My point was that if the government is not funded so that the pot of money to continue is not there, then it is the executive branch that decides what to keep going and what to shut down. It had nothing to do with signing of the bill. That is why I made the specific example of TR's move. It is a lot easier for the President to get congress painted into a corner than the other way around.
Well, what else is going to happen if the government is shut down for 6 months?
Think about it for six months... No mail, no welfare or unemployment payments, no tax refunds or audits. No Pell Grant or Stafford loans can be processed for students, and payments cannot be credited. Flights will be at a minimum, Medicare medicaid and SSD/I pay,nets will be backed up for weeks. The US credit rating drops to AAA meaning we couldn't get more money if we needed it. The list goes on.
Seconded. According to my wife and .gov friends the water cooler talk is "It's gonna happen", but the thinking is that it'll be short and someone will cave.
Same here.
While the actual shutdown may represent greater political problems among other issues, there is absolutely nothing symbolic about the furloughing of non-essential federal employees and the suspension of non-essential government services, no matter how brief the length of time turns out to be.
Or... It could be symbolic of the disfunction of Congress. It has nothing to do with debt, both sides could choose to keep running the Government on a stop gap measure if they wanted to--
Symptoms are oftentimes the actual problem. You don't go to the doctor to cure strep, you go to the doctor to cure throat pain. Same principle applies. Runaway spending is dangerous, and is a serious problem.
Please, enlighten us all as to what current defense programs are designed against a 20-30 year old threat that has since gone by the wayside.
As a former Naval Officer and current defense contractor, GML hit the nail on the head. The amount of money that I, personally, have seen the DoD is absolutely mind boggling. I spent 3 years working on the now cancelled CG(X) program and the amount of money that was spent for absolutely no return whatsoever is positively obscene.
You can't even get your medical analogies right. You absolutely go to the doctor to cure strep. Antibiotics do nothing to alleviate your pain, but kill off the strep allowing your body to feel better. My son and I even had strep this winter with little to no throat pain at all.
It is unfortunate that defense programs often times live and die by shifts due to modernization and changes in threats, which, in addition to funding concerns, was what brought down the Next Gen Cruiser program. Changes in threats are hard to predict, especially years down the road. As a former DOE employee, I am more than familiar with changes in mission resulting from changes in threat. Savannah River Site, DOE's nuclear processing facility in SC, built its K Cooling Tower to support new K reactor operations, which was slated to come back online in order to produce tritium for defense purposes. When the Cold War ended, there was no longer a need for nuclear material production, and subsequently there was no longer a need for the reactor restart project to continue. The cooling tower and reactor operated for a very short amount of time, after which the reactor was permanently shut down. K cooling tower was demolished last summer in glorious fashion, having stood lifeless for almost 2 decades. Some see it as a waste of taxpayer dollars because of its cost and the fact that it was never used. The media was also glad to point this out, too. But, coming from the inside, I know there was a very real reason for its construction, and that there was no way to foresee the events in the Soviet Union 3-5 years in the future.
If you really want to turn this Amtrak thread into a medical debate, we can. Unless you have a medical degree too, you yourself have no way of knowing what your sore throat is caused by without performing a throat culture. It very well could be strep, or it could be something else, like an adenovirus infection, or viral pharyngitis, which you'll be happy/sad to hear is the most common cause of a sore throat.
Let's leave this behind.Ain't that the truth!
Changes in the threat had nothing to do with the cancellation of CG(X) - since then I moved onto a company that does threat modeling and if anything the threat has evolved such that CG(X) is even more necessary than it was 4 years ago. Point is, you can't just blindly trust that the DoD has it's priorities straight and is a fathlful steward of the taxpayers dollars because I'm here to tell you that you can't and they aren't.
It's funny you say that, that's almost exactly what I said when I called and when I spoke to the doctor. I didn't have a sore throat, but neither did my son when he had strep the week prior. The doctor agreed that it didn't look like strep at all, but did a throat culture to be safe since I had been exposed. Sure enough the test came back and said that I had strep and I was able to avoid passing it on to other people.
Your call. If you don't want the discussion turned to medical things or wasteful DoD spending, stop making incorrect statements about them. If you want to keep the discussion confined to Amtrak,confine your own comments to Amtrak related matters.
You should also learn what spam is. Nothing in my post comes anywhere close to meeting that definition.
The problem is that Amtrak does not get fiscal year subsidies in a lump sum on the first day of the fiscal year. The subsidy payments are made periodically throughout the year. In the event of a government shutdown, those periodic payments will stop. Since Amtrak does not bring in enough revenue to meet even operating expenses, much less all expenses, they will then begin to eat through cash until there is literally too little cash to operate. That would happen in a matter of weeks.
