It's trending: #governmentshutdown
It's reality: #government #shutdown
Is this still the home of the brave and land of the free? Why has the Government shutdown? What the HELL is REALLY GOING ON?
Let's cut through the bull shit and ask two basic questions:
QUESTION #1:
What's the take on our current situation?
The U.S. government began its first step in #federal #government #shutdown over 17 years. In common terminology this can be defined as 800,000 federal employees jobs might come to an end.
Cause:
#Conservatives & #Obamacare
OR
#Obamacare & #Conservatives
Really?
Yes!
The back story:
The shutdown was spearheaded by tea party conservatives who backed a House bill tying continued government funding to a one-year delay of the Affordable Care Act and the repeal of a tax to pay for it.
*A side question we must stop and ask - despite our opinion, preconceived ideas, or emotional state is, Why?
A) Why are tea party conservatives backing a house bill tying continued government funding to a one-year delay of the Affordable Care Act ( #Obamacare ) and the repeal of a tax to pay for it?
*This has to be bigger than myself, family, my son / daughter being without insurance! It's has to be bigger then than my 27 year old friend with cancer getting turned down multiple times by insurance companies because of a preexisting condition.
I don't think we can afford not be that selfish and small minded. I know that sounds harsh, but often emotions blind us from discovering the answer.
B) Why, the Affordable Care Act? ( #Obamacare ) What's not being said?
.... .... .... I don't know.... ....
The Obama administration accelerated its push attempting to persuade individual Americans to sign up for the most extensive overhaul of the U.S. healthcare system in 50 years, even as the program's foes in Congress fought to delay its launch with the threat of a federal government shutdown.
The new online health insurance marketplaces at the heart of President Barack Obama's Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, are set to open on Tuesday. The marketplaces, or exchanges, will offer subsidized health insurance to low-to-moderate income families in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
On the eve of the launch, Vice President Joe Biden and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius urged millions of uninsured Americans to ignore the battle in Congress and instead focus on the access their families need to medical services.
"Come Tuesday, Americans will be able to see for themselves that the Affordable Care Act isn't actually about Washington politics," Biden wrote in an opinion piece printed in local newspapers including the Des Moines Register in Iowa and the Birmingham News in Alabama. "It's about regular people shopping for insurance they can finally afford, and purchasing security and peace of mind along with it." By E.J. Dionne (Real Clear Politics)
E.J. that pulls on my emotional strings but does not answer the, Why?
What's next?
Roxana Tiron with the #Bloomburgpost said, "Congressional leaders have scheduled no further negotiations on spending legislation, raising concerns among some lawmakers that the shutdown could bleed into the more consequential fight over how to raise the U.S. debt limit to avoid a first-ever default after Oct. 17."
What the HELL!!!???!!!
The #american #fatcat eats it's food and sleeps warmly at night; while, many hard working, ass-kicking american workers are sent home hourly - over the #affordablecareact or #obamacare?
What's the presidents response,
Obama said yesterday he wouldn’t negotiate under the threat of a government shutdown or a default on the U.S. debt. “You don’t get to extract a ransom for doing your job, for doing what you’re supposed to be doing anyway or just because there’s a law there you don’t like,” Obama said at the White House yesterday.
Obama immediately labeled it a "Republican shutdown." He said by closing much of government an out-of-control faction of House Republicans was putting the nation's fragile recovery at risk of an "economic shutdown."
"They've shut down the government over an ideological crusade to deny affordable health care to millions of Americans," Obama said in a Rose Garden speech, surrounded by people he said were dependent on the new health law.
"None of us want to be in a shutdown," Cantor, R-Va., told reporters. "And we're here to say to the Senate Democrats, `come and talk to us."
There has to be better ways to run the government than to get to a standstill like this.... ....
The cost to the American people....
Truth be told, we can't measure the total cost....
We can guess and project.
*if you play this out far enough it may begin to look like a Hollywood doomsday movie.
A partial federal government shutdown would cost the U.S. at least $300 million a day in lost economic output at the start, according to IHS Inc. (IHS) That’s a fraction of the country’s $15.7 trillion economy, and the effects probably will grow over time as consumers and businesses defer purchases and expansion plans. During the partial government shutdown, many essential government operations will cease.
Which operations (jobs) will stop?
Internal Revenue Service call centers will close and more than 90 percent of Environmental Protection Agency workers will stay home. National parks and museums will be shuttered.
Other services will continue uninterrupted. Social Security and Medicare benefits will be paid. U.S. troops will remain at their posts around the world and will be paid under a bill Obama signed yesterday. Air-traffic controllers and airport security screeners will keep working.
The shutdown comes on the first day of enrollment in the exchanges mandated under the health-care law at the heart of the fight. Enrollment will continue today even as the government shuts down, because it’s paid for out of mandatory funding not affected by the lapse, U.S. officials said.
Glimpse of a global prospective:
Abroad, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, whose Conservative Party is a traditional Republican ally, said the U.S. political crisis poses a threat to global growth.
“It is a risk to the world economy if the U.S. can’t properly sort out its spending plans,” Cameron told the BBC in Manchester today. In Korea, the finance ministry said it could make investors more risk averse and fuel capital outflows from emerging markets.
QUESTION #2:
What's our plan of response;
despite, the unknown outcome?
I'm not going to sit on my butt while, the future is decided by someone that I don't know or trust with my life. I hope some has guts to state the truth unbiassed & not swayed by money.... ....
For now my response is to hold fast to my constitutional rights and do the best I can to provide a future and hope for my family and the community in which i live.
President Obama made a true apples to oranges comparison yesterday when he tried to equate the failures of the Obamacare rollout to the glitches Apple experiences when it rolls out a new iOS.
OBAMA: "Consider that just a couple of weeks ago, Apple rolled out a new mobile operating system. And within days, they found a glitch, so they fixed it. I don’t remember anybody suggesting Apple should stop selling iPhones or iPads — or threatening to shut down the company if they didn’t. That’s not how we do things in America. We don’t actively root for failure. We get to work, we make things happen, we make them better, we keep going."
Apple kind of has a track record. I don’t know, a $400 billion company that sort of works. And the U.S. government has a record of the Public Housing, DMV and Postal Service... income makers? I think not!
Although the American people have witnessed the failure of government over and over again, most people remain hopelessly optimistic that things will somehow improve. We have witnessed failure, but very few people are actively rooting for it.
Glenn Beck said this about President Obama, “He’s not just comparing Apple to the rollout of Obamacare. He is also comparing himself to Steve Jobs. He’s Steve Jobs.”
Unlike President Obama, Jobs was known to put projects on hold that were not up to his standards. For example, the Mac program of the early 1980s was not rolled out late and over budget because Jobs refused to release something that was flawed.
Does anybody really believe that if [Obama] could come up with a system that could beat the American healthcare system we had, is anyone going to fault him? If the President could actually come up with a system that beat the healthcare system, but he would have to be such a genius.
Given the number of failed socialized medicine experiments we have seen throughout history, President Obama and his team would have to be pretty brilliant to figure out a way to avoid the typical pitfalls of such a program.
Let’s put this into perspective and ask an honest question or two,
If, Obama [and his team] are smarter than every communist country, every socialist country, and smarter than anyone who has ever run anything in Canada, anything in the Netherlands, anything in England, Cuba, China, Russia, anybody North Korea, South Korea.... Why, can't it be explained it to the American people? Why, is it all wrapped around emotional heart stringed stories?
They can’t even make the first step of sign up smooth. Come on!
Perhaps the largest problem with the President’s comparison, however, is his failure to remember that Apple is a private company with shareholders and customers who can take their business elsewhere, if/when they are unhappy with a product. Obamacare, on the other hand, is a law of the federal government that Americans are forced to abide by.
Steve Jobs, if he was so clueless that he took an iPad or iPod and said, ‘release it’ and the architect of it and came out and said, This thing is a train wreck. This thing is going to bankrupt the company… As a shareholder, I would root against Steve Jobs. In fact… I would give it just a few days and I would sell my stock.
But in this scenario, we can’t sell our stock. We’re trapped. We can’t opt out. We’re illegal, if we don’t have it at birth now. So, we can’t sell our shares.
Questions I'm asking myself:
- Since this problem had to start years ago, why aren't there multiple solutions and / or options?
- What are my personal options as the government shutdown continues and Obamacare rolls out?
Is this still the home of the brave and land of the free?
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Share your thoughts with me.
Check out my blog’s:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
