The Republican Congress has no plan to re-open the government. They will keep it shut down as long as possible because they hate government. The Tea Party ran on shutting down government for its own sake. The clips of them saying so publicly for 3 years or more are easily found. The Tea Party runs the House -- because the non-Tea Partiers are terrified of getting thrown out in a primary if they oppose them, and elections are next year.
There is no debt crisis. None. That's nonsense. Just something to go on and on about to distract you from reality. And the reality is, if we had absolutely no debt at all, the GOP would still want to shut down the Federal Government in order to allow state governments to do whatever they damn well please with no oversight.
The ACA -- "Obamacare," the health care law -- is not socialism or communism; there is nothing vaguely socialistic about it. You buy healthcare from private, capitalistic insurance companies, the same ones that have always been selling you insurance. If you already have insurance, it changes nothing for you except it will make insurance cheaper as more people participate in the system. If you don't have insurance, it reminds you that you have a responsibility as a citizen to have it so you are not putting your health care costs in the lap of society by depending on the emergency room every time you get sick or have an accident. Or you wind up in a disaster or dead and leave a mess behind for everyone else to clean up with no help from you.
No, it wasn't the best solution. The best solution would actually have been the socialistic one -- the single payer system, like the rest of planet Earth where you get excellent care and the costs are much lower than the USA's. But we are terrified of that thanks to the AMA lobby and the nutty right-wing that sees any form of social cooperation as an encroachment on "liberty." Liberty in this context means your freedom to get sick and lose your job and maybe die while no one cares, really, but America is weird that way.
But none of this is really about the AMA or debt. Those are just leverage and things to motivate people who don't pay attention to anything but the last episode of Breaking Bad and Miley Cyrus acting like a damn fool to sell bad music. All that's entertaining and everything, but goddamn it, there's important things to keep up with, too, and you have to do more than listen to rumors, gossip, and horseshit spread by FOX News and right-wing propaganda think tanks that are in business to do nothing except get you to put people in office who will vote to keep their rich owners and donors rich and powerful. And you do that by either being too disgusted to vote ("Both parties are the same thing!", "They're all a bunch of assholes!") or voting against your own interests ("The Republicans support small business, low taxes, personal freedom, no gun laws, they are the party of traditional values, are religious, etc.", "I'll vote for a third party and show those son of a bitches who's boss! And they'll legalize pot!").
The Tea Party is after absolutely nothing except the destruction of Federal Government -- to achieve the Confederate Dream of the States becoming independent entities, little fiefdoms with their own laws run by small cliques with strange ideologies, some of them weirdly religious, overtly or covertly racist, and some of them nigh completely anarchistic. Read and listen -- pay attention to what they say, who funds them, what sorts of groups are in favor of them. Democracy is a filthy word for them, equivalent to tyranny. Which it can be in the hands of ill-educated, prejudiced thugs who do not recognize human and individual civil liberties. But they hate democracy mainly because they know better than you how things ought to be run and by whom -- and don't need your input on the subject. They just need your initial support or inaction and distraction, and then they need your underpaid slave labor and silence. Democracy is OK just long enough for them to get their way -- then all bets are off.
They will crash the economy this go 'round. They will de-value the dollar. Why? They want a return to the gold standard, for one thing, and it will cripple the Federal Government in ways a civil war never could. Am I paranoid? Well, hell yes, but it's kept me alive for a good long while and it has helped me analyze political reality fairly accurately for years. I assume the worst most of the time from politicians with little oversight and too much power and actual existence, once it comes to light, usually turns out to be even more messy and worse than what I imagine.
So they're just dragging this out a piece at a time. It's a delaying maneuver, that's all. They know they won't get what they want. But it will eventually turn public opinion with enough propagandizing. And you'll buy it, too. Because you are not suspicious enough, not angry enough, not careful enough, too bored, too distracted, too disillusioned.
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