The Republicans in the House of Representatives just passed a bill that would pay federal employees for not working.
Admittedly, federal employees aren't working because Republicans have shut down the government in a snit, supposedly over Obamacare. So it's not government employees' fault they aren't working, and they shouldn't have to suffer for Republican grandstanding.
For people who constantly bitch about government waste, the Republicans sure do waste a lot of the government's time and money. If you're going to pay these workers for all the time they're not working, you might as well have them work. The bill for back pay is the best argument to end the shutdown right now.
But Republicans won't, and that's complete insanity. The cost of this interruption in government services won't just be the time that people aren't working. There were millions of dollars of expenses in preparing for the shutdown, and there there will be millions associated with restarting. People will be hurt: businessss near national parks that depend on tourism will lose money that will never be recovered, and defense and other government contractors that are not working because of the shutdown will also feel the pinch. Billions of dollars will be wasted.
This shutdown isn't about wasteful government spending or the deficit. It isn't about the budget. It isn't even about Obamacare. It's about a small minority of Tea Party Republicans who want to throw their weight around because they can. Republican congressmen Peter King got it dead right when he called Ted Cruz, the Republican senator from Texas who egged House Tea Party members to shut down the government, a "fraud" and accused him of "governmental terrorism."
The insanity of the Tea Party is best exemplified by Marlin Stutzman of Indiana:
“We’re not going to be disrespected,” conservative Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind., added. “We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”They don't even know what they want. Geeze, at least Muslim terrorists know what they want.
3 comments:
I guess I can't call them the American Taliban anymore if they don't even know what they want. Just like your average adolescent, if they don't get their way, they throw a fit and tear apart their room.
Hey M - you remember how much you liked David Stockman for the way he put down his fellow Repubs?
I'm thinking the man crush will be over now.
“It is the worst law ever passed in the last four decades by the federal government,” Stockman argues in the video above. “It is a massive entitlement to end all entitlements. It is going to cause a fiscal hemorrhage that is not even yet anticipated. It will tie up one-sixth of GDP in the most monstrous, massive, bureaucratic snarl that you can’t imagine. So therefore this needs to be stopped before it becomes operational.”
"Froth, froth, froth!!!", frothed Nikto. Yawn.
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