Massive confusion in this thread of a government shutdown with a failure to lift the debt ceiling.

They are very different things with very different results.

Government has shut down seventeen times. Debt ceiling has always been raised.

They (our elected leaders) must see themselves the way the banksters see themselves... "Too big to fail" But fail they will. The government will go down like a drogue stone when the rope finally breaks and all their bankster buddies will get sucked into the vortex with them when the tax revenues can no longer pay the interest on the debt. Jacking up the debt ceiling and propping it up with skinny little poles will not solve the problem... ever. But they continue to add more drainage of the treasury with new departments and agencies and more and more of the same old song and dance.

The saddest part is their arrogance in thinking that the debt will just magically disappear as long as they pay the interest on it. I wonder what the interest payment is on 17.5 trillion. If I ran my personal finances they way the government runs the public trust, I'd be broke for the next thousand years.
We lost way too many jobs and the tax revenues went with them.
I can't pay my debts with vapor money and neither can they.

Lucky them. The latest email I got said "Your company will probably let you use your vacation time if you are determined to be in a non-essential position."


As long as this doesn't last more than two and a half weeks, it's all good. Maybe. I really hope the kids don't get sick later this year. :/\\!!

The two have a link though in that Obama or the Republicans have chosen this week to have their stand-off rather than defer it to next week. I suspect, given that it's the Democrats that have rejected the Republican backed bill that it's Obama who has decided to have the showdown this week, since the Republicans wanted to push the funding for 'Obamacare' into next week, which would then be the same time that the debt ceiling vote comes through and they would be able to torpedo the 'Obamacare' package by using the debt ceiling as a threat to try to force Obama to back down. By fighting his battle this week, Obama then has crucial time to take what measures he needs to take to undercut the Republicans so that the debt ceiling raise goes ahead with little to no fuss.
That's mine and a few other peoples take on it anyway.

razark, good luck, it's easy to forget the people in the middle have faces too.

They don't care, they'll still get paid, they'll still get benefits for life and can work for any global corporation. The people that will get hurt are the middle class and poor. Every study I've seen says in the next 20 years about 10% of people/corps will hold 80-90 of all real wealth.

If you ride around, things don't look that bad, people in nice houses, cars, etc, but the majority of them really own nothing, just mass loads of debt. I saw one report that 75% of Americans are one crisis away from utter poverty.

Every serious economist agrees a large crisis is coming, because we continue to kick the can down the road.

Sheesh, I can see why so many people dislike Pelosi...she just doesn't shut up, does she? :dead:
Dems accusing Reps, Reps accusing Dems...it'd be funny if it wasn't so bloody tragic.

http://blog.jokeroo.com/wp-content/u...t-shutdown.jpg

It took Hannibal’s greatest victory to force the Roman government to adopt a Fabian strategy. It would take a government shutdown for the US government to understand that they need to cut spending.
Sometimes the amputation is needed, and only an extreme situation would make it happen.

Easy, I've had to sit in front of her office; The Thatcher of American politics in the predominantly Y chromosome soup of a dysfunctional Congress. Senator Feinstein is worse but at least was a mayor with some practical gravitas under her belt. To a historian (in theory) like myself the unseen worms' eye view is a wondrous thing... And then there's Barbara Lee, Dem. from across the bay... :yep:

I hope that something is taken away from this mess, that both sides learn and understand that people want compromise not confrontation.
I suspect that we will learn the answer to this within a fortnight when the debt ceiling bill comes around, and see if people can resist the temptation to bring a Christmas list to the House/Senate and crash the damn thing.

I think that it is safe to say that the rest of the world is looking on at this with a lot of confusion and some consternation, I must admit that I am, and I think this article speaks for some of us from outside of America:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-24342521

Oh, she's a force of nature, no doubting that, but I think she needs to work on her aim and conservation of fire, rather than the liberal application of firepower in a sweeping arc.

Scipio would argue otherwise:haha:

Ok...I'm on the White House Email List.

I just got this email...


:rotfl2: :rotfl2: :rotfl2: :rotfl2: :rotfl2: :rotfl2: :rotfl2: :rotfl2: :rotfl2: :rotfl2:

As of midnight, I'm not allowed to check my email. Time to grab a beer and some sleep. I've got to get up early so they can send me home when I get to work.

I'm ashamed of what we are supposed to have as a govt in DC! They are as worthless as the day is long! Would love to take them all to the Anacostia bridge around 1 AM, and see how long they last! The Gang Bangers down there would take care of the whole bunch, and we could elect a whole new group!

I found this snippet off your link.
Since your preceding post mentioned the Pelosi I thought it rather fitting.



2) Thought experiment. Let's suppose it's the fall of 2005. Suppose George W. Bush has been reelected, as he was in real life. Let's suppose, also as in reality, the Senate remained in Republican hands. But then suppose that Nancy Pelosi and her Democrats had already won control of the House, rather than doing so two years later. So suppose that the lineup as of 2005 had been:

• Reelected Republican president;
• The president's Republican party retaining control of the Senate; and
• Democrats controlling only one chamber, the House.

Then suppose further that Pelosi's newly empowered House Democrats announced that unless George W. Bush agreed to reverse the sweeping tax cuts that had been the signature legislative achievement of his first term, they would refuse to pass a budget so that the federal government could operate, and would threaten a default on U.S. sovereign debt. Alternatively, that unless Bush immediately withdrew from Iraq, federal government funding would cease and the debt ceiling would be frozen.

In this imagined world, I contend:

• "respectable" opinion would be all over Pelosi and the Democrats for their "shrill," "extreme" demands, especially given their lack of broad electoral mandate;
• hand-wringing editorials would point out that if you want to change policy, there's an established route to do so, which involves passing new bills and getting them signed into law, rather than issuing "otherwise we blow up the government" ultimatums;
• no one would be saying that the "grownups in the room" had to resolve the crisis by giving away, say, half of the president's tax cuts. (Even though, to my taste, that would have been a positive step.)

The circumstances are the mirror image now. A party that within the past year has:

• lost the presidency by 5 million votes;
• lost the Senate by a total of 10 million votes;
• held onto control of the House through favorable districting, while losing the overall House vote by 1.7 million nationwide

... is nonetheless dictating terms to the rest of the government. This would have been called extreme and unreasonable under an imagined Nancy Pelosi House in 2005. It is extreme and unreasonable now.

How it's being reported herehttp://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2013-10-01/us-government-in-shutdown-after-dispute-over-obamacare/4991400

Let it shut down. The parks will be closed. Tax auditing will stop. Civilian fed employees stay home. A few paychecks delayed. Did I miss anything? The govt has shut down before and for lesser reasons as this. Everyone survived.

It goes a little deeper than just "oh, well I guess we can't go to Yellowstone this weekend." One of the reasons S&P gave when they lowered the U.S.'s credit rating was "political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America's governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed."

The shutdown has real lasting economic effects. Damn them all for playing party politics with people's lives. We're nothing more than pawns to them. This is a national embarrassment.

In Canada, a failed national budget immediately causes Parliament to be dissolved and a federal election to be called. That would be a great thing to implement here.

No, it really does not go deeper than that. Markets react certainly. If I'm not mistaken, after the last shut down, the markets increased 10% after the on switch was hit. This only demonstrates the dysfunctional nature of the douche bags running the asylum. This is a indicator that term limits need to be addressed.