It’s not about this line item, it’s about the executive branch ursurping the power of the purse by holding federal workers and huge sectors of our economy ransom. Trump was on national tv saying he’s intentionally doing this for a pet project.
Nobody actually cares about the $5.7 billion dollars, it's chump change for the government. This is all about appearance. The Democrats will lose face if they sign off on a budget which allows him to build his wall, and Trump will lose face if he fails to start building it (presumably in time for the next election).
(It's also notable that neither party, politically, has a good reason to end it. Trump will have a hard time holding onto even his strongest supporters come reelection if he can't start the wall, the most tangible and physical representation of his promises to his base, and the longer the shutdown persists, the better Democrats will do in Congress next election, the shutdown is a political godsend.)
I don't think the democrats should cave because this is a terrible precedent that far outstrips "appearance". It feels like a perversion of checks and balances where, because on side doesn't get what they want, they shut down the entire government until the other side caves. I won't be a fan of future presidents shutting down the government every time they can't come to a bipartisan agreement.
Sure, but it also means that your position is that our government should be shut down and people should be unable to feed their families to prevent giving the opposition a mostly meaningless amount of money to build a useless thing that pales in comparison to how much we've blown on the F-35 (literally like 1% of the cost), a largely useless airplane.
Which is to say, one party is certainly responsible for picking this fight, but both parties are responsible for not ending it.
Is your point that one side should cave because the numbers are meaningless? If so, I don't agree - they aren't meaningless. No one should be able to hold the American people hostage in order to get what they want - it not democratic. You shouldn't be allowed to undermine democracy by using threatening Americans as hostage - fullstop. Your suggestion is to just cave whenever one side threatens a shutdown is unacceptable
They are acting like children. If your son relentlessly bullied your other baby and in order for your baby to stop crying your son said "give me $5" (a meaningless amount to most adults) - the solution wouldn't be to give him $5 and teach him that whenever he wants money he just has to threaten throw the baby down the stairs.
The Democrats have the CR on their side: Continuing Resolution. The Democrats are asking for a simple, clean CR (the proposition to keep the old budget for just 3 or 4 weeks while we debate longer)
If the clean CR fails, then its a terrible future ahead. In 2018, when Democrats were in the opposite situation (they were denying the CR), it was on the onus of the Republicans to push for the CR.
--------
The only reason why the CR is agreed upon in the past, is because both sides recognize the harm that a shutdown would cause. Unfortunately, one side is willing to shutdown the government and avoid the CR this time.
As another commentor noted, this is a matter of precedence for the Democrats.
Trump has refused to accept continuing resolution proposals unless they include a down payment on the wall [1] - these proposals continue prior funding while the budget is discussed, alleviating the shutdown.
When material damage begins to occur to US businesses their first call will be to certain Senators. Imagine Fedex with no flights, Disneyworld with no guests, Prime with no deliveries. It's a massive disaster in the making with lots of ripple effects. Even the mail won't move except by truck.
As of approximately 15 minutes ago the LGA ground stop has been replaced with a ground delay. There are still ground delay programs in effect at PHL and EWR.
The people not getting paid mostly don't have enough political power to matter. If the airports start going offline politicians are going to very quickly hear from the constituents they actually care about.
Awfully nice of our US friends to try and make and feel better about our current bit of unpleasantness with our government here in the UK, but you really didn't need to bother....
Could a situation like this happen in the UK, do you think? Not voting through a budget would normally be a confidence issue, which would bring about the fall of the government, could we have a situation where that went on for a period of time without causing a new election?
I think it used to be that a government losing a vote on a budget would mean a general election but since the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 I believe there has to be an explicit vote of no confidence in the government (or a two thirds vote by MPs) to trigger an election.
Arguably since the Lib Dems detached confidence votes from normal business the constitution has been broken; previously the "May Deal" would have been a confidence vote and its failure would have collapsed the government.
While I don't think we'll have budget issues we're very likely to go the other way: use of emergency powers to suspend Parliamentary democracy. I believe some of the Tory party are already calling for this.
They in effect voted for a dictatorship, initially for Pompey on the ground of a terrorism threat, and then later were supportive of Caesar. Pompey used the democratic tribune system which had been abolished by a previous generation of the aristocracy. The dictator argued past the traditions of the Roman Republic as exemplified by the aristocrats, and appealed directly to the people.
It's not my favorite analogy. Probably something closer to the government of early modern Poland: so paralyzed by dysfunction that it couldn't effectively govern or respond to novel threats.
I've wondered if public dialog about societal change might be improved by having a richer set of exemplars, to serve as context and landmarks in discussion.
When exploring design objectives with a client, one often provides a set of proposals, whose differences then serve as a vocabulary for discussion. Almost a basis vector set. Public dialog often leaves me with the impression of a client with an inadequate set, an impoverished vocabulary, struggling to both clearly understand and express their opportunities and desires.
For governance and society, even just current US States are variously diverse. So we might discuss whether we want aspect X of the federal government or national society, to look more like those of this state or that state, with a bit from some other. Current countries and societies provide even larger breath, and history even more.
But the goal here isn't models, merely vocabulary. Not "if we do this, then these experiences suggest these results". Such extrapolations between highly complex systems are almost silly. Though experiences can suggest possibilities. But my focus here is more on creating vocabulary. For example, I recall a story of "you don't call the police in <city in Brazil>, because they will just show up in force, smash things and people unrelated to the problem, and then leave, having done nothing but additional harm". For vocabulary, it doesn't matter whether that's true, or typical, or happens only under specific conditions, or is different now, or whatever. It's merely a tag, to facilitate discussion and reflection like "Hmm, it seems there are a few situations of that in the US too! What is the shape of such cases? Does it vary among municipalities? Why? What does the space of shapes look like? What are the class, cultural, political, and professional contexts?", etc.
Society slowly turned into an oligarchy where a handful of families owned the majority of wealth. And the same time depletion of natural resources, mostly forests, lead to systemic scarcity of fuel (wood). Increased social complexity due to the size of the empire. On top of that, ongoing wars with barbarian and Ira... I mean Persian forces.
I'm not a lawyer so I'm wondering: how feasible would it be for government employees to sue the president in small claims court and get a default judgement since there's no way he'll how up all over the country? Kinda like how people did this in the Equifax data leak...
I'm Irish. Our politics is usually boring, so we watch the east and west (UK & US) versions.
From an outside perspective, it sounds like the destructive stalemates currently causing havoc in parliament & Congress are quite similar.
Everything is political machinations. The issues at hand (brexits & border walls) are popular/opinionated with the public, but most politicians don't feel as strongly about these issues.
They are equally happy if things go well, and they get credit or they go bad, and the other side gets blamed. I know politics always has.. politics, but I don't remember it ever being so explicit.
A mental exercise I often go to is imagining a secret ballot. I suspect that the votes would be totally different, if the ballot was secret.
Honestly I just don't want to fly at all until this whole thing is over. Who knows if on the day I want to fly there won't be a shortage of ATCs or TSA to man the "security" line?
We have 2 horrible years where Trump was in the White House and the GOP controlled the House and the Senate and there was no stomach for the border wall. To think there is any greater chance now that the Democrats control the House or that they could somehow be shamed into capitulating is laughable.
The public has generally not been kind to whatever party forced a shutdown. Look at Newt Gingrich's shutdown as one modern example. According to 538 it seems like people are (rightly) blaming Trump for this. Good.
My question is at what point do McConnell develop a spine and overrule the president? Because that's what it may well take. Either that or a rank-and-file revolt in the Senate.
I'm glad to see banks are trying to help out Federal workers who are hurt by this but the one question I have is: how can people live and have responsibilities and sudden expenses and not be able to come up with $500? I mean I realize this fact is the basis for the check cashing industry (which is predatory and should be outlawed) but I honestly couldn't live that way.
An interesting question. If TSA does not show up, what happens if the airport just opens the security gates. That would be ... hilarious. Probably illegal.
I don't think it would be, providing the airport do the same 'quality' of checks.
If security instead got rid of the theatre of taking shoes off, molestation, etc, reverting to security as it was 20 years ago, but with a locked cockpit, it would be far more pleasant and wouldn't require the TSA at all.
This is by far not the first shutdown, nor is there any indication it will be the last. I'm wondering why under these circumstances anyone would even want to work for the US government?
Obviously there are people near to their pension years who will want to complete them, but they would usually have some money.
But young people? If your boss is an asshole, just quit! Why would that be any different in the public sector?
I believe the idea is that it if congress members could be compelled to accept something they disagree with to end their own personal finance issues, it would cause an inbalance benefiting the richer/better-backed members.
Well, I'll be damned. It looks like there's going to be a general strike primarily organized by the US Government. I guess horseshoe theory is real after all.
Seriously though, it'll be interesting to see how much disruption is necessary to force the hand of the legislative and executive branch to finally fund the government.
I'm still not fully understanding what's going on here, and I'm american. Could someone who is more educated in politics of the US explain to me why this shutdown is allowed to go on for this long, and why there is no law in place for 'if the congress cannot come to an agreement, X shold happen'?
The law says the opposite: agencies are legally prohibited from carrying out any nonessential work without explicit continuing funding. Look up the Anti-Deficiency Act for more info.
As for why it continues to be this way, it’s because politicians have found the threat of a shutdown to be a useful bargaining chip. It’s a little bit like nuclear weapons: they’re pretty bad, but at the same time people stand up and listen to you when you threaten to use them.
The problem is that we now have an idiot in the Presidency and too many cowards in Congress who don’t want to bypass him.
Congress can write, and rewrite, any law. Congress will virtually never be held responsible for any event, since they control the law itself.
Another thing: Trump issued a veto-threat against the bills that passed the House. Trump refuses for a budget to be passed unless it has his wall. Republicans don't want to betray their leader, so they're holding firm with Trump.
Republican support for Trump has dropped from 97% to like 90% this past month. Sooooo... yeah. I forget the numbers exactly, but its well above 80%.
Note: Republican Senators and House members are trapped. Literally every Republican Senator up for election 2016 to 2018 who said something bad about Trump was voted out.
Lisa Murkowski is the one exception: her next election is in 2022. And she's clearly expecting Trump to be voted out in 2020 (which is why she's willing to go against him so much). She's willing to play the long game.
All the other Republican Senators who didn't like Trump's policies (Jeff Flake, John McCain, etc. etc.) are gone. I guess Mitt Romney (new Utah Senator) is a new instigator, but the anti-Trump Republican movement is basically dead at this point.
Either a Democrat took over the seat, or a harder-leaning Republican took over.
Note that over 30% of the US Population agrees with Trump on the issue and still strongly supports him through this shutdown. If you are a Republican and in the House or Senate, you HAVE to earn the support of that 30%, because no one really will vote for you if you go against this base.
Politics is innately emotional, and not a thing of reason.
Fundamentally, when people choose a leader, they will then follow that person. Its an innate characteristic of humans. Its not a Republican or Democrat thing, its simply a human thing.
Thank you again for explaining. I'll have to look into that. (I'm a little strange so I don't often follow leadership without also querying their reasoning constantly.)
Why can't US government give an official statement to all its employees guaranteeing future payment of the work done during shutdown? And banks should be able to give personal loan over that statement. Interest paid over that loan can be reimbursed by the govt once shutdown is over.
(1) The US government did just that -- promised backpay for all unpaid work during the shutdown.
(2) Banks may not wish to give loans to folks who have bad/no credit, even with the assurance. Banks need a bit more than assurances that the government will pay their debtees -- they need assurances that they will get that money.
This is pretty silly. Congress thinks they can't continue to fund government activities, but they certainly don't suspend tax collection. It would be easy to solve the "shutdown" and "debt ceiling" fictions, except they are too useful as a political weapon.
I feel bad for the TSA employees, as they couldn't have seen this coming.
But this is yet another reason the TSA should 100% be funded by the airlines, not the Taxpayers of the United States. Those who wish to fly will pay for their own security, those who rarely fly wouldn't.
I am shocked this hasn't happened sooner. It speaks to the lack of agency the average person has even in a government job. Politics and money grant agency for people, but most Americans have limited access to either.
Not surprised by this. I'm patently surprised that Houston has stayed open given the staffing issues around the TSA. Maybe this will be the forcing mechanism to end the stalemate.
The US should seriously consider decoupling critical services like this from government. It is neither reliable nor necessarily to have the setup you are currently using.
I can only hope that voters learn something from all this and start considering alternative parties, rather than continuing to vote democrat/republican every year.
The vast majority of Americans don't get a choice of who to vote for as districts are extremely gerrymandered nowadays. The only politicians I had a chance to vote for last election was local ones like the school board. Congress was just one name that I had to fill in the oval for.
Is there any way to donate or lend money to ATC/TSA workers who are struggling to make ends meet? (Ideally lend, but with as generous terms as possible...)
I believe the most common model in Europe on country-level is that of a state-owned or at least state-controlled company, with sometimes some locations being subcontracted (but I believe the latter exists in the US too). International agreements about allowed fees probably mean you can't really make a profit, so little reason for other owners to be interested.
Depending on the cancellation terms, the airlines or the fliers, and it probably trickles down to the businesses or individuals when they have to make alternative travel arrangements.
The public clearly blames Trump for the shutdown, so Democrats have no reason to lift a finger to stop it while Trumps approval rating drops, and as more airports close, the situations surely becomes untenable fast.
I was just at LGA Terminal B and can't believe how awful it is. You're stuck at those cramped gates with CNN blaring at max volume - when it's not playing stupid ads it's just non stop Trump bashing - I was there 2.5 hours and boarded my flight with a throbbing headache.
Also could not believe there's no public transport at LGA. After 60 years they have not managed to get a rail line out there. WTF?
So I really feel for people stuck there due to this shutdown nonsense.
In situations like this people need to understand what exactly was being voted on. It's common in American federal politics for bills to be voted on that contain poison pills so that headlines like the story you linked to can be made. Both parties have passed bills in the respective chambers they control to end the shutdown.
At some level and at some point in time probably both parties will take the blame for this mess. However, the President appears to have put his party at a disadvantage in terms of public relations due his proudly shutting down the government:
For anyone else wondering why Dems would seemingly vote against this, the news source seems to be purposefully misleading others in order to place blame on house democrats.
This vote was not a vote to pass the bill, it was a motion to recommit (amend) the bill and delay it further. If you follow the links (http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2019/roll048.xml) to the source you can see it there.
Instead of recycling blogspam from "left/right" biased news sources, could you possibly look at the primary facts yourself and actually comment on what is happening?
For one the CNS and The Hill report aren't even reporting on the same bill, so your second source isn't materially reporting on the same thing as your first.
Second, the new source, (and none of the sources I could find) actually mention what bill it was. The only bill to fail 222-195 in that time range was this (http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2019/roll043.xml), another recommit bill.
Your second news source is as baloney as the first. People complain about news sources all the time and are unwilling to do their own research. The House GOP measure that thehill is mentioning here is a motion to delay a democratic bill which already passed and then was rejected by the Senate (Mitch McConnell). The hoops and misdirection here to try and blame this as a democratic house failure when it is still clearly a republican senate house failure is astounding.
Reading Pelosi's tweet, which at-mentions the president and includes an exclamation point, depresses me as much as the shutdown. Nobody should follow Trump's example of using social media as some sort of loudspeaker.
As a non US citizen, I don’t understand what’s that shutdown even about, seems like absurd thing to do. Is it all because of Trump or he is not the only one to blame? I remember there was some shutdown when Obama was there too? Or am I mistaken?
it is a political thing. Both the House and the Senate have to approve bills that fund these various government agencies, so if a president has at least one of the two backing him up (just enough that they can't override his veto) then he can say give me X or we won't pass the funding bill.
It's standard practice to tack lots of little x things onto the bill because they wouldn't ever really pass on their own, but people don't want to deal with a shutdown to stop them. Sometimes that is a big enough issue that people will deal with a shutdown.
Unlike sane countries if the US government doesn't pass a budget in time then federal workers can go unpaid. Many federal workers are nevertheless still forced to work (via summons) despite not being paid. This particular shutdown is due to a disagreement about providing funding for a border wall between the US and Mexico (one of Trump's campaign promises, though he said "Mexico will pay for it").
Keep in mind that the shutdown began during the previous congress, when Republicans controlled the House, Senate, and the Presidency. It has extended to the current congress where the Democrats now control the house.
To break down some additional bits and pieces for folks about how the US government works:
A bill (such as a budget) needs to be passed by both the House of Congress and by the Senate and also approved by the President.
Senate rules make it possible to infinitely delay (effectively block) any bill without support of 60% of the Senate (so even a bill that would pass the Senate may not even be voted on if more than 40% of the Senate opposes it).
If the President vetos (doesn't sign) a bill the house and senate can only override that with a 2/3 majority vote in both.
It seems like in the US the two legislative branches and the executive branch of government have to all agree each year on a budget, or else everything shuts down? It's a curious system, I think in most countries not being able to pass a budget would bring down the government and cause a new election. It seems to rely very strongly on politicians seeking compromise, which is ambitious!
A question to American posters: could any party holding any of the branches of government unilaterally shut down the entire government if they chose, until the next scheduled congressional or presidential election?
Only the legislative branch has enough power to unilaterally shut the gov't. The executive can make them work for it, but ultimately congress holds all the cards.
The executive makes a budget, but it's just advisory. Officially the House is the source of the budget, which gets passed by the senate, then signed by the president. But as a practical matter there's much negotiation before and during the whole process, of course.
Why don’t you check Wikipedia or literally any english-language newspaper, instead of sending people on a mission explaining the basics to you? Nothing anybody is going to come up here in two paragraphs or less is going to do the subject justice.
Most of the newspapers don't go into the reasoning behind it and just blame everything on Trump and it's hard to read a one sided point of view of wikipedia, I wanted to hear different opinions on the topic.
Both sides are being stupid here. Trump knew the #resistance mindset makes it impossible for democrats to even trade something they supposedly care about, DACA protections, for the wall he cares about.
I just find it mind-boggling that this path was even tried when it was a big gamble on popular opinion overruling #resistance.
I find it hypocritical that the democrats are willing to spend more money on #resistance than what they could trade wall for DACA protections. Remember, real americans and children brought here illegally are effected by this inability to trade what you supposedly care for with what someone else cares for.
It is human to care more for your family than you neighbor, more for your neighbor than a stranger countryman, more for a stranger countryman than one from another country. The people already here illegally are our countrymen, but the people not here yet are not. Lets make sure our people is taken care of.
> Trump knew the #resistance mindset makes it impossible for democrats to even trade something they supposedly care about, DACA protections, for the wall he cares about.
Trump's offer on DACA was a temporary preservation of the status quo on DACA, which opponents of his attempt to eliminate it have already acheived through litigation.
If he offered the more comprehensive legislative solution—the DREAM Act—for which the Obama Administration implementing DACA was a stopgap alternative, maybe that would actually be something. But what he has offered is essentially nothing.
While yes, there is a negotiation between two perspectives going on, imo the fault for the shutdown is independent and wholly owned by Trump and McConnell with the republican senators as accessories for not ousting McConnell.
The House and the Senate passed a bill in December to keep the government open. From what I read, the Senate bill passed with a veto-proof majority. Trump vetoed but McConnell refused to get this through despite Trump.
Clever of Trump to offer to temporarily return some of the DACA protections he himself took away.
Offer something substantial, and it would be a more interesting discussion. How about a blanket, one-time grant of citizenship (or at least green cards) to all current DACA kids? Might be political suicide, but ... maybe not. Would really change the political calculus in the country right now. Ha!
An administration official recommended that all those affected simply take out loans but unfortunately banks don't lend to people without an income nor to those who have recent delinquencies on their credit due to no income.
I feel very bad for these real people being affected by political showmanship.