The perfectly good funding plan did not include the budget requests the President made. Whether you agree with his politics or not is immaterial. It is not 100% his decision.
The perfectly good funding plan was given to Trump by his allies when they controlled both houses, it was the most favorable plan he could ever possibly get. It even had some wall funding in it. It was 100% his decision to veto it, and 100% his stupid fault for thinking that he could get more concessions from his enemies than he could from his friends, right after those enemies won the House by the largest popular vote margin in history.
President Trump has not vetoed a single bill during his term of office thus far. Go look this up if you do not believe me. Please see spurcell93's sibling comment to yours in this thread.
Paul Ryan and the House passed a budget bill that included wall funding.
https://www.npr.org/2018/12/20/678602214/senate-approves-tem...
The Senate failed to pass a compatible budget bill because Democrats refused to include any funding for a wall.
> Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, of New York, pledged to continue the discussions, but said it was clear there are not enough votes to pass a spending measure that includes funding for a wall along the nation’s southern border.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/12/21/gove...
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/26/trump-says-he-will-wait-to-g...
But that's the only detail of the story told above that's true.
I don't even support Trump, but I can't simply state facts anymore because they don't support the mainstream narrative. The emperor has no clothes.
What's really changed since then is that government has grown unimaginably larger than the forefathers ever imagined possible, let alone intended. And we've also massively increased the power of various branches. For instance, that the president alone can now unilaterally deploy our military throughout the world is just insane and arguably completely unconstitutional. In any case it completely destroys the entire system of checks and balances that our system, and country, was built and prospered upon.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by system such as ours failing, nor that our system was kept afloat by tradition. We started a revolution against a heavily centralized mercantalistic monarchical empire to create a decentralized capitalistic democratic republic.
I'm not saying it's temperance that keeps the US together (except for the first 8 years) but rather tradition. Long standing institutions tend to amass legitimacy over time.
It's not so much that we have a larger country these days as that we have ideologically distinct parties. We had real ideological distinctions between the Democractic Republicans and the Federalists in the old days and in addition to what you mention there were people considering a military coup if the election of 1800 went the wrong way. Thankfully the Federalists imploded and for a long time parties were mostly patronage machines, though you did have the pro-science, pro-religion, pro-treating other races with respect party versus the pro-freedom, pro-small government, pro-treating other religions with respect party as sort of vague ideologies. Except for the bit where they polarized over slavery and we immediately had a civil war. After progressive reforms made patronage less of an issue the two parties were both still ideologically mixed until the South defected to the Republicans and things have been polarizing ever since.
Right now we're in a situation where the most conservative Democrat in Congress is more liberal than the most liberal Republican, a situation that is basically unprecedented. I don't expect the current system to break soon, hundreds of years of tradition is pretty resilient, but if the current level of partisan divide and constitutional hardball continues it will break down eventually.
More importantly, Congress sets the budget through the House and Senate budget committees, which then draft and pass appropriations bills. This is the point in the process where we are stuck.
The President is saying "bring me budget bills that have the things I want and I won't veto them" and Congress is saying no. It's nothing new really, barely anyone knows basic civics and so people are letting their emotions drive their opinions.
Both parties here are playing games that affect peoples' lives and are both worthy of blame.
The US Treasury Department is most analogous to the finance department of most corporations. Which, incidentally, is also shutdown right now because the board and the ceo told them to close. (Just as an additional point of fact, the finance department of many organizations does not set departmental budgets. That's not how it works. One of the reasons they exist is to, "finance", projects. Which could involve the use of any number of financial vehicles.)
You still have provided zero justification for Congress being the "board" even though it is a terrible metaphor.
Relax guy. We can just agree to disagree. No worries.
I just thought that since the Founders' intended congress to act as a check and balance on the president it's pretty much analogous to the boards that act as a check and balance on a given ceo in your average corporate structure. It also seemed reasonable to view Treasury as the finance department.
But seriously, no worries if you see things differently. No biggie man.
You have a nice rest of your day.
There just isn't a good analogy to be found with the US system because corporations don't have the same structure as the US government.
The House passed a budget bill that included wall funding.
https://www.npr.org/2018/12/20/678602214/senate-approves-tem...
It never reached the President's desk because the Senate failed to pass a compatible budget bill when Democrats refused to include any funding for a wall.
> Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, of New York, pledged to continue the discussions, but said it was clear there are not enough votes to pass a spending measure that includes funding for a wall along the nation’s southern border.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/12/21/gove...
The part you left out is that the Democrats blocked a bill with wall funding, even before they took over the House. Trump never "had a perfectly good budget on his desk, written by his allies and passed by Republicans".
Both parties put this issue ahead of the continued operation of the government and both are responsible for the shutdown.
Neither party has "had control" in the senate for years. It takes 60 votes in the senate to pass a budget, and neither party has had that.
The situation is far more complex than you're stating it.
(1) Congress is more like a board of directors than a finance department.
(2) Internal issues would never be allowed to block payroll except in the most extreme cases in a normal business because there is an external actor, the government, which will impose severe consequences for that. A business operating in an environment without that external force would not be unlikely to delay payroll.
It almost certainly would have shut down half the state governments due to poor performance.
And it would have declared bankruptcy and not paid any of its workers or maintained any of its infrastructure.
There’s a reason government exists. The greatest strength of private industry is any one institution is allowed to fail, without destroying the system. The government is needed where that does not hold true. That’s why the Too Big to Fail companies are such a threat to capitalism and private industry. They break the fundamental Darwinian impulses that makes private industry such a great creator of wealth and ideas.
I'm not sure what the current situation says about this concept, if anything. Maybe the government is its own beast and can't be run like a business at all -- not saying that Trump was the right guy for the job, but wondering if any CEO type would be?
Yes, you can vote, but voting only changes so much. If you're changing CEOs and radically changing direction ever 4 or 8 years, it's not likely any large scale reform will ever go long enough to have any effects.
And as we've also heard a lot recently, the entrenched bureaucracy isn't easily or quickly reformed.
The purpose of a business it create wealth. The purpose of government is to take wealth. Government does some useful functions with the wealth it takes, but extremely inefficiently. Private enterprises which are profit motivated consistently outperform government on budget, quality and time.
The purpose of government is to create social wealth.
The US government is $21tn in debt. 21 trillion. With a constant budget deficit.
No private entity would be ever allowed to go that far.
If the Government is still taking money out of my paycheck, it simply isn’t shut down enough.
It's because of a high-status meme that's gone around that "Governments Aren't Households" followed by a pedantic lecture about a few dimensions where they have interesting, but not fundamental differences. And it's true: reliable, trusted governments e.g. suffer lower costs from going into debt, and are able to recapture some of the expenses. Plus, they can default in a way that's technically legal (inflate away the debt).
But none of that changes the more important, relevant similarities:
- There are limits to how quickly you can accumulate real resources to pay off debts.
- There are severe consequences to being unable to pay debts.
- There are debt levels that are dangerous to have and which prevent you from raising funds for real emergencies.
All of these are true and relevant for both governments and households.
Yes, you can debate how close you are to the breaking point, but you can't simply avoid the comparison entirely just because Governments Aren't Households.
Oh yes, along with my purchasing power. Amazing.
Is there a reason government is inefficient?
First, many of the problems the government tries to solve are not problems with easy solutions. There are no businesses (that I know of, anyway) out there with the goal of providing free education to every child in a community. Or feeding and housing disabled people. And so on. THe failure of the government to perform better in these areas is sometimes referred to as "inefficiency", but what are we comparing government's performance against? Is there a baseline for how well any entity can do fighting a war on poverty?
Second, often, the government has goals fundamentally different from making money, eg in fighting and winning wars. We complain about the F35 being a bondoggle. But that's only true if you think the government's goal is to acquire a better fighter aircraft than China or Russia for as little money as possible. But that isn't exactly the government's goal. The government wants to acquire a fighter aircraft that makes winning such wars most likely -- in other words, it is maximizing the likelihood of winning wars. The cost of that maximization is clearly secondary. To a business, any expense past what you need to beat the competition looks like waste. To the government, any step you didn't take to maximize your chance of success looks like risk.
Third, the government holds itself to legal ethics standards that, inevitably, slow it down. Take government contracting. When the government lets a contract, it can't go to the obviously best qualified business and write a check. It has to advertise. How long it has to advertise for depends on the size of the contract, but it's rarely less than 90 days. It has to fairly evaluate all proposals. It gives extra points to small or minority owned businesses. It then writes a contract that is in keeping with the Federal Acquisitions Regulations (the FAR), which is a body of US Law that literally takes up an entire row on the bookshelf. Most of that law was written to protect businesses from potentially unethical government behavior, given that the government is more powerful than any business it is likely to contract with.
For instance, the interaction between the Contracting Officer's Representative (the COR - the primary liason between the government and the contractor) is strictly limited to reduce the ability of the government to ask for special favors. Violations of the contract or the law surrounding it as a result of behavior of the COR can result in the COR being personally liable, which is to say: if you, as a COR, result in either the government or the business losing money, they can come after your house and your retirement, all the ay up to the value of the losses. If the government loses a million dollars, the COR can be held liable for that amount. As a consequence, there's little incentive to streamline the way the government works with contractors, and every incentive in the world to make sure every t is crossed and every i dotted.
This list can go on and on. The ultimate reason the government is less efficient than a business is that it isn't one. It isn't solving the same problems, it isn't operating by the same rules, and it doesn't have the same incentives.
I mean, ideally they'd strive to reduce those inefficiencies, but why does it need to be a certain level of efficient to be considered "good"?
When I finally got around to getting my CS degree, I took my first job offer, in a private industry. But the first chance I got, I took a contractor job for the FAA, to chase that same stability.
Now, my dad's working for no pay, and I'm watching contractors around me getting laid off or having their hours reduced to 12 or 16 per week to stretch the leftover contract funds through the end of February. I got only a small cut myself, to 36, but the ax could come down any day. So much for stability. I'm not looking to jump ship and find a private sector dev job, but my 5 years of experience is with technologies and tools that the private industry has largely left behind, or in niches that also require domain specific skills I don't have. I feel like I'm almost having to start from scratch if I want to get my income out from under the capricious nature of modern politics. My dad on the other hand has pretty much resigned himself to accepting things as they are, since he doesn't think there's much of a market for 55yo project managers who only know about air traffic systems.
All that said, I expect a lot of contract workers in particular are going to start avoiding government contracts in the future, and considering they already don't seem to be getting much of the best and brightest, I wonder how they are going to manage to maintain any momentum in developing new technologies for air traffic safety.
You think the employees are saying - "working is my right, gosh darn it, pay or no pay?"
They work not because they feel entitled to the job but because (a) not coming in to work has been criminalized and they could go to jail, and (b) people would die if they stopped working. This isn't hyperbole - there are hundreds of organ transplant operations happening every day. The most hardy organs die in about 2 days, the most fickle need to be implanted within 6 hours of extraction. If flights stop, that's it - the patient dies. That's a single example off the top of my head.
Criminalization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Service_Labor-Manageme...
As a final note - even if all of these folks quit their jobs today, it's not like there is an extra 2 million available positions out there, ready to absorb the new labor force.
The private sector one paid more, I remember, but my mother brought up to my dad something interesting: You're less likely to get laid off, and you'll always have more job security, with the stable paycheck provided by a government job.
It's weird to think about it, but at this point in time, the United States Government may be one of the worst major employers in the country. Two missed pay periods, unstable leadership, no yearly budget, massive deficits, constantly changing its mind.