Government Shutdown Tuna!

Congress has gone fishin’. Fishing for Tuna that is. Both parties hold fast to their ideologies while neither has a firm grip on the big picture or the realities of what needs to be done to resolve the imbalance of the budget. One party says cut the spending!! They are bolstered by the Tea Party faction yelling “Cut it! Or shut it!” The GOP legislators want about $61 billion in cuts while their fanatic backers want $100 Billion. The reality is that cutting the entire $100 Billion would do nothing to either balance the budget or curtail the necessity to raise the debt ceiling. Calls for shutting down the government elicit visceral responses from all factions in the grand debate. One might end the authorization to spend money for a few days or a week, but eventually there would be a resumption of the government activities. The only outcome would be the collateral damage that extends from the brief period of interruption. Much of what doesn’t get done during shutdown would have to be taken up after it is over.

The definition of what Tuna! is tells us that buying and selling without regard to consequences is what make something into Tuna! All sides of the budget issue are using the threats of government shutdowns to leverage their positions to extract the outcomes they seek. At risk are the people who depend on the spending that the government does. There are seniors who need medical services paid for by Medicare and Medicaid. There are children who need food and shelter. There are veterans who need their pensions for paying rent. All and all, a shutdown would pressure the legislators to come to an agreement while the American people sit and wait for funds and services that will come late. The long-term impacts of a shutdown can only be realized if the government stays shut down.

Like the Libertarian philosophy of governance, a government shutdown is not a sustainable scenario. The alleged budget bloat of one ideology is another person's dinner.

The Libertarian and Tea Party ideology can only be sustained for a short period of time. It is in that interval that the believer must derive ALL of his benefits before the system collapses into anarchy. Short term results may allow the Libertarian to keep his income for a year or two longer, but eventually the roads serving his property will need to be repaired. The Tea Party person may get a warm and fuzzy feeling from beating down the budget total and harassing GOP pansies who did not toe the party line in the budget fracas but soon there will be illiterate adults who were mere children when the budget was balanced at the expense of education funding. The health of seniors will not suddenly drop because the Medicare and Medicaid budget got slashed, but time will exact its toll on those people and if the ‘maintenance’ and ‘inspection’ are not regularly performed, people will fail. When they fail, they die sooner after being in poorer health.

The same principle applies to our physical infrastructure. Without bridge inspections and regular repair, some number of bridges will fall into the ravine. People may die in the fall. This will not happen during the days and hours of a government shutdown that has been orchestrated by the posturing and haggling of 536 elected men and women. It will happen as the days stretch into weeks and weeks into years that there is insufficient funding to maintain the essential elements of our society. The cutting of spending can only garner a few tens of billions for the tally sheet that says that some ‘good’ has been had. The larger issue is the increases in revenues that must be raised to meet our growing demand. The contentious $100 billion is only 2.78% of the $3.6 trillion 2010 budget. We have fallen so far behind in maintaining our essential systems that we might not be able to fix them. The bottom line is that we must balance our budget with a combination of better controlled spending and increased revenues. We can accept $100 billion in spending cuts if the people who actually have spare wealth would pony up the funds to not need to borrow any more.

Speaker Boehner and Harry Reid are verbally sparring over policy issues that are keeping the budget battle from being settled. At issue are the funding of Planned Parenthood and the Environmental Protection Administration. In the first theater of war, the issue is the money that goes to abortions. Conservatives do not want to allow women to choose whether to bear a child or not. To the woman it is a choice and to the Conservative it is murder. The woman may see the futility of having another mouth to feed. The conservative sees the sanctity of human life. The Conservatives position on this matter would not seem so hypocritical if they added a provision that every child born would be given sufficient food, clothing, shelter, love, education and medical care even if the parents could not afford to pay for all those thing with their 40 hours per week labor. The right to life equation has an Equals Sign in it. Not-aborted = Taxpayer funded childhood services or a child who is economically and nutritionally deprived due to no fault of its own.

The environment is the place in which we all live. We as a species do not like being told what is good and bad for us. For all this distaste, we do know that there are things we do that are not good, but we are fully willing to deny that relationship. We want to drive automobiles and use electricity, heat and air-condition our homes. These things by their nature pollute the environment in which we live and breathe. But instead of embracing a new paradigm of energy usage that will protect our biosphere, we follow the lead of businesses that prosper by our present energy usage patterns and attempt to shutdown the government agency that was created to protect us from that death. The EPA is the one watchdog that we are insisting that it stops barking instead of wondering why it is barking in the first place. Defunding the EPA will stop the barking but will not mitigate the danger the bark is heralding.

So the fearful few are yelling "shut it down!" lest we anger the gods of deficit and debt. Make no mistake about it, we need to make a systemic change in the way we go about funding our essential services but merely cutting them off only spites our faces. We can limit spending but eliminating the revenues first is a backwards approach that only serves to exacerbate the funding of those services. Cutting the funding serves to protect the wealth of the more wealthy people in the country and creates a perception that spending must be curtailed. It would be a far better plan to make the expenditures more efficient, less fraught with fraud and unnecessary goods and services.

Ruben Navarrette, Jr. of CNNs writing staff avers that government must learn to live within its means. This process is quite difficult when the income sources (tax revenues) are stripped away like the income of a laid-off worker who has a fixed expenditure portfolio that includes a mortgage, car payment, college tuition loan, health care costs, food, fuel and taxes to pay that cannot be shed by willing it to be gone. Add to that family budget a new child who must be fed and you see what the government is up against when they cannot keep pace with the demands of the American public. It is not government that is bloated and out of control, it is us. We are the people. We are the beneficiaries of government services. We have committed the sin of getting old and needing others to support us. How can we retire if the next generation is not will to pay our bills? The crushing burden of pensions and Medicare are the consequence of our longevity. So who among us is going to volunteer to live a shorter life in order to save the wealthy class on their taxes? The Twenty-five Percenters would like you to know that they encourage and fully support your sacrifices.

Post Script:
It is quite fortunate that the factions of Congress put together a plan at the eleventh hour on April 8, 2011 and averted the imminent government shutdown. While there were people who cheered for a shutdown and rallied to crash our system on ideological grounds, the damage that would have been done was far out of proportion to the goals they sought to attain. The savor of shutdown was in the mouths of millions of Americans and the politicians who were doing battle in the committee rooms of the US Capitol. The fever was palpable like the run up to the start of a war. They all knew that the outcome would be felt for many years hence even if the suspension of paychecks was only for a few days. The idea that our unifying governance is expendable and non-essential would a be a seed of thought in the minds of many. Without our social support systems, America would be no different than any Third-world country where there is no hope in the people to be able to have a better existence.