Two-thirds are unlikely to agree to any change, up or down, in an entitlement, or a tax.
The only real way to increase, or decrease, benefits, under your plan, is for the form of government to change, such as with a coup.
The world has at least several dozen successful democracies. I would look to them for models. And you will find they make little use of supermajorities, as can be divined from this:
I know some people on this board don’t like Stephen Harper, but the Canadian system seems to me to work better than ours. Any change in our system should be to make it more like theirs.
Ah! My fault; I was confused. I thought you were talking about 66% voting, and 33% not even voting at all.
In a case where 66% vote yes, and 33% vote no, well, majority rules. That’s how democracies work. The U.S. is fortunate to have a Bill of Rights which restricts how much the majority can do to shove the minority around. But, ultimately, the majority wins. If 66% say “Build a Freeway there” and 33% say “Keep it a natural undeveloped parkland,” well, sorry (very sorry, as I’m probably in the 33%!) the freeway goes through.
If the 66% majority says, “Everyone in the 33% minority may no longer vote,” that’s tyranny.
No one takes this stuff seriously because it’s no more than politicians throwing a tantrum over not getting their way. The gov has done this same thing 17 times in my short lifetime of 40 years. It will likely happen another 17 before I kick the bucket. No one believes that any on the government departments or branches will ever actually shut down for good. The U.S. Gov is and always will be about growing itself larger and larger in a perpetual power grab.
The whole “shutdown” thing is nothing more than a pissing contest in the form of scare tactics and playing chicken. Who will blink first?
Correction. While posturing about the debt limit is an old American tradition, this is only the second time that refusal to raise the debt limit was used as a threat to get something else. I understand the first time was with Newt Gingrich.
Playing chicken is when 2 cars head towards each other at 60 mph. This is a case where one car is speeding on a highway and another jumps the meridian and heads straight towards it.
Only one of the two parties is using blackmail. It is unsurprising that this crisis has prompted so much international censure, including calls to find an alternative to the US dollar as the major currency of international payments. It is also unsurprising that the major rating agencies have seen fit to downgrade US debt or consider the same.
So let’s not pretend this is business as usual. The idea that US debt is anything other than AAA only appeared within the last couple of years. For the previous 100+ it was considered risk-free. No longer, to the shame of the Republican Party’s base of deadbeats, for what would be a more appropriate term?
When I said “the same thing”, I meant that it’s the 17th time in my lifetime that a government “shutdown” has occurred. The reasons vary but the whole “shutdown” thing is not at all new or surprising. It really is just business as usual.
It isn’t business as usual. The vast majority of those shutdowns were limited in scope, not like this one. They were also shorter, nine of them being three days or less.
If you think it’s a good thing to shut down government, waste money, and hurt the economy, just say so. But saying that shutdowns are normal when it has been 17 years since the last one is very disingenuous.
Term limits in California have been a disaster. When they approach the legislators concentrate on getting ready to jump to a new job, and it turns out only the lobbyists have any continuity, so they were writing the bills. Is that what you want?
I’m glad you think Ted Cruz is an old hand. Politics works on relationships, and it works a lot better with long term relationships and respect - something the Tea Partiers don’t have either for the Democrats or for the more moderate in their own party.
I neither said not implied that I think shutdowns are a good thing. I actually think it’s absolutely f-in stupid and uncalled for. And it’s not disingenuous to say that this kind of political BS is “business as usual.” Insincere BS pissing contests are EXACTLY what government shines at.
I’m not going to research your figure of 17 years since the last one right now. I’ll assume it’s correct. But 17 times in the past 40 years (some of which were longer than this one) is a pretty piss pure average. Yes, this crap IS business as usual.
As for 2014 and after, it would be foolish to predict that Democrats and Republicans can come to the kind of agreements needed to ease sequestration. So we are likely to see continued shinkage in the government head count:
My point is simply that government is perpetually trying to gain more and more power and control in any way they can. They care not how it comes about. These silly shutdowns are only posturing to drag the public into the pissing contest. Get more of the public sector crying and screaming and you have more leverage to force through your political adjenda.
I’m just not buying the notion that these shutdowns are anything more than scare tactics to strongarm support.
How much leverage do you think the public sector has? It’s not like there’s been an explosion of growth in nonmilitary government jobs anytime in the past 40 years. What I’m seeing is a lot of parroting of anti-government rhetoric.
This shutdown was vastly different in kind from the past ones, with the possible exception of the Gingrich/Clinton showdown. If you don’t see that, you haven’t been paying attention. There is a world of difference between shutting down the government unless you can overturn a law and brief wrangling over the latest budget.
Moreover, the federal government is basically a pension plan that happens to have an army. I don’t see the social security administration and medicare/medicaid as a vast conspiracy to gain more power for the Masons, UFOs, Bigfoot or whomever.
