So the news the past few weeks, besides the horrific earthquakes and nuclear crisis in Japan, has been about the battles in Congress over a budget for FY 2011. It very nearly led to a partial shutdown of the US Goverment and furloughing 800,000 of its workers. However, at the last hour, there was an announcement that a deal was made and that a budget would be passed, so there would not be a shutdown. With that, lots of people started celebrating, thinking this was all over.
I wasn't one of them.
Reading through the details, we were given yet another continuing resolution, much like the ones that Congress has been using to punt actually dealing with the budget down the road for the last six months, at least until folks started growing tired of it. I know I was one of them, primarily because it was screwing up funding for some of the projects I work on at work. What did piss me off though was watching Congress just pass another CR and then sit around and do nothing about the budget, including waiting until the last minute because some fucktards were threatening to withhold votes unless they got their way. Let me tell you, it's a rather surreal experience to walk into work and end up in a meeting with the head of your department where they're telling you that you're going to show up to work the following Monday and then be handed a notice to go home. It's not a good feeling either, as I was definitely taking a hard look at my finances to make sure I would be able to pay bills and all that.
However, the other reason I didn't celebrate was because I have no faith that Congress is actually going to pass this budget and pass it correctly. I believe it's going to come down to the very last possible minute once again, and 800,000 of us are going to be sweating bullets on Thursday night. Now supposedly they're going to vote on the budget on Wednesday, but I would not be surprised if there are some sort of shenanigans about it. Already the tea party fucktards in Congress are screaming that Boehner sold them out by agreeing to a budget deal rather than just shutting down the US Government and trying to force the spending cuts that they wanted. That's not how DC works folks, as much as it has been "the norm" for the last few years, people are growing tired of strong-arm tactics and would rather see some compromise. Unfortunately those folks are not listening, and it's just going to make things worse.
Even if this budget passes, folks in Congress are already gearing up for the next budget battle, and it's going to get very ugly. At our current rate of spending, we're going to hit our debt ceiling by May 16, and there's already fighting about it. Well unfortunately if the debt ceiling is reached, that could shut down the entire government, meaning grandma doesn't get her social security check, you can't board that airplane to go to Vegas, and soldiers out in Afghanistan likely won't get paid until a much later time. So that's another furlough that can hit, except with much worse consequences because it hurts everyone.
After that, then we still have to deal with hoping that Congress actually passes a budget for FY2012, which my faith in that happening hovers somewhere between 0 and 0.000000000001% right now.
This just is not a fun time to be a fed right now, we've had these folks screaming that we're the ones who single-handedly drove the US economy into ruin and that we are not needed. You know what? I'm tired of hearing that. I'm tired of people assuming I just walked into my job and I get paid for doing nothing. Those folks don't see the work I put in every day so that they can have quality information that they can misquote in their editorials and speeches, and then I can laugh at them when they get fact checked. None of my jobs were handed to me, I worked my way up and had to show along the way that I was ready to move up and to handle the extra responsibilities that came with it. So to basically label me as the bad guy and say that I should be worth nothing? No, you're the one that's worth nothing, you're the one that is so out of touch with what really goes on here.
Now I've set up on this blog a countdown clock as to when the next shutdown could happen, as we reach and get past this potential shutdown milestones (or not) I'll update it accordingly.
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