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Senate Passes Short-Term Deal To Reopen Government, With Trump's Endorsement
President Trump has endorsed a bipartisan deal that would end the 35-day partial government shutdown. The three-week stopgap funding measure would reopen shuttered agencies while negotiations continue.
Trump announces deal to lift shutdown
President Donald Trump has endorsed a deal to reopen the US government for three weeks, after a record-breaking shutdown of federal agencies.
But the pact does not include any money that Mr Trump has demanded for a US-Mexico border wall.
See also: Dem senator unveils 'Stop STUPIDITY Act' to prevent all shutdowns
White House: 'Large down payment' on wall could end government shutdown
35 ways the shutdown is affecting America
Original Submission #1 Original Submission #2 Original Submission #3 Original Submission #4
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bradley13 on Friday January 25 2019, @10:39PM (35 children)
Stupid. Not being in the US, I'm not on either side, but: Trump colhosr to make "the walk" his hill. Pulls a record-breaking shutdown. And now wimps out? That's just stupid.
Also, he missed the chance to permanently fire 800,000 bureaucrats.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Friday January 25 2019, @10:40PM (2 children)
Damn mobile keyboard, sorry for the typos...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 5, Funny) by krishnoid on Saturday January 26 2019, @02:11AM
Don't sweat it, it was mostly covfefe enough.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 26 2019, @07:21AM
Ex-pat Trump supporters, claiming to not be in the US! Pathetic! You are such a looser! I am surprised you can actually mis-type on a mobile keyboard, since you are such a mis-anthrope to begin with!
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 25 2019, @10:43PM (5 children)
Hey even bradley13 is getting with reality! There may be hope after all?
(Score: 5, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday January 26 2019, @07:22AM (4 children)
He's not getting with reality; he specifically said he disapproves of Der Gropenfuhrer *stopping* the shutdown, and because it makes him "look weak." That kind of thoughtless, macho posturing dooms nations, and bradley is showing himself to be part of the problem, the low-information red-meat base whose thought processes are selfish and small and narrow enough that it appeals to him.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday January 26 2019, @04:16PM (3 children)
Der GropenFuhrer [rosi-kessel.org] is Arnold Schwarzenegger, not Donald Trump, you nitwit.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday January 26 2019, @06:53PM (1 child)
Would you prefer "The Orange Cockwomble?" "Hair Fuhrer?" "Fat sack of orange Oompa-Loompa shit from hell" as a friend calls him?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 26 2019, @09:26PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 29 2019, @09:04PM
After the "grab women by the pussy" comments it can work for either
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 25 2019, @11:22PM
Its just training for the future.
Those people are getting a second chance to save some money for next time the government gets shut down (in a few weeks but also later this year).
Trump has managed to put the collapse in slow motion: eventually they will be furloughed for 2 months every year, then 3, etc until they start getting new jobs. This is actually a genius way to go about it unwinding the mess.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Saturday January 26 2019, @12:00AM (15 children)
Forget the political repercussions, the economic impact of 800,000 bureaucrats suddenly out of work would be enough to trigger a deep recession.
First, 80,000 of them would go back to work providing the essential functions that the 800,000 used to do.
Next, the $57 Billion per year missing from the fired bureaucrats paychecks would send shockwaves through the luxury, entertainment and energy industries triggering a drop in demand for products and services, probably another 300,000 lost jobs, and another $20 Billion of lost wages, rinse, later, repeat and the domestic economy would lose over $100B in income.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Saturday January 26 2019, @02:03AM
You are arguing that government economic stimulus works. After all, if cutting $57B creates a $100B loss, then adding another $57B should create an extra $100B in income.
I don't disagree, but you are likely to trigger some of the more extreme RWNJs.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 26 2019, @01:15PM (13 children)
In the meantime 80k do the work of 800k, and the rest can get real jobs. Disaster averted.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 26 2019, @02:33PM (3 children)
No air traffic control == no planes flying in US. And no IRS == no revenue for government at all.... And no FDA, so you can be served with some rotten shit and fuck you.... maybe you can buy Radithol again? I could go on and on ....
It's sad that you idiots don't know know what these public servants do.
How about fire the Army and then you at least have 3+ million fired that actually don't do anything productive? Would that put your panties in a bunch?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 26 2019, @07:00PM (1 child)
1) No air traffic control == no planes flying in US
-Whats the history behind this? It seems like a bad idea.
2) no IRS == no revenue for government at al
- They can have the federal reserve or china loan them money, about 25% of the money comes from this anyway. They can also collect tariffs, etc. The US used to have no IRS, no selective service, and no federal reserve. These were all introduced because big US banks (eg, JP Morgan) had loaned craploads of money to the Britain/France/Russia for WWI and they wanted to make sure they would get paid back.
3) No FDA, so you can be served with some rotten shit and fuck you
- You could still sue in state courts, and most states/towns have their own versions of the epa and health departments.
So, I think your post betrays a false understanding of the world around you.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 28 2019, @03:58AM
You do realize that none of those were shut down by the shutdown? There's somewhere around 2.5 million civilian federal employees with 800k furloughed or required to work without pay. Plenty of people left to handle the small number of important federal government roles.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday January 26 2019, @10:36PM
You're hitting the high points, and you're right. If you read carefully, I allocated 10% of the current furloughed workforce to provide those essential services, the other 90% shuffle documents and attend meetings about how to shuffle documents. It's nothing new, but it's not much improved from the time of Franz Khafka.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday January 26 2019, @10:33PM (8 children)
When it comes to turning the wheels of the economic engine, it's not so much about what people do as it is about what people spend.
Dot com wasn't a go-go boom because of all the pets.com websites that were being created, it was a go-go boom because people with cash hoards splashed it out to pay a bunch of people to create pets.com and friends, and those people took their income and spent it on all kinds of things, driving the economic engine.
A bunch of people dutifully showing up to work at a factory and producing high quality goods won't drive economic activity unless people also buy those high quality goods. $200 blue jeans, $4.50 lattes, $80,000 new cars - those drive economic activity, not because they have great intrinsic value, but because they get a lot of cash flowing from the consumers to the whole supply chain that provides these, ahem, premium priced products, and everybody in that supply chain can take their slice of the profits and turn around and feed the machine again.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 28 2019, @04:01AM (7 children)
If they aren't buying, then those things likely aren't high quality goods.
And the problem isn't merely the lack of importance of the activity being shutdown, but also the meager quantity of the economic activity.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday January 28 2019, @06:36PM (6 children)
Government is people, and people are expensive.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 29 2019, @02:47AM (5 children)
So... get rid of the people and you get rid of the cost. Sounds fine to me. I think we already discussed firing the 720k who weren't doing any work.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 29 2019, @02:40PM (4 children)
The cost is also economic stimulus. Firing the people and eliminating the cost is an anti-stimulus. If you don't believe that matters, then you're calling the Fed and every other economic theorist in power for the last 40 years wrong. That may be your opinion, but lots of data has been collected to back up the validity and effectiveness of economic stimulus, at least for short term effects.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 29 2019, @04:37PM (3 children)
The cost is also an anti-stimulus for everyone who pays taxes in the present and future.
Which, let us note, is far from a big deal. Conflict of interest and wishful thinking are things, Joe.
By all means, let's review that data and see how it fails to explain so many economic recoveries of the past 30 years. For example, Japan is working on lost decade number three despite it's government borrowing more than twice its GDP. The US had a pathetic recovery from its 2007-2008 recession despite massive stimulus spending. Same with the EU.
This is just yet another example of that ancient economic fallacy, the Broken Window fallacy. Here, we're chasing after the shiny unicorn of economic stimulus, by paying 800k people to do the work of 80k people (as you acknowledge), which is the broken window.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 29 2019, @05:59PM (1 child)
Don't forget, you are also wishfully thinking about how you might like things to be, imagining how they _might_ be better if everybody did things your way.
1. Everybody is quite unlikely to do things your way, even if you could present a more charming and convincing argument
2. Even if they did, your theory of what will happen is presently untested on the current economic situation, even if it is based on a long gone historical state of the world economy as documented by biased sources with vested interests
What would I like? For one thing I would like financial institutions that pay a meaningful guaranteed interest rate - say 4 or 5% - on deposited funds - that was a huge component of the economic landscape back when things were done more like you are calling for them to be done again. Am I likely to get that? Hell no, and little point in whining about it, either.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 29 2019, @11:33PM
Back at you on that. Critical thinking is all about mitigating that wishful thinking. Let's do more of that, ok?
In particular, "everybody" means you. This sort of dishonest presentation is a big part of the reason you don't get more politeness from me. Because it's wasted on you.
But it is quite well tested on the economic situation prior to about the 1920s. For example, the US has suffered numerous recessions [wikipedia.org] prior to the present economic approach. Every single one of those recessions ended despite there being no organized Keynesian approach or central bank with control over credit to fix things. So why are we to suppose that stimulus matters when there's little difference in recessions from before and after - including when the US government spent 2-4% of US GDP instead of 20%).
But the reason you wouldn't get that is because it doesn't work, not because some imaginary "everybody" stands in your way. Japan tried that with their postal savings system (which turned into a destructive cycle - they had to invent fake investments to dump the savings into and the result was construction of a vast amount of shoddy infrastructure that few wanted combined with that massive debt I already mentioned in a previous post). Now, it's merely a big part of the reason their economic system is crumbling. There's not enough investment to back that interest rate.
As to your other reply:
Sure, I'm good with gradual approaches - when we are capable of implementing them. But I notice that gradual rarely happens. What happens is that the "broken window" gets protected by the special interests that benefit from the economic harm (which after all is the real reason the broken window fallacy happens in the first place, someone always benefits from the course of action even if it is very harmful to most others) even successfully resisting small reforms. There is no graceful failure mode as a result. We often can't "boil the frog" because the frog figures out how to turn off the oven (after all the reform dude is only going to be in office for a few years).
To name a few examples, agricultural policy in the US is chock fully of incredibly stupid ideas that should have ended half a century or more ago under the gradual ending scheme, but still kick around. There's not going to be a gentle transition to a saner economic basis for that. We have peanut and sugar subsidies that are deeply broken. Currently, there's still a massive incentive to use corn-based ethanol in gasoline even though the process wastes more oil than it saves.
For another such example, raisins used to have a marketing board [reason.com] that would seize a portion of the US raisin market every year. Sometimes up to half the crop and sometimes the farmers wouldn't receive compensation for the seizure. This board was set up in 1937. It was finally ended [reason.com] due to court ruling (massive violation of the Fifth Amendment) in 2015. This is what "gradual" looks like in the real world. Government abuse gradually growing until it gets so big that it destroys itself.
Elsewhere in the world, "austerity" in Greece happened because they never fixed the problems until external forces had enough leverage to force reforms all at once. Notice that the parties complaining about said austerity are peculiarly disinterested in actually solving the problems that led to the austerity measure in the first place.
So sure, I'd love to do gradual reform. But we'll rarely get the opportunity for that. So I'd rather fire 720k government employees at a time than have no reform at all (and eventually destruction of the US instead).
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 29 2019, @06:02PM
By all means, fix the broken window - but study the successful approaches available for boiling a frog... same thing applies to the world economy. Idiots making big changes all at once don't accomplish their aims.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Magic Oddball on Saturday January 26 2019, @06:32AM (1 child)
Bureaucrats work in the Coast Guard, patrolling & running our national parks, enforcing our borders, keeping the Presidential & former-Presidential families safe, act as scientists at the NIH/NASA/USGS/AWS, handle advanced IT tasks for all federal agencies, perform safety inspections for the USDA & OSHA, work in the field for FEMA during natural disasters, and so forth?
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Saturday January 26 2019, @06:35AM
By "work in the Coast Guard" I was referring to the people out there performing rescues, patrolling the waters, and similar functions (relaying communications?), not asking if there are any bureaucratic jobs in the CG. :-p
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Saturday January 26 2019, @08:15AM (6 children)
Part of the reason Trump caved is that some major airports were turning traffic away today due to short staff in air traffic control. If the paychecks didn't start flowing, that was going to start happening all over the country.
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Saturday January 26 2019, @05:01PM (5 children)
Guess what: next shutdown, it will happen much quicker.
Those essential employees discovered how powerful they were and next time, they will use that power to get their paychecks again much more quickly.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday January 26 2019, @07:12PM (3 children)
This is the Reagan disaster coming full circle. This karma has been almost 40 years in the making. How ironic...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Monday January 28 2019, @04:03AM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday January 28 2019, @05:21AM (1 child)
May you end up broke and homeless and unemployed so you can gain just a little perspective on the things you say...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 28 2019, @05:36AM
Why should that change my perspective? Unlike you, karma apparently doesn't feel the need to punish me for having unpopular opinions.
What happens when everyone else acts just as greedily as those long ago air traffic controllers who were fired by President Reagan? Society needs people who are willing to put their society ahead of their own selfish interests on occasion. I'm tired of hearing how a few well-paid federal employees should get all kinds of pampering and considerations just because they didn't have the foresight to handle a couple of delayed paychecks.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Sunday January 27 2019, @06:44AM
And so they should! It's funny how Trump is a big capitalist right up until he asks over 100,000 people to work for free.