A lot of nonsense has been written about the US Govt “shutdown” in the UK media right across the political spectrum from the Telegraph’s extra dry Jeremy Warner to the wet lettuce BBC Obama shill Mark Mardell. Combine this with the high level of ignorance about the US political sytem here in Britain (matched only by the equally astonishing misunderstanding of “funny foreigners” by Americans) and you have as much chance of drilling down to the nitty gritty as a bricklayer trying to do some delicate brain surgery with a trowel. But the explanation of what is happening is as simple and straightforward as getting the gin out of the bottle (unscrewing the cap if your memory needs a jolt) according to the highly respected academic Thomas Sowell.
- The Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted all the money required to keep all government activities going — except for ObamaCare.
- All spending bills must originate in the House of Representatives, which means that congressmen there have a right to decide whether they want to spend money on a particular government activity.
- The money voted by the House of Representatives covered everything that the government does, except for ObamaCare.
- The Senate chose not to vote to authorize that money to be spent, because it did not include money for ObamaCare.
- Tax money keeps coming into the Treasury during the shutdown, and it vastly exceeds the interest that has to be paid on the national debt.
Read Sowell’s brief but soundly reasoned exposition here. Regard anything written about the shutdown that does not tally with those five key facts as either a malicious and deliberate lie or as a demonstration that the author’s understanding of American politics is on the same level as an earwig’s grasp of the second law of thermodynamics..
