I remember this one. I was in college. I was sitting on the front stoop of the house I was living in when the mailman came by. I mentioned that I was surprised he was still working since the government was shutdown. He laughed and said that the USPS is self-funded and is flush with cash and had no debts so they had no problem staying open. Oh how things have changed.
In case you don't know: the government passed a law that USPS must prefund all benefits (like pensions), which is extremely uncommon (pay-as-you-go is typical).
Actually requiring a fund in escrow to complete its promises is what all companies should have been required to do. Employees took a willful paycut to save money for later... But, why does the company care?
You want to know what happens when they don't? They declare bankruptcy and the judge dismisses the pensions, and the federal government takes it over.
This is a truly optimistic assessment of the Availability of Government Services.
I went to the post office a few weeks ago, and while the building was open, they had stopped taking packages. Not that they wouldn't mail them today, but that they just wouldn't even take them. And that doesn't even count the hours they're meant to be closed.
In any case, it's clear that the length of any specific downtime matters as much as the cumulative downtime.
It's measuring whether the service as a whole is outright down and refusing to respond to requests. There's arguably been a degraded user experience since the 80s, but we seem to have reached the cascading failure point in the last 2 years.
Like many services, it has suffered from frequent management changes and short-sighted initiatives that have ultimately prioritized marketing and sales over the core service experience.
There's arguments to be made that this is a right-wing coup.
Many hardliners in the republican party, along with trump, want to starve the beast. And there's not much more you can do than by harming the rank and file with "you must go to work but we won't pay you". The people in federal positions I know of are already looking elsewhere. Some are trying to survive it. And others are going "sick-out".
Regardless how its being done, it is. And this shutdown is starving all non-military federal positions from TSA to the USDA. If this goes on for months, then those people will leave, along with their experience their tenure brought. And eventually, when the government is not "shut down", they will have proof that the government really didn't need those positions.
And we open our eyes, and realize the swamp wasn't Capitol Hill. The swamp was us. We're in the middle of draining.
Maybe, but I think it's ironic that this shutdown is over a Republican (well, Trumpist) initiative to spend more money, while it's the Democrats who want to hold the line on spending.
It's not really money. You'd need 3 or 4 significant figures to even tell the difference, depending on how you calculate it. With less, the wall completely disappears in the rounding.
Maybe that says something bad about the size of the rest of the budget. It's kind of disturbing that the wall cost is like loose change dropped down under a seat cushion and forgotten.
To put it another way, the wall cost is just half a day of the federal budget. Most likely, we've already blown far more than that on the cost of the shutdown.
Scaling things down to median American household sizes, it's like a couple getting a divorce because one person insists on spending $16.81 to $93.42 and the other person is flipping out over it.
Absolutely, this is not really over money. I think if you look at the past few decades, Democrats have been better at being fiscally conservative, for whatever reason, but this is a battle over principles, not money.
Ha they're still using that red-tailed hawk sound for pretty much any appearance of a bald eagle in media. The real sound they make is so anticlimactic compared to the hawk screech, they can't ever go back. It would be too silly.
Bald eagles make a sort of whiny peeping. It's a very cute sound, not at all what people expect.
To quote Sibley: "Call rather weak, flat, chirping whistles, stuttering, variable. Immature calls generally harsher, more shrill than adult until three to four years old."
Someone realized that they could use desk vetoes as a negotiation tool even when what was being vetoed was the budget, without the public really minding enough to cost anyone an election.
I remember this one. I was in college. I was sitting on the front stoop of the house I was living in when the mailman came by. I mentioned that I was surprised he was still working since the government was shutdown. He laughed and said that the USPS is self-funded and is flush with cash and had no debts so they had no problem staying open. Oh how things have changed.