By Big Al
The Real Shutdown Outrage
Big Al and Tim will address all of your comments on this editorial tomorrow. So, please get them in!
The real shutdown outrage: Inept Congress picks posturing over governing
BY ANDREW MALCOLM Special to McClatchy
Despite media hysteria during the recently-deceased government shutdown, the reality is the United States has had such political paralysis on average every 30 months for nearly a half-century, lasting on average 7 days.
Shutdowns, even these partial ones few people notice outside the D.C. company town, raise many questions: What exactly gets shut down? When isn’t the government shut down over a weekend? Why are these stalemates never solved for good? Will voters even remember this hiatus come November?
But here’s the real question: How did our federal governing officials on both sides slip so easily from doing what they were actually hired to do, namely govern? And instead spend so much time strategizing, maneuvering and posturing to avoid getting blamed for what they didn’t do when they should have?
This is their job, for Chuck’s sake, their full-time job! Other workers can’t throw up their hands, “Oh, this is too hard.”
These elected bumpkins are each getting paid a princely price of $174,000 (plus free gym, swell insurance, cheap food, etc.). That’s for about 133 workdays a year. That makes for a paycheck three-plus times larger than the average American’s annual pay for 240 workdays. Three times the money for about half the workdays. How does that work?
Yet, somehow these legislators’ procrastinations, pet programs, politics, personal egos and “principles” don’t permit them to work out a budget compromise? Time after time. Both sides must prance and preen for their base.
Part of the problem is the absence (thanks to voters and resignations) of political moderates to design and broker compromises. This leaves the stage to performance art by the most extreme wings of each party to profess positions they claim prohibit dealing.
Some unreliable media, notably talk-radio and rabble-rousing cable shows, are too busy fanning the flames of feuding factions and filling in the time between ads during the next hour’s shows with likely the laziest questions in the history of interviewing: “What do you make of _____?”
No one in the nation’s capital pauses as common-sense Americans watching at home do, yelling at the TV screen, “When will someone hold these clowns accountable?”
Feeling helpless, frustrated and ignored, millions of these folks decided in 2016 to vote for a political outsider who vowed to disrupt Washington’s failed business-as-usual. He wasn’t/isn’t politically-qualified for the job. But neither, it seems, are those who hold the Capitol jobs.
There’s a myth among conservatives that a hostile media tells Americans what to think. Ever try telling three family members what to think, let alone 323 million Americans? Instead, a hostile media excels at telling Americans what to think about.
Think about the implications of a rogue North Korea with the actual ability to annihilate a half dozen U.S. cities in 30 minutes? Think about the …read more
Source:: The Korelin Economics Report
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