This is just dumb. Is research an essential activity? We do, as a society, want cures from cancer or improved treatments for PTSD, right? We need to be able to manage passports, right? We want to have national parks, right?
But in a crisis, are these critical? No.
If the only jobs your want the government to be involved in are the ones that pertain essentially to life and death, you’ll get a much smaller government, that’s for sure. Whether it would be a particularly desirable government is pretty dubious.
I don’t think this misrepresents the thinking of many conservatives. Some of them literally do say things like keep government out of my Medicare, or I was on food stamps and nobody helped me!
Most people can name something that is not essential that is still worth having if they want to fund it, not if they are forced to at gunpoint by a Federal bureaucracy.
What, think I’m overstating things? Try not paying your taxes and see how many unicorns they dispatch to collect you.
I haven’t defined a single thing, I’ve merely pointed out that the Federal government has decided to fund “essential services” - I haven’t even listed which ones - and yet I’m ignorant.
Pretty much, yeah. You give little impression of having a basic understanding of the matter, and instead post stuff that is about of the caliber of the childish nonsense that floats through the transom of my Facebook page on a regular basis.
More problematic is that you seem to have little inclination towards actually trying to get it.
Fine - you tell us what you consider essential services the Administration has chosen not to fund that you would have if it were up to you.
Again - I have not mentioned anything specific one way or another, just said that if there are things not being funded that are not considered “essential”, then clearly we don’t need them. That is the textbook definition of “essential”.
So let me get this straight: The shutdown is one Republican faction acting because they personally do not like this one law that has A) already been passed into law by Congress; and B) has withstood Supreme Court scrutiny? Is that correct? Because that is pretty despicable if it is true. That’s the Pubbies acting like little despots who can’t have their way. I hope the Democrats can make the public understand this, if that’s what is happening.
The public does know this is happening. It doesn’t much matter. The Tea Party members of Congress are in relatively safe districts, so they don’t have too much to fear about the next election. As has been mentioned in several other threads, the Democrats in the House won more overall votes than their Republican counterparts. But the way the districts are drawn made this a Republican win.
Of course, the more moderate members of the Republican Party might have reason to fear a public backlash, but they also have reason to fear a Tea Party backed challenger in the next election. Rock, meet hard place. They’re currently choosing the tiger they don’t see yet vs the tiger they do.
I like to think of them as “services that, if interrupted, could cause people to come after the Members of Congress with pitchforks and torches.”
Anyway, just want to make sure that I understand your position. Apparently, the staff and operations of national parks, and of museums such as the Smithsonian, are deemed non-essential for the purposes of this idiotic shutdown. Can I assume that you object to any of these institutions being government-funded?
Out of sight, out of mind? I do wonder if Republicans are pandering also to many republicans that reject science when it affects the bottom line of many polluters.
The IRS. The Patent and Trademark Office. The Small Business Administration. The Securities and Exchange Commission. The CDC. The NIH. Food safety inspections.
I can go on, but you’re playing, perhaps, dumb about this all. The semantics of “essential” seem overly challenging to you for some strange reason.