Weather or Not

Severe Outflow by R. Edwards

Regarding This and Other “Government Shutdowns”

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The “shutdown” and the blame game: this is not a “Trump shutdown”, nor a “Schumer shutdown”. It is a bipartisan debacle for show and ego. The same is true for each of these multiple episodes since I started public service as a Federal student employee in Dec. 1985. Been there, done that, seen ‘em all.

Stand outside the partisan mud slinging. Reject memes and ignore posts that assume only one side is at fault, amidst the actual refusal of both sides to compromise and reach a deal. They’re all lies.

As someone who voted for neither of the egomaniacal, corrupt criminals who headed the major-party presidential tickets, I can offer a perspective of independent thought, free from the ideological shackles of the D and R loyalist lemmings parroting their party lines on this.

As such, I clearly see how each side is guilty of failure to compromise here, in order to save face and pander to their bases. This is nothing new, and a common denominator to all of these “shutdowns” under presidents of both parties, going back decades.

It’s disgraceful, this time and every time. Federal employees with bills to pay are the pawns. Fortunately I have many months of savings for just such a contingency and will hunker down and wait it out. However, others (especially new and young talent, or those otherwise with low reserves, whether their fault or not) do not. Same goes for contractors who are simply laid off during all this.

Speaking as a member of the NWSEO, I can attest that the young talent and contractors are the ones my life-saving storm-alerting agency will sacrifice to other jobs and professions if this drags on much longer. It’s local businesses in areas with lots of federal employees (especially outside DC) who likewise suffer. Shameful. Whatever sides you take, remember this.

Speaking for me, yes, in a Libertarian sense I favor smaller, leaner, tightly focused federal government in keeping with the literal words of the Constitution, which can be done smartly and humanely over time. This episode is neither smart nor focused nor humane. It’s just moronic.

I’m not interested in entertaining sick-out ideas or other such foolishness. I forecast severe storms in my unnamed agency out of a passion for what I do—serve the tax-paying public, and more specifically, serving the Lord by serving the public. Even if “because reasons”, sick-outs nonetheless are selfish in that they burden the rest of the shift crew with filling in behind you, also on IOU basis. How is that “empathetic” to your unpaid fill-ins?

Devotion to duty doesn’t pay the bills, that’s true. I know that. Neither does leaving your better-prepared and/or more-devoted co-workers with shift slack to fill, and potentially worse storm-warning service to the public. That’s dishonest for one (you’re not sick), and for two, wholly antithetical to the ideal of service above self. If you are a fellow employee thinking that way, stop it. I want no part of that poison. And I won’t blame future managers for taking notes on who is doing it, and hiring/promoting accordingly. Employers rightly want people who are dependable and trustworthy, even in hard times.

I also am not the least interested in any whining about how the “other side” of yours is to blame on this issue, so don’t bother. I have no scruples about wielding the delete button in comments too, and fully expect to, given the proclivities of many I know to

  1. Reflexively blame others, or
  2. Lazily and mindlessly cry “whatboutism” to every opinion not blaming entirely the other side.

The brutally honest truth, like it or not, is that idiots on both sides are to blame. This was preventable. And now a lot of innocent Federal employees aren’t getting paid as bills mount.

On my Facebook feed, I posted about this and had to remove several comments (after making such a rule that I would) for being unproductively hyperpartisan. I predicted it, I warned the readers it would happen, yet some could not resist spouting their one-sided party lines. See, that is such a big part of the problem, in the electorate as well as inside the beltway: failure to think outside that party-line herd mentality!

To illustrate my point that this problem of “shutdowns” crosses party lines, and has for decades, since the ridiculously shortsighted section of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 that enabled these debacles. I have documented 21 of them since they began (Ford Administration). I tabulated the party of the President (P), majority Senate (S) and majority House (H). Presented here is the tabulation of shutdowns by PSH composition:

RRD: 8
DDD: 5
RDD: 3
DRR: 2
RRR: 2
DDR: 1

Now you shall witness the tabulation of “shutdowns” another way, by each party of P, then S, then H:

RP: 13
DP: 8

RS: 12
DS: 9

RH: 5
DH: 16

Of course, you can have your own opinions, but not your own facts. The facts are what they are. Factually, it is obvious, and absolutely indisputable, that shutdowns are a bipartisan problem. If you still think otherwise after seeing the above tabulations, you are immune to facts and reason, and I urge you to read other material elsewhere.

What to do about it is a matter of opinion. Mine is to force these petulant little mental children to behave, since they refuse to do so on their own, by means of a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution. That has two beautiful benefits. It ends these shutdowns forevermore and draws down our crisis-level (and exploding under both parties’ latest President) national debt.

The Most Essential Government Function

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The news among government workers and politicians swirls first around a possible shutdown of “non-essential” functions, and conditional on that, around proposed cuts to the remainder of the 2011 fiscal-year budget that would, in their most extreme scenarios, force assorted closures and furloughs in storm-warning and forecasting services. Will the worst-case scenario come to pass? Likely not…but the NWS Employees’ Organization’s discussion of it is a needed check-and-balance against the opposite, “we don’t need storm warnings” type of ignorant extreme the other way. Ultimately, something in the middle is the most probable outcome.

As a card-carrying Republican (who has accused many a Republican politician of being too liberal fiscally), I’m about as much of a fiscal conservative and deficit hawk as anybody can be rationally. The difference is that I see the austerity blade as something to be wielded carefully, thoughtfully and meritoriously, instead of indiscriminately or for political posturing.

One size does not fit all! Some government is more important, some less! Most governmental cutbacks in these situations are lazy, mindless, across-the-board proposals concocted by politicians and not experts, and as such, have no basis in value, function or merit at all. As such, they throw out both the bathwater and the baby.

For more in-depth discussion on this topic and how it applies to severe storm and hurricane watches and warnings, see the following invited post that I provided to the BLOG of jazz musician, keen writer, and fellow storm observer Bob Hartig: Protection of Life and Property: The Necessary Government Role.

Yes, my bare-bones litmus test for what’s worth keeping, if it has to come to that, is simple: protection of life and property. No governmental function is more basic or important. Protection of life and property should be the final straw, the last thing ever jeopardized.

We all need to make sacrifices, and this absolutely includes governmental agencies and employees. My salary freeze is one example, and I am NOT complaining about it in the face of even greater sacrifices being made by other hard-working Americans.

Below, I’ll state some examples of what would and wouldn’t pass my litmus test, which represents the extreme end (last resort) of what to handle in paring down the national debt. Most other folks’ standards for where to stop cutting actually seem far less stringent than mine. These are not all-inclusive, but instead represent examples being bantered to and fro at this time.

  1. SOLIDLY PASSES “LIVESAVING” LITMUS TEST: Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, National Guard, Federal law enforcement (FBI, Secret Service, Border patrol, etc.,) National Weather Service forecasting centers and offices, DOA food and meat inspectors, NFS firefighting, NASA satellites, FAA air-traffic control, Federal courts, V.A. hospitals, Federal prisons, electric-power regulation and security
  2. PARTS DO, PARTS DON’T: These contain elements that are mission-critical when the last mission is protection of public safety; but also, contain large swaths of functions that are not absolutely necessary: NASA (except for defense, comms and weather satellites), National Forest Service (except fire-weather and firefighting), DoD procurement, DOA (outside food inspectors), DHS, CIA, HHS, DOT, DOE, EPA, FEMA, most foreign aid, Medicare/Medicaid (lots of waste and fraud to hack out!), NWS outside forecasting offices/centers, and NOAA outside the NWS. A very careful and precise knife needs to be used; critical and non-critical functions are often closely intermixed in these!
  3. NON-LIFESAVING FUNCTION (DOES NOT PASS TEST): These are “nice but not critically necessary” or simply aren’t clearly pertinent to imminent protection of taxpayers’ lives. A few of these I personally detest, others I strongly support and would hate to see them go…but again, these are not critical for life-saving. As such, they’re fair game… TARP bailouts, IRS, National Endowment for the Arts, National Public Radio, HUD, most of assorted welfare entitlements, UN representation, White House “czars”, most of Commerce outside NOAA, and the overwhelming majority of the Interior, Education and Labor Departments.

I can assure this: If the IRS were largely gone, that would mean we would have a simple, flat and largely automated taxing system, and that would be not only a money-saver for government but a fantastic cause for celebration!