April 7, 2011--Shut It Down? Who Cares

The Republican's wet dream is about to come true.

Unless a deal can be struck between now and midnight Friday, much of the government will be shut down. Mainly those parts of it that the GOP, if they had their druthers, would like to eliminate permanently.

The GOP's favorite government programs--deemed "essential services"--will continue to be funded and operate. First and foremost, the military will continue to defend us and make war in four or five countries as if nothing happened. The border patrol will continue to try to keep out illegal immigrants; the TSA will continue to X-ray us at airports; air traffic controllers, assuming they're not sleeping on the job, will continue to guide landings and takeoffs; the FBI and the CIA will continue to snoop on our enemies as well as the rest of us; veterans will continue to get their benefits, as will Social Security recipients; Medicare and Medicaid will continue to function, that is before being turned into voucher programs, if the Republicans have their way, or, as in the case of Medicaid, be funded by block grants to the states that will result in a dramatic increase in cost to individual taxpayers and in a reduction of services to the poor--half of whom are children.

Those agencies shutting down their "non-essential" parts, which means almost everything, will be, among others, the Departments of Eduction, Transportation, Commerce, Energy, Environmental Protection, and Agriculture (though farm subsidy checks will continue to flow to mega agribusinesses, including those that Republican members of Congress themselves own. (See linked New York Times article.)

The national parks will close, but with gas rapidly approaching $4.00 a gallon only a few retired folks roaming around in RVs will notice. And no one on the political right is likely to get upset when the EPA stops monitoring carbon emissions or the levels of waste at toxic super-sites.

Few will be directly affected by the Energy Department shuttering it's 24 research labs (whatever in the world these are up to can be done better, for a profit, by Exxon and BP) or wasting money cleaning up the environment after 50 years of nuclear defense activities that impacted two million acres in communities across the country (let the local folks, if they even care, worry about that).

And who will notice when the Department of Commerce halts gathering employment statistics (with so few working, it hardly pays to know, especially now that the number unemployed is decreasing and Obama may get political credits for that). Who will notice if Commerce is forced to curtail its minority business development assistance (isn't it time we terminate affirmative action programs) or its oceanic and atmospheric research (we don't need this kind of so-called science any more, particularly if it shows evidence of climate change).

Some of us will be upset that the Food and Drug Administration will stop accepting applications for the testing of new, potentially live-saving drugs. Talk about caring about the "sanctity" of life.

Tea Party members of Congress will finally get their wish--a much smaller government. They will be able to see fulfilled Ronald Reagan's dream when he famously said, "Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem."

And these small-government advocates, who conveniently ignore the fact that as congressmen and women they too are government employees, will continue to be paid even if most of the rest of the federal workforce will be taken off the payroll.

Lest I forget, best of all, the IRS will be forced to essentially shut down. They will not only not be sending out any refund checks, they'll also be suspending audits. I wonder who will be the main beneficiaries of that.