Tuesday, October 1, 2013

US Government Shutdown: don't blame the Republicans – blame whoever spent all the money!

The Telegraph ^ | 10/1/2013 | Tim Stanley

Okay, so let's get the mainstream media analysis of the looming shutdown out of the way first. The House Republicans are led by a moderate weakling (Boehner) who is being held hostage by a gaggle of Tea Party crazies determined to destroy a humanitarian law known as Obamacare that is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to rescue us from disease, poverty, global warming and Robin Thicke. Obama (Father of the Nation and possibly Jesus, but he's too humble to admit it) and the lions of the Senate are standing their ground. And so the Federal Government faces catastrophe because a GOP alliance of cowards and loons won't see reason and bend to the public will as represented by the glorious Democrats. Prepare yourself for society to collapse as museum workers don't turn up for work in the morning…
The reality is that this crisis has been caused by two things: a) overspending and b) the Constitution of the United States. On the overspend, the US has reached this point of crisis because it has failed to curtail spending effectively – and it has failed to do that because Democrats have consistently refused to make genuinely tough choices (the dreaded sequester was, itself, a plan to delay making a plan that has now started catching up with the President who called for a sequester in the first place). I could recite all those big debt numbers that run into hundreds of zeroes but for a simpler sense of the madness consider the spending spree that has been going on in just the past few days. In a dash to "use it or lose it", The Washington Post reports that,
This past week, the Department of Veterans Affairs bought $562,000 worth of artwork.


(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.telegraph.co.uk ...

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