So, it’s looking more and more likely that, barring a miracle before midnight, Tuesday morning I’ll be heading into the office to sign furlough paperwork, then getting essentially locked out until Congress can stop playing chicken with my paycheck.
While I’m known for getting occasionally political in this space, I haven’t actually done so in a while. Not that I haven’t been paying attention, but I’ve not had a lot of free time to write down even semi-coherent thoughts about much of anything, let alone the inner workings of federal budgetary policy and politicking.
I have a couple of thoughts on the current situation, however, and I have a little bit of free headspace (not that most of my headspace isn’t consumed by this business anyway, because of the rather large effect it’s having on my life and livelihood), so I’m writing some things down.
First of all, this whole business is largely a manufactured crisis. The comparison used by the vocal cadre of freshman Republican legislators who came in on the Tea Party wave, is invalid – the idea of comparing a Federal budget to a household budget is flawed. When you get to the scale of nations and national spending, “money” doesn’t really mean the same thing as it does on an individual level. It’s a convenient way of expressing the idea of resource distribution, stemming from the fact that at all levels, “money” is really a theoretical construct everyone agrees on as a way to ease the exchange of goods and services in modern widely distributed markets – “money” is only worth the value we all agree to give it – if we each only traded with a small, consistent community in a small geographic area, we wouldn’t need it, as barter would work just fine. When the entities that create the “money” talk about spending, it’s really just a way to describe balances of power in quantifiable terms people can sort of understand.
Whether or not you agree with how power is distributed on an international scale is one thing; that’s something worth debating about, and enacting laws and constructs to deploy a nation’s power in given directions – that’s a matter of defining priorities, and that’s what elected government representatives ought to be doing. Things like the debt ceiling and continuing resolutions and budgets are paperwork to allow government priorities to interact with the smaller scale economies that go about enacting them.
The current financial shenanigans are, for the most part, manufactured. It’s a matter of holding up paperwork in order to prevent anything meaningful from happening, because somebody didn’t get what they want; it’s a temper tantrum situation, where the body politic is the family unit, and the Tea Party Republicans are the toddler kicking, screaming, and trashing the cereal aisle at the grocery store.
The thing they don’t like, of course, is The Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare). Whether their opposition to this package of healthcare initiatives has merit isn’t really the issue here – heck, I’m well-known as a total bleeding heart, and I have issues with some elements of the program (it was a compro – however, the issues they have with the law have been debated, discussed, and talked about at every level from individual talk over dinner to the floor of the Supreme Court, and in every legal way that matters, and it’s now the law of the land. The debate is over. It’s happening. Throwing a temper tantrum isn’t going to get the result they want, and the tactic isn’t going to go well for them in the court of public opinion, which is much larger than the echo chamber they often find themselves in.
However, there’s no short term downside to the tactics for them. When the government shuts down tomorrow, Congress continues to get paid; their staff might field a few more calls from unhappy constitutents, but none of them are up for election for another thirteen months, and that’s a political eternity – few low-info voters (and at the congressional level, that’s most voters) will even remember this next year.
This works for both sides on the issue: The Senate Democrats are, perhaps rightly, not particularly moved to cede to the right-wing demands – there’s no downside for them to keep doing what they’re doing – they’ll still get paid, and are at least paying lip service to the plight of political footballs federal workers. Giving ground here wouldn’t actually be compromise – it’d be giving into the tantrum. The entire process of enacting the ACA was compromise; lots of concessions were made all around to get it passed in the first place; everybody gave some. And, if nobody’s completely satisfied with it, it means it’s probably a good compromise, and a decent first step at getting us on par with the rest of the world regarding the idea of making health care a basic human right. Demanding “compromise” now, especially when suggesting that “give us what we want and we won’t shut the federal government down” is hardly compromise. Also, nationwide polls indicate pretty significantly that when the shit hits the fan tomorrow, the blame won’t be landing at Harry Reid’s feet*.
Still, however I might agree theoretically with Senate Democrats on the issue, it doesn’t change the fact that I’m going to lose at least a couple of days pay over this, along with about a million other federal workers, and the impact of that income loss on the US economy (not to mention the potential impact to my credit rating if it goes on too long) is wide-ranging, and won’t do the country any favors at all. It’s a bad situation all around, and totally avoidable.
to belabor the temper tantrum metaphor above, The Federal workforce are the sanitation staff that gets the pleasure of sweeping up the cereal aisle after the kid tears it up, sweeping up the spilled Cheerios and Froot Loops left in the wake of the rampaging toddler.
And I won’t even be getting the benefit of an unsuitably low minimum wage for it.
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*- In this case, and for the last couple of years, I’ve actually kind of felt bad for John Boehner. While he and I don’t necessarily see eye-to-eye ideologically, I can at least kind of respect the guy as a career politician who understands how the legislative sausage is made, and understands that give-and-take is how anything gets done in Washington. It’s hard not to see his frustration coming through, just a little bit, at having to wrangle all these Tea Party upstarts with their ideological purity, while still having to pay occasional lip service to their views in order to keep his job as Speaker. I feel for the guy, honestly I do.
