Prof. explains government shutdown

The federal government has been in a heated debate all week, and the two parties will have to come to a resolution by Wednesday to avoid the first shutdown since the mid-1990s. IU senior lecturer in political science Christine Barbour gives her rundown of what you need to know.
 
What is this shutdown all about?

“There are two separate things that are being threatened right now, and I suspect people blend them together and they don’t know what they are,” Barbour said.
She said there is the government shutdown, and then there is the debt ceiling.
Right now there is a really unusual situation in congress, she said, where you have one portion of the Republican Party that would like to undo some policy, but they don’t have the votes to make it happen.

Tea Party Republicans don’t like the Affordable Care Act, and she said they would like to see that policy die.

Barbour said the current plan is to try to use what they think is leverage to make it happen.

Parts of the Republican Party think by threatening to close down the federal government or defaulting on the national debt, she said, the Democrats will panic enough they will cave on the issues and give the Tea Party what they want.

“They are sort of counting on the Democrats and Obama to be responsible,” Barbour said.

She said Republicans are determined to shut down to say they fought to get rid of Obamacare.

“The irony is if the government shuts down, Obamacare will keep working,” Barbour said.

Some government spending, Barbour explained, is fixed and can’t be halted in a shutdown. Social security, Medicare, Medicaid and most of the Affordable Care Act will continue to be funded. So they can’t stop those, but there are a lot of governmental services that will be stopped, she said, and a lot of employees who will be on furlough.

Although Obamacare is at the heart of many of the debates, there is the more pressing matter of the debt ceiling. The Treasury Department has said the United States will exhaust its borrowing limit Oct. 17, and in a letter from Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew to U.S. Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-Ohio, he urged Congress to raise the debt ceiling in a continuing resolution, or clean bill, to avoid any question of defaulting on its debts. Barbour said the continuing resolutions are temporary measures that will keep the government funded for some period of time where the budget could then be negotiated.

What’s at stake with the debt ceiling?

The debt ceiling is the most cataclysmic issue at stake with the shutdown, Barbour said. The government authorizes itself to borrow a certain amount of money, she said, but when that money runs out we have to authorize ourselves to borrow more to continue to pay expenses.

“If we don’t borrow more money, we can’t pay our bills,” she said. “Then the government really shuts down. They can’t write a check because they physically run out of money.”

What is scary about this is the stock market panics and spirals down, and the global economy might very well tank, Barbour said. The full effects are still unknown, she said, because defaulting has never happened. One thing that’s guaranteed is the stock market panics at a drop of a hat, she said, and the prospect of the United States not paying its bills and having another credit downgrading is huge to contemplate.
“It could be a huge economic disaster, and we are just climbing out of that pit and it could send us right back,” Barbour said.

The reason a default has never happened, she said, is because even politicians like Ronald Reagan, an icon in the Republican Party, knew it would be disaster for the country.

“The full consequences of a default, or even the serious prospect of a default, by the United States are impossible to predict and awesome to contemplate,” Reagan said in 1983.

Can anything good come from a shutdown?

The Tea Party Republicans think they can get what they want from a shutdown, Barbour said, but they are wrong.

“This is not the people running the U.S. government acting like adults,” she said.
Many of the Republicans, like Boehner, want to act like adults, but jobs are at stake if other Republicans cross the Tea Party, she said. Boehner only has his job if he’s voted the head of the majority party, she said, so he’s being threatened to not be supported and letting others run the show.

“This is the inmates running the asylum,” Barbour said, “and it’s a big problem because this is not how our political system was designed to work.” 

Barbour said the U.S. political system is a great system that works most of the time, but there has to be compromise. So the Tea Party is saying they don’t want to compromise and give anyone what they want, but they are trying to get everything they want, she said.

“This is a system born from compromise and a system that depends on compromise,” she said.


Why should students care?

There are two big reasons why students should care about this, Barbour said, because there are two different issues involved.

First, students should care because we should want to have a well-functioning government, she said. Our system depends on two healthy parties with give and take, she said, and we don’t have that right now. The precedent that gets established now is the precedent of how this country governs itself into the future.

“If it’s going to be governed by flame-throwing and hostage-taking,” she said, “I don’t know about you, but I’m moving to France.”

The second reason students should care about this is because the debt ceiling affects everyone in the country, Barbour said, so even students will feel it. The government shutting down and not paying its debt costs billions of dollars, she said, and that’s your tax money at stake.

The government has really crossed a line here, she said, because if the debt ceiling is breached and isn’t fixed in time, the economy is going to take a big hit. Students’ entire families will feel it if the stock market tanks again, she said, especially when students are trying to find jobs after graduation. College funds, retirement funds and social security will all be affected, she said.

“Your life is bigger than campus. You have relatives, you have a family and you have a future, and that’s all impacted,” Barbour said. “I would say there is no way this doesn’t affect student’s lives.”

Follow reporter Jake Wright on Twitter @fljwright.