“WASHINGTON — The White House warned on Wednesday that a shutdown of the federal government would threaten the nation’s fragile economic recovery. But negotiations over the budget remained stalled amid increasingly sharp rhetoric from lawmakers in both political parties.”
So there you have it. The government is SO big it threatens basic economic stability by virtue of being poised for imminent shutdown.
It’s too big to fail!
Please add your own cliche’s or observations WRT this vestige of truth I assert.
A whole lot of things are “too big to fail”, e.g., the Internet, the power grid, the telephone network, the highway system. That generally means that they are a good thing, not a bad thing.
So, Nadir, from your statements, would it be fair to conclude that you have no interest in our government supporting the armed forces? Because that takes up a pretty big chunk of our budget. To be fair, I could see where you’d be completely in favor of funding the military but might be unhappy about Social Security entitlements or Medicare, which are also big chunks. So, what’s your solution? Millions of retired folks paid into the SS fund and the Medicare fund, and while it is a lopsided deal, they made good on their part of the promise. If we defund those programs, we’re going to have a lot of elderly people dying to treatable illnesses, losing their homes, and possibly having trouble getting food to eat.
Do you understand this is one of the many “fragile” parts which require a smoothly operating government to work?
Or would you rather the streets be filled with the poor, the sick, the elderly, the mentally ill, the unemployed, and the previously incarcerated?
There isn’t necessarily an ideal option. Too Big To Fail might overlap with Small Enough that People Starve in the Streets. In which case we might fail at the same time as we cut our resources beyond the bleeding edge and still have deficits.
So if we had a small gov’t that just provided, say, national defense, it’d be OK if that failed? It wouldn’t be detrimental to our economy, people would still invest in our companies even though they could be taken over by some Canadians with slingshots?
Neither does the U.S. government, in all likelihood. Although if you’d care to argue to the contrary, please do. I could use a laugh.
Bad as a shutdown may be, it doesn’t mean that life is going to grind to a halt. The military will still do its thing, the FAA will still keep planes in the air, etc.
Not AIG per se, but the financial sector, including banking and insurance, is essential in society. There might have been other techniques to solve the problem, but one way or another the government had to intervene so that people and corporations financially linked to AIG did not collapse as a result of a collapse of AIG.
I have four tires on my car, none more important than the others. The tires don’t even power the car, the engine does that. But if one tire goes flat or blows out, I’m kind of screwed.
In other words, the necessity of the government is not directly linked to its size.
I join with Nadir in pitting big government. Our eyes are bigger than our stomach. In particular I pit our huge, bloated military, the source of our budget problems, and the Republicans who did their utmost to create that bloat.
I don’t know. What would happen if enough government workers stopped getting paid, enough government offices/services - even the so-called “non-critical” type closed for long enough?
Not so sure it wouldn’t constitute a complete failure of government “as we know it.”
There are some 2.7 million federal employees. First tell us how many is “enough” to cause a “failure of the government as we know it”, then describe what scenario would cause it to occur. This is highly subjective, but it would at least give us a starting point for discussion.
IMHO, most of the scenarios that might bring about such a governmental failure are in the nature of nuclear war and extreme natural disasters, not political wrangling over whether to cut Medicaid or the military.
No way to really define that. It hasn’t happened, at least not in any particularly spectacular way. Yet.
My whole point is the simple idea that this concept - however you choose to define it, and the political game of chicken that goes along with it - has taken on a life of it’s own by virtue of the story cited in the OP. Big government as a general concept, has given rise to this specter.