Federal Government Shutdown Not All Bad

By Paul Gable

Maybe a federal government shutdown isn’t such a bad thing for the citizens of the United States.

The only thing this 113^th Congress has excelled at is being more polarized and less effective than the 112^th Congress.

You remember the 112^th Congress. That was the one that passed the Budget Control Act of 2011 that mandated automatic funding cuts of 5% across the board for the federal government if a Joint Select Committee on Budget couldn’t reach agreement on $1.2 trillion in federal budget cuts by 2013.

To no one’s surprise, this joint committee couldn’t agree and we all became familiar with the term sequestration.

Knowing the federal government needed spending approval for the new fiscal year, which begins today, the 113^th Congress spent the summer, either on vacation, or worried about such things as non-intervention in Libya, intervention in Syria and stopping the Affordable Healthcare Act (Obamacare).

Now we have the irony that the federal government shuts down on October 1 for lack of funding while Obamacare begins enrolling citizens on the same day because its funding is already in place.

The Republican goal in the standoff leading to the government shutdown was repealing or defunding Obamacare, or at least major parts of it.

The federal government stops but Obamacare moves forward. Didn’t that work well?

But the positive in all of this is while the government is shut down, there will be no one spying on us, no one getting us into wars we have no reason to be in and no one spending the money we don’t have.

Maybe that’s not such a bad deal for the American people.

Now, if we can only find a way to stop paying those 535 clowns on Capitol Hill the $176,500 per year they don’t earn!