Are Shuttered Gov't Sites Actually Saving Money? 668
Lots of U.S. government agencies' websites are partly or fully shut down, many of them with messages like this one, from the front page of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory: "Effective 7 p.m. EDT, Friday, 4 October 2013, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) temporarily suspended all US operations because of the US Federal government shutdown. All NRAO facilities and buildings are closed; NRAO personnel, other than a skeleton crew, are on furlough and cannot respond to emails or phone calls." Brian Doherty argues at Reason that many of these shutterings don't actually seem to make any financial sense, and that the sites are down more as a public statement than out of fiscal prudence. If you're involved with running an organizational web site (government-funded or not), do you agree?
I don't know if Obama planned it this way... (Score:4, Interesting)
With all the small gov't Tea Party blather out there it's nice for Americans to be reminded that gov't is a tool, and one they depend on. I for one don't want to see EPA regulation, anti-slavery and usury laws, OSHA Safety and FDA regulations go away.
It's all for show: example of why (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:"Financial Sense" (Score:3, Interesting)
Many of the shuttered parks *do not* even get federal funds, so you are wrong, and in the cases where they do, there is no cost to keep them open beyond the park rangers that they're *already spending money on*.
the park has costs... those costs are for people visiting. hence people cannot visit if there isn't budget for it(as if the money put into the park already was getting "spent" when people visit and trample the paths etc).
makes perfect sense, no? of course not, but it makes most sense in the whole shutdown debacle.
people can't even volunteer to keep the museums open because it's against the law to accept that volunteer work(to keep people employed).
what you really need is an overhaul of the duo-party system. a good place would be to abolish the houses and set up a parliament and ministers + president system. in almost any other representative democracy(or in actual representative democracies) the government(pm+other ministers) would have been disbanded and a new government being formed, one that wouldn't fail confidence vote from the parliament - because what you essentially now have is roughly 1/4th or so of your representatives blocking entire government from action because they don't like one law, in a fashion that amounts to a vote of non-confidence on the prime minister. no even multi party country could function in a fashion that could create new legislation if such a fraction of elected representatives could block already agreed law getting funding(heck in most other countries you could sue the country for not upholding the law as it is written).
heck in several other countries the president technically leaves any party he happens to be in out of courtesy - because the president represents everyone. in the usa he is some sort of semi-prime minister overseeing two fucked up parliaments of which either one can sabotage anything they know of SO THE ONLY FUCKING THING YOU SPEND MONEY ON IS THE BLACK OPS BECAUSE THEY'RE THE ONLY FUCKING THING YOU CAN AGREE TO SPEND MONEY ON YOU MORONS. because so few know where the money goes and who's pockets it lines...
how about stopping the nsa+half of your military and running the health care on that... instead of bleeding money out of the country by buying grenades, rockets, guns, engines, electronics, ammo, armor, guidance systems, hd's, military medical equipment, airplane parts and other various things you're spending money even while the shutdown is in effect you could just have ran the obamacare on that. OR if your parliament equivalents could agree on it you could repeal the law - you know that's how it's supposed to happen in any law abiding country but it seems americans stopped caring about abiding to the laws a long time ago and would rather turn into a country of caged pussies.
if you're american yes it is you who is the problem. not a mystical "them" at the capitol hill. it is you - you're giving approval for the nonsense - your devaluing by the day dollars in the bank are what finances the nonsense.
the two house system might, just might, work if you had 10+ parties. but you don't. what's crazy about obama is that he isn't just issuing a presidental order to continue with the agreed budget as if the lower house didn't exist. he could do that - nobody would have even blinked. and if you were lucky enough then just maybe the other house would have been disbanded for good.
Re:I don't know if Obama planned it this way... (Score:4, Interesting)
It did not happen before we had a strong government, why would it happen if we reduced some of that strong government?
3 words: the Civil War.
1861-1865 is a perfect example of how a weak central government in a country the size of the US causes an extreme polarity: in politics, in economics, the infrastructure, the very way of life between different areas of the country; as well as the potentially disastrous results.
POLITICAL STUNT ONLY (Score:2, Interesting)
Posting anon because I've been directed ... This is only a political stunt. All public facing web sites are contracted out. The contracts don't fall on the end of hte FY because that's a bad time to try to get things on contract. This will cost just as much as leaving the sites up because the contractors will file a REA in response to the stop work orders they've been given. Every one of the sites that have been shut down is payed for with FY13 money right now. This is nothing other than a crass political move.
Re:"Financial Sense" (Score:4, Interesting)
The President does not 'oversee' Congress -- Congress, the Executive, and the Judicial are separate, independent branches of our government. This ensures, among other things, that even if Congress is deadlocked (as it is now), we can't have a situation where there is no government -- like happened in certain European countries recently where they couldn't form a government for months.
The difference is that in the Belgian case services stayed open and government employees were paid even though they had no government.
America, unable to achieve the administrative competence of Belgium.
Oh, yeah, icing on the cake:
Belgium has one of the best healthcare systems in Europe.
Medical care is publicly funded through the compulsory state insurance system which covers the majority of the population, along with a number of private schemes.
http://www.expatfocus.com/expatriate-belgium-healthcare-medical [expatfocus.com]
This is the end... (Score:5, Interesting)
What people haven't noticed is the total votes and how Boehner's behavior wouldn't make sense in a functioning political party.
Here are, roughly, the totals:
A) About 30-40 Republicans want a shutdown for some undefined reason.
B) About 150 Republicans do not want a shutdown, but will take whatever position Boehner takes, and will not be rebels.
C ) About 20 Republicans assert they will be rebels to stop the shutdown.
Now, look carefully at that. Remember the 'Hastert Rule', which was a way to enforce party discipline? Where bills only got to the floor the majority of Republicans liked them? Notice anything wrong here?
The vast majority, groups B and C, of Republicans want to fund the government. They would have voted for a CR at any point if Boehner had put it forward. (In fact, we'd probably had a little fight over the House wanting to continue the sequester and thus some Democrats would vote against it, but that's in an alternate universe where this isn't going on.) I mean, now there might be problems getting it to pass, now that some B-group Republicans have stuck their necks out trying to follow the party-line, but all Boehner had to do was put it up for a vote three weeks ago, tada, it passes, and we continue onward.
And it's not like Boehner was in group A. He's a perfectly reasonable person. There was no reason, in a functioning political party, for him not to put that bill forward. So why didn't it happen?
Because the Republican party is completely and utterly broken.
I don't mean broken in the sense of a 'pushing policies no one likes', although that is possibly true. It is broken because, thanks to gerrymandering, a large portion of this country has competing _Republican_ races, and that's it.
And that gerrymandering seemed liked a clever plan back when it was set up, but this is what we get. A party in a civil war, and Boehner picked the side with the biggest guns. (Although the least amount of people.)
Now, admittedly, there's not actually a way out of this. Republicans have to gerrymander like that. Without that, they wouldn't even control the House! So they're not going to stop that.
Basically, folks, this is how a political party fails. How it unravels.
In fact, there have been signs of that for a while. The Hastert Rule is something only a weak party would need to start with. The Republicans going full-bore anti-ACA instead of saying 'Hey, you finally agreed to _our_ health care plan.' All the incredibly weird bullshit getting spewed by the right.
Re:This is the end... (Score:5, Interesting)
And as for how this happened?
Well, it was a series of mistake the Republicans made over the decades. Mistakes that made it harder and harder for the Republicans to shift their positions, and harder and harder to attract new people.
And demographics continued to happen. And then they elected George W. Bush, which sped things up by about half a decade. And it because clear, about 2000 or so, they'd either have to shift their positions or cheat.
They couldn't shift their positions. (In fact, the one policy failure of the Bush administration was the attempt to shift positions on immigration.) Their position had calcified. They had let too many people in their party based on attacking those societal shifts, and couldn't change those things now.
So...they 'cheated'. (Note I'm not saying there was any lawbreaking. I mean cheating in the sense of not playing by commonly accepted rules.)
1) They rigged things so that they'd stay in power with less and less people, via gerrymandering. (They've sorta been doing this for a while, but 2000 is where it took off.)
2) They started inventing completely amazing attacks on Democrats. The much-vaulted 'civility' completely disappeared at the hands of the Republicans. (This arguable started under Clinton.)
But this backfired horribly. Either of those alone might have been okay, but when you put them together, when you create Republican-safe districts and Republicans and Fox News yammers on and on about how evil anything to do with the Democrats are...
And thus the Tea Party was born. In 2009, just in time to get elected to local government for the census, for more redistricting, making each district even more extreme.
The problem is...these victories just made the Republican's problems worse. Now they were even more extreme and had more of a problem. So, to keep power, we see stuff like reducing access to the ballot box, and nonsense like that.
And now you get a government shutdown to try to appease the extremists. Which will, of course, just makes things even worse electorally. To remain viable, the party must moderate itself, and it cannot moderate itself thanks to the system it set up to stay in power.
People think political parties die because they're no longer 'relevant'. But that's not really it. A political party die because instead of choosing to stay relevant, it tries (And succeeds for a short time) to rig the game to stay in power while continuing to be irrelevant, so it keep attracting less and less relevant people. Until the entire thing implodes.
The fact is...the Republican party is dead. It's thrashing around and can do massive harm as it goes down, but it really has no exit from where it is. I'm not entirely sure whether what's going on right now are the final death throes, but at this point, it's going to see its power reduced at basically every election. (Remember, it didn't even win a majority of votes cast for the House.)