The shut down is looming.

So on Monday if there is no spending bill passed by the Congress the government will shutdown. What does the shut down mean? It means that millions of government workers will go without pay, public parks and buildings will be closed, and the marketS will fall down. Of course those government workers who will be struggling to pay their bills will not include the members of Congress who are really at the origin of this mess.

Debt ceiling was once a routine procedure that was passed by both houses of Government without fuss. However since the 2010 Tea Party wave, the republicans pushed by the very conservative Tea Party have made the debt ceiling a political tool that they can use to slash the budget and lower taxes. They bet on the idea that if the government were to shut down the public would pin the blame on the president and they can make political gains. Unfortunately that approach hasn't worked, the first time in 1996 the blame fell solely on the Republicans.  In 2011, the newly elected GOP dominated house tried the same thing, and what we got was an awful bill with a sequester that was supposed to be averted by a super committee made of members of both parties in both Houses. In usual Washington DC fashion, the super committee failed and we are living in the effects of the sequester (I don't terribly mind as diminishing military spending is always a good thing). So here we are in 2013 after the president was elected again, and this time the GOP is threatening to shut down the government because of Obamacare. The funny part is that this isn't even about the debt ceiling, the debt ceiling will be reached on October 17th, but our government is so bad that they have to pass a spending bill that will allow them to fund the government until December since they will be too busy fighting to make that deadline!

The house passed a spending bill that repealed Obamacare (or the Affordable Care Act) and sent the bill to the Senate. Now there was no chance that the democratically controlled Senate was going to defund Obamacare, so the democrats took up the bill, stripped it of the Obamacare mention and sent it to the House. I think that Boehner, a moderate would not mind passing the bill, as a matter of fact, several moderate republicans and the totality of the democratic caucus could pass it. But Boehner is weak and he panders to the base of the party (the Tea Party really) so him and the house republicans took that bill (which really was a mutated version of their previous bill) and passed it with the added caveat of a delay of a year in implementing Obamacare. The republicans know very well that Obamacare is the crown jewel of the democratic party, the White house, the Senate and the members of the House poured everything including political capital to pass it in 2009, there is no way they will vote to delay it. So Here we are less than three days before a potential government shut down and the politicians are playing their games.

What should happen? The GOP need to realized that while Obamacare is unpopular, it is the law of the land, Obama ran on it and he won the vote by five million in November. There are plenty of solid republican idea that can be included in the debt ceiling deal that is coming up rather than risking the massive blow to our economy. The GOP should also be mindful of the polls that have shown that they might get more of the blame in the case of a shutdown. As for the president and the democrats, holding steadfast in refusing to delay Obamacare is paramount, letting it go would be a big blow to their base and an admission that they failed in passing the law. Obamacare as a law is very flawed and could certainly use improvement, but with the congress as it is I doubt there is something that can be done, if not executive orders could do.

Here we are the people at the mercy of dysfunctional political class in D.C. I hope that they are able to wake up and do something to make sure that our economy that has held rather well in this terrible global economic climate, does not tank and with it the hopes, dreams and livelihoods of may hard working Americans.

(I intended to write up something short and sweet and this huge rant came about!)