“GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN”

The flashy morbid title warning our country that the very brain of our United States is wading into imminent danger has been stalking the headlines of major news channels and reporting websites for a few days now, and most of us are terrified and have no idea what’s going to happen.

It’s not that bad.

So starting every 365 days there’s a government timed “Fiscal Year”, and this starts October 1^st through September 30^th. Every fiscal year before the deadline, the government has to balance budgets for government regulated programs to authorize the money they have to spend. If an agency doesn’t have the authorization (in the form of bills called appropriations) to spend money, than it’s absolutely illegal for them to do anything not important that requires them to spend money which is pretty much EVERYTHING.

Now this is a pretty good process in theory because every year the government has to look at all their programs that they’re investing in to see if they’re still worth all the funds at the old levels, so they can adjust them based on importance and not over or under spend.

However, over time the Federal Government’s gotten a whole lot bigger and there’s a ton more obstruction and opinions through this prioritization process, and it runs into a problem or two and never gets finished on time. So their solution for the federal tardiness is called a “Continuing Resolution” (CR), which basically gives them more time to work out Federal Agency budgets that it hasn’t gotten around to funding. The CR just says whatever you had last year you’ll get this year again, up until a certain date. For example, if last year they got $12,000 and this year they pass a three month Continuing Resolution, your agency gets $3,000 to spend over the next three months.

So the current issue right now isn’t over whether they WANT to fund the government or not, it’s that no appropriations have been passed, and both parties agree that they should fund the government while they work out all late authorization bills, and the stuff that they need to work out; the current debate at the moment, and practically the entire reason for the shutdown is over the Affordable Health Care Act, termed as Obamacare. You can view the state of authorizations online at thomas.loc.gov.

The Republican party believes that this will be their last chance to ever repeal Obamacare before it starts going into effect, according to multiple news sources and common knowledge. Because of this, members residing in the Republican Party are refusing to even vote at all in the government appropriations because they believe that if the government is shut down and everybody knows that this is happening under the Obama Administration, the general population will call out this problem on the entire Obama Administration as a tactic to get backers behind repealing Obamacare, so the Obama Administration can give in and be brought back up through the achievement of Republican Work. Democrats and the entire Administration are standing strong and not willing to get rid of their biggest political achievement and contribution to Americas’ medical system to make a Republican Party look good. They look like fools.

CHANGE.

3,330 Public Housing agencies will not receive payments to operate houses and will have to pay out of pocket until resolution, according to CNN.

The Environmental Protection Agency will be almost completely closed during a shut down, as multiple national parks have shut down.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission will be closed during shut down, Washington Post informed.

Social Security. The social security admission has enough to keep checks outgoing, but patients wont be able to replace their benefit cards or schedule new hearings for disability cases.

Congress will keep getting paid during the shutdown as their pay cannot be changed during congressional sessions.

State and Government services will usually remain unaffected as their budget comes from local funding.

The last time this happened was in 1995 and 1996, and lasted about 27 days, when speaker Newt Gingrich wanted to balance the budget in a short period of time and President Clinton wanted to drop all the dough into democratic priorities.

Currently there’s a deadline to raise the debt ceiling by October 17^th, while this will have limited effects on the financial markets, it could scare lawmakers and federal congress into succumbing to resolution.