Buckle your seatbelts, it’s gonna be a bumpy two weeks or so.
The Senate Democrats have voted (right on schedule) with the Republican majority to end the Government shutdown.
Honestly, I think it was nothing more than a political stunt on the part of the Democrats in Washington. They wanted to look like they were strong and doing something prior to the off cycle elections. They needed something to energize their base and were willing to use the American people as pawns.
Some of them in recent weeks admitted that they were using the American People as “leverage“.
How that isn’t offensive to people is beyond me. Really? Is that all the D.C. Democrats think of the American people and specifically their base? We’re all supposed to be nothing but tools for them to get their way, even if “their way” is detrimental to the Country at large and increases the national debt & thereby taxes on the working class?
Oh sure they’ll say they want to tax the rich more, “To make them pay their fair share” But ultimately the working class folks pay the tab. Because taxes keep going up for them too.
NYC will be interesting. With their new Mayor, the rich are already making their exit plans. To counter this, NY politicians are suggesting that they’ll still find a way to tax people that leave the city and state as if they still live there. What is that, if not indentured servitude?
It should be noted that the United States does the same thing to people living outside the country & charges people who choose to give up their US Citizenship a shit ton of taxes for the privilege to boot. So there is a precedent. California floated a similar indentured status law and was thwarted by the courts.
What about those folks in the country that don’t work? What about those who live on generational welfare? Their benefits are more than the average retiree receives and oh yeah, depending on the retiree’s income, they’re still subject to taxes while those receiving benefits typically are not.
The disparity is striking. Retirees still have to pay for supplemental health care. While the people on public assistance get virtually everything for free.
The shutdown should be a wake up call to everyone that there is a major problem that needs to be fixed. When you have people on benefits saying that their children are going hungry while they’re filming their TicToc on a brand new $1500 mobile phone with $100+ Nail & $200 hair extensions. Something is very wrong.
The first part of the lesson should be, if you’re that dependent on the government for your basic daily needs then you’re a slave to the government. The other part is the government has broken its promise to the elderly and retirees regarding all the money they’ve taken and mismanaged from working people’s paychecks for decades.
The D.C. Democrats were demanding extended funding for the ACA. Why? Wasn’t that system supposed to be self sustaining? That’s what we were told. We were also told that the ACA would control healthcare costs and make healthcare affordable for everyone.
It didn’t!
In fact there are a lot of people that the ACA outright hurt because it drove doctors into early retirement faster (many good doctors retired because they refused to have their patient interactions monitored by government and insurance companies or have the cost of their private practice double or triple because they had to add more staff to handle the paperwork).
Then ACA made the actual healthcare insurance plans too expensive to afford unless you were working for a corporation. Then the money that folks, as employees, kicked in pretax to cover increasing healthcare prices and lower quality of service drove salaries up resulting in higher taxes but lower effective wages.
The end result was more people on more government subsidized plans that were also generally unaffordable and resulted in them having the subsidies thought of as taxable income creating an end of year tax burden that drove them further toward poverty instead of helping them get back on the path toward economic stability.
Then to pour vinegar into the wounds. The D.C. Democrats flooded the country with “Asylum seekers” A.K.A. illegal immigrants and gave them all food, housing, and medical care, at levels higher than Americans in poverty, our own retirees, and children.
All on the taxpayer dime, during a declared pandemic, with no vaccination requirements, and looked the other way when these people were protesting in the streets while our own citizens were enduring unreasonable lockdowns.
This is the Democrat party as I see it. It’s insane!
The government shutdown and all the Democrat antics prior, gave New York City an avowed communist/muslim Mayor. Took away the legally voted for, redistricting commission in California, placing drawing voting districts in the hands of a Governor. And gave the people of Virginia a person who may be a wolf in sheep’s clothing for Governor if you look at her voting record.
They used the shutdown as a mechanism to (unsurprisingly) paint the Republicans as the bad guys. The D.C. Democrats callously used the suffering (they created) of the American people to forward their agenda.
The D.C. Republicans were willing to pass a Continuing Resolution that simply held government expenditures at current levels.
The spineless Republicans know that government spending is too high. The moment the Democrats shut the government down, Republican response should have been to pass a bill in the house that enacted needed budget restraints to actually reduce spending to pre-pandemic levels instead of kicking the budget can down the road.
As it is, the idiotic Republicans have set themselves and the country, up to be held hostage next year when the D.C. Democrats decide to throw another tantrum in the run up to the 2026 election.
We know they will, all this has done is made sure that in the run up to the midterms, the Democrats will pitch another temper tantrum and use the American People as “leverage” to hopefully regain a majority in the House and Senate. It will be a replay of the midterms in 2018 and their aim is to cripple the Trump administration for its remaining two years. It will be the old “Wash, Rinse, Repeat”.
Yes enacting a real budget instead of a CR would have extended the government shutdown. But it would have forced the government to really look at the EBT/Snap/Welfare benefits and make adjustments. While they were at it, they could have looked at military wages and adjusted those, to make sure that our soldiers families weren’t living in poverty while their husband or wife was defending the nation. Maybe, they could have actually created a balanced budget and enacted necessary cuts that we so desperately need.
I’m glad it didn’t come to nuking the filibuster. That would have ensured that the Democrats, if they ever come to power again, would irrevocably alter the country toward a more communist 3rd world shit hole.
All my personal opinion aside. Now we’re looking at weeks of grandstanding and spin by D.C. Democrats to make them look like heroes who “Forced” the “Nasty” Republicans into feeding hungry people.
They and their apparatchiks in the media will crow about their “wins” in off cycle elections and owning the Republicans. They’ll enter the 24 hour news cycle keep repeating their insane spin, and everyone will forget that they were the ones that shutdown the government. They were the ones who used their constituents suffering as tools, not to get their way, but to win a few elections.
Then in November of 2026. Everyone will be surprised that they shut the government down again. People will be angry at the “evil”, “Nazi”, Republicans and vote Democrat. Most people will claim they didn’t see it coming.
Folks, this whole thing was nothing more than a proof of concept experiment. It was carried out at the taxpayer’s expense. The next government shutdown will be worse.
You can’t capitulate to spoiled children.
Unfortunately, The Republicans just did, and if you didn’t see that the Democrats were going to suddenly change course after this election, you’ve not been paying attention.