Why Are We Afraid Of A Government Shut-Down?

By James Donahue

The media’s treatment of a potential government shut-down is one of grim sensationalism. Indeed, it is almost as if there is panic in the streets. We hear how the stock market is reacting to the threat. It is as if the world cannot function if the United States government goes into dead stop.

Actually, it might be a good thing if those bone-heads in Washington all go home for a few weeks. As long as the essential stuff, like Social Security, Medicare, Veteran’s paychecks and other "socialized" programs keep running, which we are promised they will, people on the home front will hardly notice that their government isn’t functioning.

That is because it hasn’t been functioning very well for many years. And when it is functioning, many government agencies seem to be getting in everybody’s hair. We might just find that life will go on just fine without the controls imposed by federal agents.

It would be especially nice not to have to see the faces of those Republican clowns in the Congress, standing together in a united front, attempting to convince viewers on nightly television news that they are working hard to do the will of the American people. That is a lie. They are not. They are doing the will of big American corporations and stock holders. When they vote to cut essential services to the poor like food stamps, and vote to finance unnecessary wars on foreign lands in the false premise that the wars are necessary to protect our nation, you know they don’t give a damn about the poor and the working class. They are toads in fine suits feeding on our blood and nothing more.

Sure, the federal government has gotten so big, with its fingers reaching into just about every segment of society, that a shut-down will mean that a lot of government workers will be out-of-work and maybe even missing regular monthly payments on rent, electric bills and credit cards. It the shut-down continues long enough, they will be joining the rest of us in the mere struggle to put food on our tables and keep a roof over our heads. Maybe this would help wake some of those cold-hearted "public servants" up to the needs of those growing lines of people standing at their window seeking some kind of government assistance . . . which rarely comes.

You can bet the Internal Revenue Service will be functioning next April when it comes time for everybody to file annual income tax returns. Those long and complicated tax forms, which leave us all confused and scratching our heads will be altered again, as they are every year, which means we have to hire so-called "professionals" to help us fill them out and hope against hope that we aren’t forced to produce an unexpected and unbudgeted payment of money we don’t have to our non-functioning government.

The big worry among the financial analysts is that if Congress holds its ground over the Obama-care issue, and refuses to raise the national debt ceiling, the nation will go bankrupt and be unable to pay its interest on the trillions of dollars of debt we owe to the international banking system. If such an unlikely thing should happen, it might mean some of those super rich CEO’s might not get their billion dollars bonus checks this year.

That complex scenario is not very likely, but even if it happens, it will have very little effect on the average Joe citizen. So don’t let the corporate controlled media talking heads scare you about a potential government shut-down. It probably won’t happen and if it does, it won’t go on for very long. And life will go on for us as it always has, without any sense that anything has changed.

That’s because nothing will change.