In my recent post, What Does a Government Shutdown Mean to Me?, I talked a little bit about how the threat of a shutdown, and even an actual shut down, are becoming routine.
But we forget that the shutdown is a colossal failure of our politicians to do their job and come up with a budget.
I won’t belabor this. Let’s move on.
Today’s News
Today I read on Boston.com:
The article is worth a quick read. It’s a small sample, but it’s interesting to see where people stand on this issue.
It seems like people are fed up with the US Government.
What Does the Debtclock Tell Us?
Yup, the debt. Correct.
But there is a lot more here.
Check out the largest budget items.
- $1.7 billion for medicare
- $1.5 billion for social security
- Nearly $1billion on defense
- And more than $1billion just to pay interest on our debt – sheesh!
That’s a Lot of Cheddar
The Government spends a lot – that’s just the top 4.
And we pay a lot in taxes. The average Joe has a sizable chunk of his paycheck withheld for taxes.
And what are we getting in return?
How Do People Feel?
On one hand, we have the logical side of this. We think about the debts our country has, the things like defense that need funding, and some of the more discretionary items that we should or shouldn’t be spending on, but what really drives people is how they feel.
When my dad passed away, my cousin Stephen sent a quote that he thought captured my dad.
Feelings are powerful.
People don’t seem to be feeling great about the government, or their elected officials.
Burn it All Down
The subheading on the boston.com article was a reader’s comment:
Wrap Up
Interesting.
There certainly doesn’t seem to be a strong catalyst driving politicians to resolve the shutdown.
And despite my strongly worded letter to my congresspeople, it seems like some folks are ambivalent as well.
As I think about this on day 6, I believe that it would be great to have a functioning government, but its been so long since we’ve had one that I’m not optimistic that any spending bill or stop-gap resolution will get us there.
This will be interesting to watch.
What do you think?
I’m sure our politicians would move faster on solving this shut-down, if they were also effected by not getting paid during this period.