Give and Take

  In the Beginning….

  Responding to our statement that voters should become informed, not just promise to vote everybody out of office, a reader wrote: "This stuff (shutdown and refusal to raise the debt ceiling) started LONG before (the 2012) election.”

  COMMENT: Of course it did. But that election gave us Ted Cruz to replace the laughable “second-coming-end-of-the-world” Michelle Bachmann as leader of the Koch-and-Tea Party. And it gave Shutdown-Ted more followers.  Unless voters study the candidates and issues, the next election could give us a Republican-controlled Senate, with Shutdown-Ted Cruz as Majority Leader. In that case, say goodbye to Social Security and Medicare.

  Big, Bad Government

  The reader further claimed: "(It) began when President Obama and the Democratic leadership of the 110^th and 111^th Congresses enacted the largest peacetime expansion of the Federal government in U. S. history, and chose to do so during the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression.”

 COMMENT: Without the expansion of unemployment compensation and food stamps, without the successful bailout of General Motors, without the TARP funds, we’d have failed banks, bread lines, soup kitchens, and unemployment approaching Great Depression levels. When the economy truly tanks, government has to spend to get it back on track.

  To Budge or not to Budge(it)

  And he wrote further: “Obama’s  2009 budget, $1.4 trillion deficit and all, was pushed through Congress as an emergency measure that was absolutely necessary for the survival of the nation and its economy. But then he dropped the ball and allowed all of fiscal 2010 to go by without a Federal budget."

  COMMENT: The President presented his budget request. But by law budget bills must originate in the House and then be passed (or modified) by the Senate, then either sent to a conference committee for negotiation or to the President for approval.

   It takes two to tango, and two parties to pass a budget. The Democratic Senate sent its modified budget bill to the House last April. The House refused to appoint a conference committee to negotiate, all the while shouting loudly and falsely that the Democrats would not negotiate.

  And they are still shouting, while shutting down much of the government, denying salaries, veterans benefits, military death payments, food stamps, and many other survival needs to both public employees and ordinary citizens whom they scorn as freeloaders or worse—and whom they DO NOT want to have health insurance.

  

  The present impasse and partial government shutdown is caused by House Republicans. They will not agree to let spending continue at last year’s level (the usual practice) while working on a full-year budget—all because they hope to force Obama to do away with the Affordable Care Act against the will of the majority who elected him for a second term.