Remember the ATCs never recovered from the staffing shortage when Reagan fired them for striking on working conditions. The conditions have not improved the hiring has never caught up. Rates of alcholalism from work induced stress is extremely high and they have been showing up for work while not getting paid.
Anyone who calls all public sector people lazy or entitled, remember ATCs are government workers do work extremely hard and most log extensive overtime. These are government workers and they are American Heros through and through
Wonder how that changed the perception and the desire to become an ATC. Did it have a measurable impact, with folks avoiding that line of work. Or, it hasn't really made much of a difference? The idea is if many are retiring but we're graduating or hiring just as many or more, that's not that bad.
It's wild ATC isn't funded by use fees instead of being appropriated by congress. Seems like a good opportunity to provide some mechanism so the government has to shit or get off the pot, because if the government won't do the job the airlines would surely be glad to pay for the service themselves.
The problem isn't that ATC is funded by the government; it's that the government has been taken over by people who don't believe government should exist.
This is a fundamental failure state that it is impossible for any realistic governmental structure to protect against. The best we can do is put in place safeguards to make it harder.
And...we did. It's just that over the past 40 years or so (and increasingly so over the past 15ish), those safeguards have been systematically eroded by the Republican Party, both socially and legally.
This seems to be a somewhat inefficient system. There is no absolute need to consider aviation fees to be taxes and collect them through a federal agency.
Individual airports should be capable of financing their local ATC as they see fit, be it their own airport fees or, IDK, a surcharge on hamburgers sold in the local McD or a gift from a wealthy sponsor; and they should only have a duty to maintain certain technical standards.
There’s a whole network of radars and communication centers that are not part of any specific airport. How would you fund that through use fees at an airport?
On the other hand, if the fees corresponded to actual use, that would mean that the infrastructure along the most frequented corridors would automatically be the best funded one, which would probably be overall positive.
For VFR flights, communication with ATC is optional until/unless you get into busy Class D or better airspace.
If the fees are paid by any pilot passing through the ARTCC's zone, regardless of whether they use ATC, then it wouldn't be fair for the single engine piper putzing around over his backyard.
If the fees are paid by only pilots who use ATC, then pilots will stop voluntarily using ATC, leading to decreased overall safety.
In the US system, any revenue collection needs to be authorized by Congress. In fact, it is one of the arguments currently being argued in front of the Supreme Court about the tariffs.
It's a perfectly fine system. It just relies on our elected representatives not playing a game of chicken to get what they want, and act in the best interests of the country. Unfortunately, for a whole lot of reasons, they haven't been able to do this intermittently since the mid nineties.
Then if you collect too little? Where does the excess come from? Do you keep the fees high and pay that back next year? Do you account for inflation or charge points?
Is there some reason you _don't_ want this system to have slightly more funding than it "needs?"
And I do not use "fucking around" lightly. The FAA's repeatedly delayed and ineffective upgrade effort makes even the original healthcare.gov look like the Apollo program.
Certain is a strong word, but in many other contexts, this is the actually used system, even in aviation. The FAA requires certain standards of maintenance for aircraft, for example, but individual mechanics aren't FAA employees.
Yeah, maintenance seems extremely different from ATC though. Defining and enforcing maintenance standards is trivial and happens well outside the second-to-second operational loop of aircraft actually coordinating.
> the airlines would surely be glad to pay for the service themselves.
No, they would be glad to increase fares so that the flying customers pay for the service themselves. Currently, ATC is subsidized by all tax payers. Your method moves the burden to only those that pay for fares. I'm just pointing it out not saying it is good/bad.
That's probably better anyway. Air fares should cover the costs of flying. It's already a very profitable activity: it's much more efficient than the alternatives, and flying provides much value to passengers. So why can't the industry fund itself?
Ok sure the airlines themselves aren't managing to capture the profit from the overall activity (I assume because of intense competition in that part of the value chain) but what about the gains of everyone else involved? For instance the value to passengers is greater than the cost of the airfare, or they wouldn't buy a ticket in the first place. And all the others who make money from it.
I think the argument is that if you take the airline industry as whole (so not just airlines, but aircraft manufacturers, travel agencies, airports, all the concessions there, ...) it's still very profitable.
And if you add the value to the customers, then it's through the roof.
Maybe the reverse is more clear: if air travel didn't exist, it would have a huge economic impact; a clear proof of the value creation. Airlines just happen to capture essentially 0% of it.
That's a false dichotomy. If airlines didn't exist, we would have found some other way to move things. Maybe trains, which would have been the better future by far.
What timeline are you in that we skipped trains and went to airplanes instead? We went to planes because trains were slow, and have a problem going across large bodies of water.
The reasonably best examples of commuter trains are far superior to those of commuter airplanes as long as we are not talking about travel over or around significant bodies of water or long distances.
Trains carry much more weight, are more fuel efficient, are safer, generally experience fewer delays and cancelations, and door-to-door are faster for shorter trips (<450 miles).
Safety: since 1964, the Shinkansen has carried over 10 billion passengers without a single passenger fatality from a crash or derailment.
Speed: for trips < 450 miles, trains win because of security, ATC, taxiing, etc.
The majority of travel is not over water. It may be that trains' other advantages are preferable even for longer trips where a train would be slower.
For whom? Historically, aviation has not been a profitable industry over its lifetime[0]. The companies that still fly are basically just a combination of "survivorship bias" and "newbies still somehow subsidized".
We're looking at today's companies like you'd look at the half-season cast of Squid Game and thinking "this group seems to be thriving, I guess". That only works if you disregard everything that's happened before now and what will likely happen for the rest of the season.
For distances <120 km, cars are often quicker than trains, and for >900km planes are, but in between trains are often quickest (assuming infrastructure is actually present).
From what I understand, ATC also covers military flights in the US, which gives a pretty good national security reason to have central control over it... at least when a particular party isn't intentionally trying to destroy it along with various other government functions.
I agree - a good example is bridges and bridge tolls. Maybe a lot of people in NYC have crossed the verrazano bridge. "see, most of us have crossed it, I don't see why taxes shouldn't pay for it". The counterexample would be the trucking company, that once taxes pay for it and not tolls, runs convoys of tractor trailers up and down the bridge, rapidly accelerating wear & tear - had they paid on a toll basis they'd be paying their fare share vs someone who crossed in one time 8 years ago.
Well since the Republicans closed shop and went home instead of staying and trying to figure out a working solution, while also having the majority and the presidency, in this case it's easy to determine.
It is kind of wild that airports themselves don't straight up pay for this. I can understand not wanting to privatize it, as they'll be liable to half-ass it, but surely a usage fee on flights would cover it?
I wonder if this is because bigger airports near major cities and businesses would basically be subsidizing tons of airports in the middle of nowhere, and some people don't want to admit that?
Most airports in the middle of nowhere aren’t controlled.
There are something like 530 ATC towers in the USA out of 5000 or so public airports. 20,000 if we include anything that can be described as an airstrip.
Your wider point still stands though, probably something like 20% of the airports handle 80% of the traffic.
It seems logical that the government should have a lot of control over preventing air disasters. If we allow air traffic control to be turned over to the lowest bidder, then we can expect a lot more incidents, especially at smaller airports that don't attract a lot of traffic.
Commercial airline passengers are not the only users of ATC. If you include mail and parcel carriers and other use cases like med-evac, tourist, and other private flights, you are probably close to 100% coverage of US taxpayers in the country.
A quick search shows that there are over 20,000 ATCs employed in the United States. (I'm not confident in the sources I found - anyone know where to get reliable stats for things like this?)
Is the number of retiring ATCs higher than normal? I assume it is, but the article doesn't mention the baseline. It's hard for me to understand the scale of the issue from this article alone.
If we take the lower number of 15, than that is nearly 5.5k a year. Even if we round it down, that'd be 25% a year if your number is right and this situation continued. Of course it can't continue very long, because there won't be that many old enough to have the choice, presumably. But it's a crazy rate.
There is currently a shortage of ~3k controllers (as of this comment), and the time to train and put new controllers into service is significant. Excess retirements reduces time to system failure due to labor shortages.
> Entry-level applicants must complete required training courses and spend several months at the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City. Applicants are paid while in training. After graduating the academy, individuals are placed in locations across the country and must gain 2-3 years additional training, both classroom and on-the-job experience, before becoming a certified professional controller. This rigorous training includes close supervision and evaluation by senior controllers that ensures controllers are competent, professional, know their airspace environment and can deal with the pressures and high pace of the job.
Controllers in training have been quitting because of the shutdown.
> The shutdown is having real consequences, as some students at the controller academy have already decided to abandon the profession because they don’t want to work in a job they won’t be paid for, Duffy said. That will only make it harder for the FAA to hire enough controllers to eliminate the shortage, since training takes years. He said that the government is only a week or two away from running out of money to pay students at the academy.
> “Currently nearly 50 percent of major air traffic control facilities are experiencing staffing shortages, and nearly 90 percent of air traffic controllers are out at New York–area facilities,” the FAA said in a statement posted on X on Friday evening.
This comment was moved from a different post that said “up
to 15 or 20” are retiring daily. Thus the lower number is actually zero, and my guess is they are actually describing a peak day of 15 or 20 people retiring (which is still a lot!)
Typical ATC career is 25-30 years, so naively you'd expect ~1.8 retirements per day. Maybe a little more if you assume the OP is talking only about working/weekdays, maybe a little less as the maximum age for trainees has been raised over time.
Remember, the pain this is causing everyone means less to the people in power than does the benefits of this shutdown (to them). We can argue about what those benefits are all day long, but they wouldn't be refusing to have discussions with the Dems if there were not some benefit, be it political power they can wield, or whatever.
The problem is that it's existential for both Democrats and Republicans. Given the current makeup of the federal government, Republicans basically have all the power and have been able to leverage that into spending the last 10 months doing whatever they want. The exception to that power is the Democrats' ability to filibuster in the Senate and shut down the government by not agreeing to whatever the Republicans put forward.
The actual demands I think are essentially irrelevant. If Republicans give up anything to the Democrats, the spell of the last 10 months is broken and Republicans can no longer unilaterally control the direction of government. If Democrats don't get any concessions, they're essentially irrelevant for the next 14 months and that only changes if they win either the House or Senate in 2026. Given that, it's not obvious how this ends.
It's not existential for the Republicans. THEY ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE ABLE TO DO ANYTHING THEY WANT. This setup is essentially anti-democratic, which is why they are able to murder hundreds of thousands of aids patients in Africa and kill 'future you' through their cancelling the bulk of investment in life sciences.
> The problem is that it's existential for both Democrats and Republicans.
> If Republicans give up anything to the Democrats, the spell of the last 10 months is broken and Republicans can no longer unilaterally control the direction of government.
How is that in any way shape or form “existential”? Existential means “if they fail they cease to exist or matter”, not “if they fail they don’t get to whatever the fuck they want”.
Yeah I did think about that after I made the post. I agree that you and jaybrendansmith are probably right in that it should be a bigger deal for the Democrats than the Republicans. I'm not sure Congressional Republicans see it that way though and I was thinking more about how they view the standoff, since that's important in seeing how or if there is a path towards ending the shutdown.
They've made a pretty unprecedented bet on unilateral party-line action and the legislative branch significantly deferring to the executive. I'm sure they're concerned about what the party looks like trying to transition back to a more normal way of doing business, especially given what their voters are now primed to expect. I agree this should not be existential, but I also don't understand congressional Republicans putting themselves in this situation in the first place, so clearly I'm not looking at the situation the same way they are.
It's interesting how the effects of filter bubbles are playing out here. Everyone believes that they have the upper hand and the majority of the American people are on their side, because computerized personalization shows them only opinions from people who agree with them. As a result, they think that the negative popular opinion for the shutdown will fall primarily on the other party, and so it is rational for them to continue the shutdown until the other party blinks. Of course, the other party has the same information distortion in the opposite direction, so they also believe that if they just keep going, the American public will blame their opponents.
In reality, the public is pretty close to split down the middle, and both parties are getting blamed, and the real message that people are taking away from this is that Congress is dysfunctional. It's a game of chicken where both parties think that the other side will blink, and so they just end up crashing.
Reminds me of the dysfunction the Roman Republic towards the end of it’s time.
It’s not unique to the US however, I think maybe we are all approaching the end of the line for current political/civil systems without further work that no one seems interested in taking.
The shutdown is a temporary budget squabble in a stable democracy; a banal political stunt that has happened every few years for the past few decades.
Rome’s dysfunction meant civil wars, assassinations, generals seizing poWer, private armies, and uprising (in a fundamentally different society where, incidentally, over 25% of the population was slaves.)
There has been over 2000 years of history since Rome… when a the only analogy a person can come up with is some half-baked allusion to the Roman Empire/Republic it’s a good bet said person lacks a sense of history, knowledge of current events, and common sense.
None of which has anything to do with the ‘last days of the Roman Republic.’
Feel free to panic and tear your hair out… that’s what both sides do. Boring. The post, however, make some pretentious analogy to the Roman Republic. The analogy was silly. That’s all. It’s just an annoying variant of Godwins law: Rome or Hitler… the only two analogies available to those ignorant of history.
Assassination & attempted assassinations have all happened within 12ish months.
You’ve got an executive branch stacking all open positions in judicial and legislative branches with their political appointees. And the executive is interpreting the law to gather as much power as possible to the head of state.
It’s not hard to see the parallels but you keep on trucking dude.
> You’ve got an executive branch stacking all open positions in judicial and legislative branches with their political appointees.
The judicial branch is composed of Judges who are confirmed by the Senate… not the executive branch.
And there are no ‘Legislative branch’ appointees.
I assume you mean the executive branch is making appointments to the executive branch? Who would you prefer to make such appointments? The Postal Serice?
So you’re saying the solution since Republicans control congress they should do away with the filibuster, pass a check funding bill and then continue governing under bare majorities with no filibuster?
I don’t particularly like that outcome and I think the public understands that democrats have at least some leverage or they wouldn’t be acting in this way.
The way this normally works is, when the House has passed something and the Senate won't, it goes to a reconciliation committee (with members from both houses), and they bring a compromise bill back, and both houses vote on it.
OK, the House passed something. The Senate has made it very clear that they won't pass it. Well, who's preventing the next step from happening? Speaker Johnson, that's who.
Sure, there are sessions where negotiation must happen between House and Senate. I personally think we should abolish the filibuster - it's undemocratic in the extreme. Republicans (only!) still have the "Hastert Rule" for the House, which is equally undemocratic, and named after a convicted sex offender.
I'm urging the current Senate, controlled by Republicans, the party also controlling House and Presidency, to get rid of the filibuster because then the ruling party could not escape responsibility for their legislative actions.
Polling suggests that independents don’t “overwhelmingly" blame the GOP. It’s split 48/32/14 GOP/Dem/Equal
"Democrats and Republicans hold each other's party more responsible for the government shutdown. Among independents, 48 percent think Republicans in Congress are more responsible, while 32 percent think Democrats in Congress are more responsible and 14 percent volunteered that they think both parties are equally responsible.”
A 16 point difference is quite substantial in American politics. It's a matter of taste whether you consider it "overwhelming," but it's objectively not split down the middle.
This is true, but it's also changing every week to where people increasingly blame the Republicans. A lot of people are still completely insulated from the consequences of the current shutdown, but as food benefits lapse and air travel shuts down people are going to blame the very public president and party that's allowing this to happen.
What does the Supreme Court or White House have to do with the bipartisan agreement between Senate garbagepersons to retain the insane filibuster policy that guarantees non-resolution of simple deadlocks?
For good reason. That's what being in charge means. Biden had to take the blame while he obviously wasn't capable of being in charge. But it does always seem to be exploited beyond reason by the opposition. I'm very curious on what do non-diehards think on Dems blocking the clean bill and on keeping funds flowing for themselves to stay in session.
Please don't start a flame on this. If you can't stand trump, make it an exercise in self-control and skip the reply on this one.
I'm not sure I agree. In a democracy, you should expect voters and representatives to act within the framework of that democracy, which is usually more complex than the binary choice of being the party in power or not. Yeah, in aggregate 2024 was a loss for the Democrats. But they didn't lose every election, and because of that they retain some power even as the minority party, specifically the power to filibuster in the Senate, as well as the more general power of being the minority by only a relatively slim margin in both houses of congress.
The Congressional Democrats who did win their elections choosing not to use that power to advance policies they were presumably voted into office to support just because Republicans won more elections in Congress as well as the White House seems like a strange definition of democracy. The intent of Representatives and Senators is to advocate for their constituents. Abdicating that in favor of taking a nationwide poll is the opposite of their job. Why should a Senator from California base their vote on which party the good people of North Dakota chose to represent them or how many other states voted the same way?
Yes. People love to hyperbolize "this is the last election ever", "this is the most important election ever", "no matter what we need to win this time or the world will end".
I mean they wouldn't talk to democrats before the shutdown so it seems entirely reasonable for them not to talk to them afterwards.
I still find it (morbidly) hilarious that congress considers doing their job the "nuclear option". If they weren't hiding behind the filibuster and started legislating maybe their approval rating wouldn't be such trash.
And here we see a system that was already stretched to the breaking point BEFORE the shutdown, put under an incredible strain and failing. A more robust system can handle sudden shocks, but when you’ve spent years whittling away at it there’s no slack.
I don’t know US specifically but I know a bit about Canadian air traffic controllers. It’s a high stress but very well paying job with good pension etc. But I suspect there’s not a lot of opportunity to change to another job and get the same pay and benefits. So I guess I wonder what the end game is in resigning? Is it just people taking some pre-specified early retirement option, is it early career people that just are cutting their losses? Unless I’m missing something it seems like for someone mid career at least, waiting it out seems like the only real option.
Not really ATC specific, but at some point most people in most jobs can't deal with indefinitely not getting paid and will have to go do something else even if they don't have a good backup plan. Working retail, driving for Uber, etc, all have vastly better ROI at the moment than working ATC getting a $0 paycheck. In theory they'll get backpay and have better future earnings prospects than leaving for an uncertain career change. But that's probably not as comforting as it should be since it's uncertain when that will happen, or even if, since the government has unnecessarily gone out of its way to cast doubt on the promise of backpay.
If they are allowed at work when they are not being paid, why don’t the airlines create a fund where they just pay them something so they can survive the shut down? IIRC the shutdown isn’t happening that often, they probably can just put money in it and use it when needed
They don't need an "emergency fund". It's not like the government maintains this giant sack of money in the basement of Congress that they reach into to pay government employees. They are still buying and redeeming treasury bills and notes. They -could- pay government employees (see also: Congress is getting paid) but they won't because the strategy to grief normal people while they fight is deliberate.
They can speak to the people actually working on the job? Even if there's no one to give the airlines a list the pilots can deliver the message when they talk at take off and landing.
I'm a heavy gamer. I like lots of strategy games. Sometimes I look at our country like a strategy game: where we are investing resources, infrastructure planning and investment, active problems or threats and how they are being prioritized and handled, managing citizen happiness, etc.
The last 10-20 years feel like a massive lost opportunity to invest in some of these improvements and forward-thinking planning. In the last few years, it feels like catastrophic decision after decision.
I can't help but look at the state of America and feel like I'm looking at an inexperienced amateur player taking a relatively strong game position and slowly throwing it away. Crumbling infrastructure, weak citizen cohesion and education, intentional weakening of our own national and cyber security in more than one way, not to mention all the harm being done to our reputation and relationships with other countries.
It feels like we are in a weaker position then ever: militaristically, economically, scientifically, and so on. Meanwhile the threats of China and Russia and what could happen in the next few years are quite concerning.
I'm pretty pessimistic right now. I know the world and the US is not as simple as a strategy game, but tons of principles from strategy games well-understood by experienced players sure could help with more wise use of resources. Attention and time are also incredibly valuable resources that feel like they are being thrown away right now.
Getting into a major conflict could help unify The People and put focus on more important problems in the country, but as far as I'm concerned, I think all the other NATO countries would be the ones holding the war effort together. I'm just ranting at this point though.
I can't escape the impression that the person currently most responsible for these shortsighted decisions simply doesn't care what happens after he's gone.
There's something particularly pathetic about lauding a guy for not taking a $400K yearly salary when he spends $4M a weekend on taxpayer money playing golf, but that's what you get when we've spent the better part of the past 50 years demonizing social programs and the people who have been forced to rely on them.
For a massive part, if not the majority of his voter base, they don't get to experience assets and investments that aren't their regular salary or wages and the physical items they purchase with them. They don't get high value benefits, vesting stocks, or auid pro other than bartering with their pees. From that perspective, forgoing a salary seems like a huge personal sacrifice.
It is fascinating how there are two current opinions about Donald Trump and that one is that he is a serial liar and the other is that he tells it how it is.
I'm sympathetic to the latter because he manages to talk without a filter, but the things he lies about are much more serious and much more obvious and much more dangerous. But it gets him very far because people seem to think that "owning the libs" is the success condition for domestic and foreign policy.
I agree though, the next 3 years are going to be him insisting things are great. China will probably try for Taiwan after he leaves and he'll just continue to say things like they wouldn't have done it if he was in office. And sure that's partly true, because why not just wait a year until he's gone, then China can really split the electorate on what we should do.
> I'm a heavy gamer. I like lots of strategy games.
Politicians should have to play several hundred hours of 4X games (Civ 4/5/6/7, Stellaris, Europa Universalis, Hearts of Iron) before they're allowed to run for office.
I'm curious on your take on the necessity for political leaders to master the "exterminate" prong of the 4X?
The thing is, a game is a tool with a surface-level set of rules, and a ton of implicit belief systems of how the (game) world works.
You could say someone might become a shrewd negotiator by playing Monopoly, but that is based on a narrow set of winning negotiation strategies which either the game builders have consciously built their game around, or emerge due to their cultural/personal biases or even come up unexpectedly from the rules of the game.
So filtering your leader(s) this way requires agreement that the ideology promoted by the game(s) is what the people want to live under.
> I'm curious on your take on the necessity for political leaders to master the "exterminate" prong of the 4X?
Civilization, for one, has scientific and cultural victory conditions, and not just military. Stellaris takes economic and technological factors into account.
But the main skill in being able to "win" is the ability to balance various needs of the population: economic, technology, happiness, crime, foreign threats. And it may not even be able "winning" but about how you play the game: all potential candidates could be given several randomly generated seed, and their gameplay is available for evaluation. Some seeds could be militaristic species, others pacifists; some capitalists, some collectivists; etc, with the expectation that you don't (necessarily) play how you'd like the society to be, but role play as the species at it is: so you may be a pacifist, but you have to play as a militarist if that's what the species is in-game.
If you can't wrap your head around the interconnectedness of resources in something as simple as a video game, what chance do you have IRL?
> On a flip side - politics is deeply social game. My mental image of gamers is very opposite of social (yes I know many games nowadays are social).
On the flip-flip side, the US has a president which seems to have a high 'charisma score' and very little grasp on reality.
Being able to wrap your head around the interconnectedness of resources in something as simple as a video game is just one factor. I'd like to know how much candidates can deal with the complexities with something as 'simple' as video game society: they could suck at it, and that could be fine if they have other qualities, but it could be a useful data point.
Can confirm, building a startup scratches much of the same itch as playing Civ — I would say one of the primary differences is that it requires immense growth in interpersonal skills to be able to execute any strategy effectively.
It's hard not to zoom out and look at the world as a game at times. If you do that, and go back way more than 10 years, it feels like every country is playing terribly.
Countries used to routinely go on domination quests for land and resources. They used to go find exotic lands and claim them as their own. They used to harvest resources and enslave the losers.
Now, not so much. If you watched it zoomed out as a game, you'd assume the powerful players all got bored with it and gave up.
Of course, realizing it's not a game but real people, you realize the world collectively is probably in a better place. But it also means powerful countries giving up power, which is weird to see happen.
>Countries used to routinely go on domination quests for land and resources. They used to go find exotic lands and claim them as their own. They used to harvest resources and enslave the losers.
This is not a golden age to look back on fondly. That was colonialism. That was the world wars. That was the bleakest era in human history.
That doesn't mean power games don't exist anymore though. The order that prevents regression to the above is held in place by peaceful competition and a threat that nobody wants to relive those horrific experiences. Yet the leaders lived through these horrors are gone, replaced by their children who seem to not have a healthy fear of the depths of depravity humans can fall to. Instead focused on personal wealth accumulation to the exclusion of all else, and if the structures that prevent global war are in the way of that well they need to go.
To me it doesn't look like the powerful have given up power, it seems as concentrated as ever. It is more that the concept of a nation isn't that useful to them under globalization at least not in the same way.
Some of this is due to changes in technology. For example as farming improved with the green revolution shear land area counted for less, and shipping and refrigeration allow longer distance imports.
So rather than land area control you see more localized strategic resource control. Things like mines, oil fields, shipping lanes etc.
The United States has benefited tremendously by having global peace and free trade in the developed world. And the rest of the world generally has as well.
It's simply not in the United States' best interest to go colonizing militarily, nor is it in other countries' if the sole super power is providing stability.
Indeed, to go along with your analogy it does feel like we have chosen to go for a "All in rush", rather that try and compound marginal advantage. Sometimes that does work, but is can be a really chaotic where small perturbations can wildly swing the outcome.
To me the most wild thing about our current circumstance is the abstraction away from the real with financialization. Pretending that money basically has unlimited optionality and liquidity in the future without having to manage, maintain and develop the resources, capabilities, infrastructure, and environment for the long future not just the next few quarters.
Especially when it comes to investing for retirement. So much people are delegating their excess to grow the "market" which by in large is destroying the foundations for that very retirement by chasing maximal growth of money while destroying the underlying systems (healthcare, housing, social and environmental stability).
Maybe this is the best we can do due to adversarial constraints and the current system state. But that is a pretty depressing thought.
Americans today are incapable of envisioning a better future and incapable of envisioning a worse one! We as a society are now only able to focus on what problems exist now, and to demand that they are fixed tomorrow.
There are a lot of problems that can be solved over decades, but we can no longer even fathom such a thing, much less put together the will power to see such projects through.
> It feels like we are in a weaker position then ever: militaristically,
> economically, scientifically, and so on. Meanwhile the threats of China
> and Russia and what could happen in the next few years are quite concerning.
On the other hand, it's not only USA really.
Russia with their czarist structure of power and control hasn't really had an economy that's more sustainable than USSR ever pretended to have, and their government keeps digging the country further in the grave as we speak. Russia can be a nuisance to its neighbours by their size alone but as their failing offensive in Ukraine shows they don't really give much to worry about in their peer countries of similar size and position.
Europe is running around like a group of headless chicken pecking eachother with minimal ability to make decisions cohesively and in unison, and many larger European countries are trampling knee deep in the mud when you compare to their heydays.
China is indebted, lacking energy, yet wants to expand their projection of military power but having enough to do with their current neighbours and desperately needing to maintain trade relations around the world means that, at best, the ruling party can only think about it. Unlike some other peer nation states I think they just might ultimately be wise enough to understand their position themselves, too, despite the desire to posture hard.
Further, I can name many countries that are, in relative terms, doing similarly stupid things now that they didn't do before and few that have actually managed to preserve some common sense but they're either small enough to not matter a squat on the global stage or they aren't interested in global power in the first place.
Not that USA isn't actively destroying the very relations that did help them extend their power across the globe cheaply through allies, working to weaken the dollar, and in internal affairs shooting themselves in the foot at a rate that could make even Russia jealous, but USA is still pretty good in comparison to their competition. There's no serious contender for USA at the moment and won't be any time soon even if USA keeps hitting even lower and lower bars of statehood.
I'm more pessimistic than optimistic about the future but the reason is that it seems the world as a whole has enshittified themselves down to a level that would have seemed even theoretically impossible by the key players only a few decades ago.
In my eyes China seems to have a very strong position. They have invested so heavily in optimizing their industries, regulations, etc. that they really seem to operate many orders of magnitude more efficiently than anyone else.
They also have a great advantage in their communistic structure. If they decide on a big project, pivot, allocation of resources for long-term strategy, they just do it. You don't have to convince citizens or states. They just do it if it makes strategic sense.
Those benefits often seem to outweigh the issues of citizen happiness, cohesion, government support. China has gotten incredibly good at controlling their citizens such that dissent seems like a pretty small issue for them to deal with.
As I understand, China is facing some difficulty scaling up food production for strong food security. I'm not familiar with their issues regarding power generation, but I'm curious to know more. While I'm not surprised they are indebted, like almost every other country in the world, I don't see that stopping them from ignoring the rest of the world when they don't think anyone else can stop them. Whenever tensions reach a breaking point.
On top of all that, China seems to have a lot of good talent, particular in the technology sector. We are at the precipice of an AI and drone-enabled world war, and if a country were to make vast strides in that technology to get ahead of peers, the power differential could be quite scary. And if any country has the industry and resources to produce tons of such weapons at scale, I'd expect it to be China, maybe with some help from their allies.
China has been a rising star for a long time, albeit not without its share of problems obviously. I heartily agree there's a lot of momentum in China to the direction of things getting better whereas traditional western countries lack much of that, and might even ride a momentum for the worse. And China's centrally-led government can be very effective and more sophisticated, in a way most other dictatorships simply aren't. But China is still too weak to make moves. Their domestic policy and handling of their internal affairs eats up their resources of force, and they also have a long border full of territorial skirmishes they can't just ignore while acting out militarily. It's hard to see China being able to make a move that would be a threat to West and that wouldn't cost way too much. China can certainly posture threats left and right, but I think they understand they don't necessarily need to consider carrying out those threats for real. They also know the art of patience, and together with that and some effective propaganda they can just sit, wait, and slowly move the piece towards their favour, and there's some calm wisdom in that that I greatly appreciate. The constant talks and news we see about a threat posed by China is likely a significant part of just that.
Most of my early 30 year old friends are very pessimistic about the future. I am pessimistic but less so. I think (and hope) that the republic will still be standing. But what I see and expect is that Trump will spend his time doing performative actions. He is narcissistic and he conflates the deference he receives when flying around the world negotiating trade deals with deference to the US. The reality is that telling him he deserves the Nobel peace prize is easy pickings for politicians who don't want to tank their economies while they realign with Russia.
Ultimately I think where we end up after his second term is he leaves, he says he did a great job and his supporters believe him. But we have problems. And he has this fantastic blessing of controlling all 3 branches of government, which he is wasting by grabbing power and solving NONE of them. So really we just wasted 4 years. And where the world is right now it's probably the worst 4 years we could ever waste.
Didn't DOGE/Musk try this or at least talk about it? Like modernizing the whole system or something? I don't think the turn around time on such a conversion would be very quick. I'm not sure there are thousands of qualified controllers waiting in the wings private sector, though maybe I'm wrong about that.
at a certain point, rebooting ATC could become exceptionaly difficult, as the whole aviation comunity, flys.
And no, you cant train new AT controllers, they learn on the job, and what a job it is!
as part of our pilot training they took us into a controll tower, which is a radicaly modern, high tech, high security environment, and let us hang around, the senior hand started chatting with us, while directing air traffic, ground traffic, confering with coleages, talking on the phone, telling us a joke, all at once, and his timing was so good, that the joke was still funny......these are guys who can do other stuff
Depending how bad it gets you could end up in a situation where European controllers are needed to at least help get things stood up again but while the job is similar the systems won’t be.
That or you pay the ones who’ve resigned a shit load of money.
It astounds me how quickly they are breaking things that took decades or more to build.
Also, there are strict medical (including mental health) and age requirements in order to become and remain an ATC. You need to be under 31 to apply and must retire at age 56.
Curbing air traffic at major airports by 10% -- seems like this change alone would cause enough upheaval and disruption to everyday operations that it would offset any incremental relief from slightly lower traffic volume.
I heard a radio report that said something like 25,000-30,000 flights a day, so 10% would still be 2-3 thousand flights per day canceled. They said a majority of these would be the smaller legs from smaller airports to the larger hubs. The flights from hub to larger cities would be less impacted. However it breaks down, 2-3 thousand flights a day is a lot of flight crews not working, and similar cascading effects. So not only an inconvenience for travelers, but some people are going to take a financial hit because of this
Yet still not as much as Osama bin Laden achieved. If you want to take things to the extreme, why stop where you tipped toed through the tulips to get to?
If this keeps going, lots of knowledge will be lost. But at least by retiring they will start getting paid (I think) via 401k, Social Security or pensions.
In a way we have an idea what to expect. When Reagan fired the controllers in 1981/2, AFAIK there were no major incidents with air travel. But I think Military Controllers were brought in to cover the holes the firing left.
This time, I thought I saw Military Controllers are unable to cover or were told not to cover. so I guess we will see how this plays out with a set of crazy people in charge of the US.
> But at least by retiring they will start getting paid (I think) via 401k, Social Security or pensions.
Gov't 401k is called TSP, and like regular 401k plans it's not accessible (without penalties) until you're 59 1/2. Social Security also has a minimum age (62) before you can start receiving benefits. ATC can access FERS earlier than other federal employees because of their mandatory retirement age (56) which is below MRA under FERS (57 for most people now). They can get their pension at age 50 with 20 years of ATC time or any age with 25 years of ATC time (some other services also get this benefit and count towards that).
And an important point there, because ATCs retire before 59 1/2 and before 62 by necessity (56 is the oldest they can be), they won't get their TSP or Social Security for several more years.
Pensions are being held up for people who are retiring right now as the people processing retirements are also furloughed (I don't think all, but it's impacted friends of mine with delays to processing). Retirements are already slow to process and occasionally people end up waiting 6+ months to get their pension (they should get back pay in that case, but it's still months without income).
I can't believe it takes this long. I would resign the very first day my paycheque doesn't arrive. There's one and only one reason I go to work every day.
I can't imagine you're getting a huge inflow of people in their 30s or above itching to spend years training for a job where you won't get paid for months at a time at the whims of fighting politicians.
No it doesn’t. They require years of specialized training paid for on the governments dime, and have a mandatory retirement at age 56. Much older than 31 and it simply does not justify the expense of training.
We can always re-examine our priors and assumptions given the current context. It's also worth considering other fields. For example, military helicopter pilots training is longer, more expensive, and frequently only requires a 6-8 year commitment. It doesn't pass a sanity check that a 25 year career should be too much of a concern... if they were treated well.
If the Democrats are smart, they'll keep the shutdown going until Trump folds, keep it going until the midterms if they have to. It's the first thing they're doing that people like, they blame Trump for all the misery.
He's jumping in front of the bullet by trying to stop SNAP under a goofy theory that Democrats actually care if people go hungry. Many Republicans have this strange but deeply-held crazy belief that Democrats are motivated by ideology rather than the same money that they themselves are motivated by, so they always think threatening to cut the baby in half will work.
And he's busy building a ballroom. People are really loving flights getting cancelled and more expensive, hard to blame that on immigrant fent terrorist antifa; and if there's anything that middle-class people hate, it's minor inconvenience.
Dems don't have to say anything (in fact it's better if they don't say anything) or do anything. Just watch the poll numbers go up and the donations from health insurers go up. All rational people agree that Obamacare sucks. But the Republicans are fighting to make it worse.
Remember recission panels? Remember not being able to get insurance if you had sleep apnea (aka pre-existing condition)? I can go on and on about exactly how insurance sucked shit before the ACA.
The ACA could be better, and it was supposed to be adjusted over time. The problem is that we've got an entire party in the US who sole solution to the problems in the ACA is "Destroy it all" without providing a single alternative or improvement.
Since when have Republicans or Libertarians ever cared about the truth on the ACA? They still call it Obamacare, for God's sake.
From the very beginning they talked of "Death Panels", that quite literally already existed in insurance companies. And on zero basis, the ACA has no such thing!
Laws are irrelevant if they are not enforced. Laws are being very slowly or very selectively enforced these days, while some of the powers that be are flagrantly breaking laws.
> Will they get their salaries and some extra compensation for the tardiness?
Theoretically, yes. Just regular pay plus OT that they are owed. No bonus or extra compensation.
Also, most of these folks can fairly easily get low interest loans from banks or credit cards that will be due when they get back pay.
Part of this story is not being told, but I’m not sure what part.
Were these folks who were about to retire anyway?
Were these folks who plan on getting hired back when the government reopens?
I’m not sure, but I don’t think the complete story is being told here (not necessarily with malice or intent).
>Are there any laws that protect labour in the US?
Air traffic controllers are famously a group of people who were just mass fired for striking. These days the laws in the US actually protect the airlines from them by making it illegal for them to strike.
why are traffic controllers government employees at all? wouldn't it be better for the government to maintain a standards/licensing body and only have a couple on staff as a "traffic controllers of last resort" during emergencies?
when an traffic controller quits, what job can they go to? clearly not another airport
It's probably because a lot of smaller airports in the middle of nowhere would be hard to get coverage for. The current system sends controllers to where they are needed, not to where people want to work.
Now, should more productive parts of the country be subsidizing air travel in less productive parts of the country? That's for you to decide.
"Now, should more productive parts of the country be subsidizing air travel in less productive parts of the country? That's for you to decide."
I would say "no", personally. In the absence of a subsidy, the network of the rural airports would likely become sparser, but the surviving ones would have better economy and, as a result, infrastructure too.
Isn't that arguably want rural communities want, however? I believe they're the strongest advocates of small government, less subsidies and pulling oneself (ie, their community) up by their bootstraps, regardless of what reality is.
There's more of a need to not have planes hit each other and cover areas with wreckage.
I can just imagine the hilarity if air-space was sold off to the highest bidder and then some of the smaller airports may decide to host advertising blimps in their share of the airspace and then charge plane companies extra to navigate around them.
Why would it be better to have this job be driven by profit?
It's a service provided to the public. Seems like a natural fit for being run by government. The only thing is this funding situation for this government is dumb. Otherwise we wouldn't be talking about it.
> It's a service provided to the public. Seems like a natural fit for being run by government.
I don't understand this part of your reasoning. It sounds like you are saying it is a service provided to the public therefore it is a natural fit for being run by the government. Do I understand your reasoning right?
Because if so: A lot of services are provided to the public. For example baking bread. Should every baker be a government employee?
The difference here is that everyone needs air traffic control and there's zero choices so a market structure doesn't make sense.
With bread, maybe I only like certain types of bread. Maybe I don't want bread. It makes sense for there to be a market with diverse offerings. If bread inputs get expensive maybe everyone pivots to eating potatoes.
In contrast if you want to fly out of a major city there's one major airport, and you need air traffic control. It's a uniform service that is required. The same sort of market structure is not really viable.
> The difference here is that everyone needs air traffic control
This is very much not true. People who don’t own or operate aircraft don’t need air traffic control.
> and there's zero choices
Probably what you are saying here is that air traffic control is a natural monopoly. You can’t have two (or more) paralel systems issuing clearances at the same time in the same airspace. That would be madness.
But what I’m saying is not that we should have some crazy capitalist system where rival air traffic controllers compete with each other in the same airspace. What I’m talking about is a system where air traffic control services are provided by a private company. A private company which is funded by service charges to aircraft operators, and one whose operations are regulated by the government.
You can argue why that is not possible, but this is exactly how Canada’s air traffic control is organised. There the air traffic controllers are employed by a non-profit corporation which is funded by service charges. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nav_Canada
Similarly air traffic controllers in the UK are employed by the NATS which is a public-private partnership.
Germany has a similar structure with Deutsche Flugsicherung, or switzerland with Skyguide (formerly known as Swisscontrol).
When you are arguing why it cannot work, you are arguing against all these examples.
Yea that's the point I'm making that it's a natural monopoly. And yea the examples you provide are another way to handle a monopoly, though it's not really clear to me what the comprehensive benefits actually would be. Other than to create an appearance of arms length from government.
Would have the upside of not being shutdown due to the USA's crazy government shutdown nonsense, tho possibly you still have the shutdowns of a union strike.
Kind of reminds me about how people slip up and occasionally call BC Ferries a crown corporation, and are corrected that no, actually BC Ferries is an independent, company, simply one with the sole monopoly contract to provide ferry service that is 100% owned by BC Ferry Authority, which is... owned by the Province and whose board is 44% selected by the Province (another 44% by municipalities, who are creatures of the Province).
> Other than to create an appearance of arms length from government.
Big benefit is to separate the regulator from the regulated entity. That alone could probably stop the kind of group thinking which let them route a busy helicopter route through a busy landing corridor with inadequate procedural controls.
Other big benefit is to make the flight operators pay directly for the services the flight operators need. We are not paying their fuel from taxes, why do we pay for air navigation services from taxes?
> Would have the upside of not being shutdown due to the USA's crazy government shutdown nonsense
That is why it is brought up, yes. That is the most direct benefit at this moment.
Also, people living under the paths of airplanes need ATC because they don't want planes colliding and crashing into their homes. It's a clear public service that benefits the public broadly. I personally wouldn't want to turn it over to profit-seeking, race-to-the-bottom private contractors.
Are you flying a Boeing 747-400 from Seatle to London return overflying Canada? That will be $5,370.78 please. It consist of $66.10 for oceanic services and $5,304.68 for enroute services.
Are you flying an Embraer 175 from Halifax to St John return? Good on ya. That will be $1,608.04. Pleasure doing busines.
Why are Americans paying for ICE agents to terrorize America but aren’t paying for ATCs to protect Americans? What decides what is and is not an essential service?
Their goal, since they 80's, has been to make government look incompetent so they can privatize it and use as a weapon against their adversaries (who they argue want "big government").
I saw this interview with Arie Rothschild, the author of strangers in their own land (https://youtu.be/RywaAeWbXjo). And she described this sort of paradox, that people sort of know that Republicans are the ones screwing them, but the sting from being hurt by the government causes them to be susceptible to the arguments Republicans make about the government not working.
Don't forget "so they can make a lot of money off of it." One of the critical legs in the "privatization" stool is to make everything more expensive to line the pockets of people profiting off of what was once a government-provided service.
There is no end game. He makes everything up as he goes along.
When (if?) the shutdown ends, he will claim victory no matter what the outcome. If it doesn't end, he will still claim victory. He always wins.
Given that Trump and the left have the same view on this government shutdown as they’re both acknowledging how Republicans control both houses, I wouldn’t say this is part of any plan he has.
Trump has called for the Senate to remove the filibuster, which would allow for the government to reopen with a simple majority instead of needing more votes from Democrats
One could say the only endgame is unilateral control
But this is an issue with Congress which Trump does not control. The Senate is not considering getting rid of the filibuster because of the threat its used in favor of Democrats after midterms
AFAIK the existence of the filibuster is something that's separately decided every session. I think if the Republicans delete it for this session, and Democrats win the next one, they'll bring it back because they suffer from extreme normalcy bias / Business As Usual syndrome.
Mike Johnson has been speaker for long enough so that the average follower of politics probably forgets the fiasco behind his selection.
He’s really not a very skilled politician at all.
And of course, Trump is beyond deep fried, he’s a full blown dementia patient. He has no ability to navigate Congress. He even gave away his party’s leverage by fighting against SNAP payments, giving Democrats no reason to back down.
Fun fact, the only two presidents without government shutdowns since the modern budget process began have been Joe Biden and George W. Bush.
Joe Biden in particular was a master at navigating Congress and has relationships all over the place across the aisle. The bipartisan infrastructure bill is a really legitimate accomplishment in that sense.
Without being in favour of it, this is one reason politicians are old. Not necessarily twenty years past typical retirement, but those relationships that were so useful to Biden were built over decades. Getting elected at 40 doesn't mean you also have the history with others in government to actully get things done.
Good faith could be assumed in some other countries, and those relationships could, subsuquently, be less vital. But that's not the political environment America has found itself in.
I think it’s both relationships and being legitimately good at what you do.
Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi were in their prime extremely shrewd strategic leaders.
Someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez started off young and somewhat isolated but has quickly turned into someone who is one of the most important leaders of the party before age 40.
The impression I get is that Mike Johnson was not picked for his skills or connections, but because he was someone who his party’s factions didn’t have an existing hate relationship with.
Why do you blame Trump for the shutdown? Isn't it caused by Congress basically failing to agree on a funding continuation? (I think it's been ages since they could actually go further and agree on a budget). Government shutdowns are common under both Republican and Democrat administrations.
You can say he refuses to compromise, but clearly so does the other side, hence the impasse.
The issue is that the Democrats 'compromised' on the last funding bill - basically had an agreement that some programs would stay funded.
Then the trump administration said "funding allocations from Congress are limits, and we do not have to spend that much on these programs if there is not a need"
There's a conflict because Trump thinks the obvious way forward is you destroy the filibuster, and the Republicans in the Senate fear that when there are more Democrats - say, after the mid-terms - they need the filibuster or else Democratic priorities can become law by simple majority.
Imagine trying to explain to Trump that you can't destroy the filibuster because too many of your colleagues might lose an election. It's like telling a five year old that he can't have desert because he hasn't eaten the vegetables. He doesn't want to eat the vegetables, you are a bad person because rather than agreeing with him you're acting as if he's wrong, which is inconceivable.
Some of Trump's advisors may have the idea that they can rig the 2026 elections and so it won't matter. A big problem is that some of these advisors also assured senators that they'd locked down 2020 and that didn't go so well.
To Trump this seems irrelevant. Why should he care about Susan Collins? She's not even hot, and hasn't given him any cool trinkets. So what if she loses to some Democrat? They're both losers, Trump is the ultimate and his people have told him that over 600% of people support Trump, if she loses that's her fault.
So that's a problem, a recurring problem and so far this term the solution has generally been to ignore Trump's useless suggestions but not do anything he explicitly forbids. Trouble is, Trump doesn't care about the shutdown but the at-risk Republican senators do care.
I actually give Trump more credit for understanding scrapping filibuster is the wrong move.
I also think he’s smart enough to realise people think he’s dumb. So he says scrap filibuster as a way to sow the seeds that there’s tension where there really isn’t.
Maybe it’s too much 4D chess but he is a master manipulator of media/public opinion.
The two longest shutdowns in the history of the United States of America have occurred under Donald J. Trump.
Trump is hosting Great Gatsby parties, traveling, golfing, and doing everything except trying to end the shutdown. He doesn't seem to care that much that it is happening. And the entire reason it is happening is because Trump's Big Beautiful Bill did not contain Affordable Care Act subsidies.
It is incorrect to say that what is happening is common under all administrations. This dysfunction is uniquely Trumpian.
> Government shutdowns are common under both Republican and Democrat administrations.
They're not really, especially at this scale. Since they became a thing when Carter was President, Biden and George W. Bush had 0. Reagan had 3, but only for 6 days total and George H. W. Bush had 1 for 3 days. Clinton had 2 for 28 days total and Obama had 1 for 16 days total.
Clinton and Obama's records are a bit more significant, but Trump so far across his 2 terms, 1 of which is less than a year in, has had 3 shutdowns for 77 total days so far. Or to put it another way, out of the 130 days of shutdown that have even happened since they became a thing 45 years ago, ~60% of them have happened in the 5 years Trump has been president. If you do the math, that's roughly 10x worse government uptime. Notably, those are also the only shutdowns that have happened with one party controlling the Presidency, the House, and the Senate.
I'm still not saying this is definitively the Trump administration's fault, but any way you look at it that is not a great record.
> I'm still not saying this is definitively the Trump administration's fault
How is it not?
The budget requires 60 votes, not a simple majority. Thus it's up to the majority party to present a bill that will win 60 votes.
Some important stuff in major democracies is designed to require way more than simple majority.
In Italy, e.g. the president is elected by the parliament, but the quorum required is two thirds of votes.
This is very important because it forces all governments to find a suitable candidate that is as unbiased and trustable as possible by the overwhelming majority of the representatives.
While elections of the president can drag for very long, even for months, I can't but say we italians have been blessed with great presidents. Each one stepped up to represent italians and never political interests.
> The budget requires 60 votes, not a simple majority. Thus it's up to the majority party to present a bill that will win 60 votes.
It's up to the majority party to do so, but not up to the President to facilitate it, even if he's a member of the majority party. Of course he should help find a solution and has some responsibility if that doesn't happen. But Congressional Republicans could work out a compromise with Democrats with or without the President's involvement, and as long as they have enough votes to override a veto they can come up with a compromise even if the President actively opposes it.
This is only true if Congress treats the President just as the head of a co-equal branch of government, which is not always the case and is definitely not the case for current Congressional Republicans. The fact that they defer to the President so much effectively shifts more responsibility to the executive branch, but I'm not sure congress isn't still to blame even if they abdicate their responsibility.
Well in this case the executive branch isn't even following congressionally appropriations, so one could argue that this particular shut down is more caused by the president than any other in history.
AFAIK this kind of situation is a result of a novel interpretation by an AG of a much older law some time around 1980. I don't think it's ever been tested in court, and we'd operated for decades under the old interpretation before then.
Trump could just say "we're going back to the old interpretation" and at-minimum buy several months of runway while court challenges happened (if they even did). This would be among the least questionable "stretches" (to be very generous) of presidential power he'd exercised.
So the deadlock is over ACA premium tax credits. A subsidy towards premiums, inversely proportional to income.
Republicans have to budge on this right? Health insurance is already dire in this country, you cant fuck it up even more. The working class is the biggest part of the citizenry, and we are in an affordability crisis
The incentive to provide benefits is to buy votes. If it doesn't buy votes for them either way because they are mostly voting (D) no matter what, then there's not much carrot to provide them, and since money doesn't come from thin air a distinct possibility you will end up selling the vote of some of the people you tax it from.
> A Representative represents everyone in their district
In theory, maybe; in practice, very much not; its one of the strongest arguments for having a system that has proportional representation (whether with small multimember districts or at-large proportionality or a hybrid system like Mixed Member Proportional.)
Somehow the Republicans have managed to convince their constituents that somehow stuff that will objectively fuck them over is actually not fucking them over. It's impressive in its own way.
I have seen people who still don't seem to understand the (extremely) simple "there's no such thing as a free lunch" part of economics and genuinely still think that the tariffs are going to be paid purely by China, because apparently they don't realize that for-profit businesses bake all overhead (including taxes and tariffs) into the total cost. It really isn't that complicated, but I guess the distortion field around "owning the left" makes them turn off this logic.
Project 2025 (the instruction manual that the president and his staff are hewing to) wants to shred everything in ACA and privatize everything. They offer nothing other than reducing taxes on the wealthy. The poors don't matter because they they are poor and exist only to be exploited for service work.
I think this is the last stand they can take that will (under normal circumstances) be completely forgotten before midterms. Democrats need to drag it out as long as possible and look for populist Republican allies.
They need to start campaigning for midterms now, and to be generous towards those populist worker-friendly Republicans and especially those that are threats to Republican incumbents. That means campaigning on something other than illegal immigration and trans. It also means that shutdown misery will be part of what they'll be campaigning on, so everything Trump is doing now will backfire. He cut his base out from under him with H1Bs, Israel and Epstein, so as terrible as they are, Democrats have a chance to get to popularity parity or even turn the tables right now.
Trump also gasses when he starts losing control of the situation. He lost at the end of his last term because everything was going wrong; he looked tired, and like he had lost interest in the job completely. A dragged-out shutdown will weigh him down and bore him like covid did. He doesn't even care about ACA tax credits.
I get that the Trump admin doesn't care a bit about the impact of the shutdown on the general population (they're fighting in court for NOT having to release the emergency funding that would instantly reinstate SNAP) and probably even welcome it as an opportunity for "government downsizing" - but things like air traffic becoming restricted would start to touch even the areas that the ultra-rich are interested in, would it?
The shutdown impacts Federal FAA controllers (at major centers/towers) who are considered essential and must work without pay.
However, many smaller FBO-serving towers are staffed by Contract Controllers, who are employed by private companies holding FAA contracts.
These contract controllers generally continue to receive their pay during a shutdown, shielding them from the immediate financial crisis affecting their federal counterparts.
Yes, air cargo will be impacted as well which will change the costs for businesses. They'll need to start shifting to other freight methods (rail, truck, ship) if available and those operate on different timescales than air cargo which can have further downstream effects impacting businesses' abilities to actually do their business.
More as an interesting fact than trying to be argumentative:
In the current electorate, Democrats are supported by a majority of both low-income and high-income voters. Republicans even it out by having a majority of the middle income voters, especially those without a college degree.
Wouldn't private planes still necessitate air traffic controllers? I remember when I flew with my uncle in his small private plane [1] he had to fairly frequently chatter with the air traffic people over the radio to report his position and altitude and the like.
[1] Just a tiny two seat thing, I don't come from billionaires, it wasn't a cool private jet.
No one rich enough flying what the average person would consider a "private jet" or private plane would be flying VFR from uncontrolled airport to uncontrolled airport. The "ultra rich" are not puttering around in single-engine Cessnas
yes but Musk has claimed he could trivially re-implement the system with more or less only using AI
putting aside weather that is true or not and just assume it to be true for the later argument
then it is the perfect chance to replace a public service the country depends on by a billionaire controlled private company
thats how you convert a country to an oligarchy, bit by bit replacing essential parts with entities privately owned and (most importantly) controlled by a few people so that a country "has to" depend on them to function and they can use it as leverage to force through their interests
to be fair, this might not be the intend here. A lot of the shutdown seem more blind ideological driven then well calculated, but it's a potential danger anyway
That's... concerning to anyone who has tried or witnessed a trivial rewrite. Let me hold some hope in the institutions that be to stop this from being hastily deployed.
It’s hardly a herculean task to replace most atc functions with software, detecting planes which are on collision course and instructing them how to avoid that being one of the easiest tasks.
Of course you’d still sometimes need a human in the loop, but you could get by with much less staff
I’m a pilot though, so fairly familiar with how ATC works.
In many places most day-to-day atc operations are already automated and the work is largely data-entry/answering service on the radio. We’re starting to get to the point where speech recognition is better than humans, so it would be perfectly fine to have humans communicate routine atc stuff with a robot.
Of course we’ll need humans available to react to emergencies.
Elon Musk will step in to save the day and privatize air traffic control. The government will transform the nation into a fully decentralized economy owned and operated by oligarchs, with the role of the government shrinking to that of a mediator between the various oligarchs, and employed directly by the oligarchs. Kind of like how they describe it in the sci-fi show Alien Earth.
Pull all air traffic controllers from private airports and shutdown all routes for private jets, then this government shutdown will be done by tomorrow morning.
That’s not how it works, like at all. Private airports don’t have controllers, and the ones I presume you are thinking of (smaller PUBLIC airports) the controllers are either employed or funded by the FAA.
Absolutely no English speaker doesn't read 'PJs' as 'pyjamas'.
That's what PJ's means. It means pyjamas, it always has.
I didn't mean to ruin your cool moment, but it's better to know now than to be out on the real world trying to project an air of casual wealth when all you're doing is confusing people about nightwear.
> Absolutely no English speaker doesn't read 'PJs' as 'pyjamas'.
While I agree that “pajamas” is the most common meaning of PJs, there is a certain socio-economic class in the US in which “PJs” is used far more often in speech to refer to private jets than pajamas.
I’m a “language guy”, and it was a new one to me when I started spending more time around people who were referring to, and often users of, PJs.
While the person you were responding to took a crass line, their linguistic intent was very clear to me.
FAA could restrict who flies in and out of airports, why not target private jets? It’s like closing traffic for cars but letting busses in. Much better unit economics in terms of passengers serviced.
I know many of the people reading this will think I'm being hysterical. But there was a small voice in the back of my mind when the shutdown started wondering whether that version of the American government would ever reopen and that voice has started to become much louder in recent days. Specifically the combination of this, the handling of SNAP benefits, and this all happening in November just seems intentionally designed to cause unrest. Families going hungry and/or unable to fly to spend Thanksgiving together feels like a perfectly orchestrated way to cause mass civil unrest that an authoritarian could use to seize power.
The sooner things become intolerably broken in the U.S. the better off I think the rest of the world is. The U.S. kind of scares me right now. So much power, wielded by deeply incompetent, broken, and evil people. And those who aren't those things are demonstrably too weak to do anything about it. I have a sense that things will only improve once they hit an intolerable low. And the longer it takes for that to happen, the more normalized it will become for all of those people. Basically: I really hope the current regime boils the water too fast.
A major part of the plot of The Every[0] is one protagonist's belief, akin to yours, that precipitating things to their worst outcome could be the fastest way to snap public opinion back to sanity.
I don't want to spoil the suspense, but I'll say that I do see the logic in hoping that a quick fire would call everyone's attention to the fire hazard. What you're failing to ask here is "What could possibly go wrong with this plan?"
The house is already on fire. The choices are to allow it to burn down and rebuild, taking the arsonists with it, or attempting to slow them down while the fire continues to burn and their supporters cheer them on.
American Democracy appears to be the same as second generation wealth: unappreciated until gone. Make Functional Governance Great Again. I wish it were not so.
Hahahahahahahhaa the arsonists aren’t going down with it, the arsonists are on mansions in a private island watching it go down. The idea that the people in power will _lose_ power as a result of widespread unrest is bananas. The only people watching the house burn are those with an insurance policy out on it.
> the arsonists are on mansions in a private island watching it go down. The idea that the people in power will _lose_ power as a result of widespread unrest is bananas.
Islands do make easy targets, though—they’re hard to move and they’re hard to hide.
Anybody with a $200 drone and a chip on their shoulder. All I’m saying is: if there is widespread civil unrest, billionaires are going to find themselves with giant targets on their backs.
The supporters are the people who keep voting Republican while Republicans (the arsonists) are stripping them of their SNAP benefits and ACA subsidies, while also dismantling the federal government out of ideology. The wealthy might influence (they spent over $40M to influence the NYC mayor election and still lost, for example), but the voters are the root cause.
I get the reasoning and I think it’s colourable. But I can’t help but be irritated having grown up hearing nothing but “Liberty or death” rhetoric of American identity, only to find it was all a pathetic cosplay.
"Liberty or death" never meant the first resort is detonating a proverbial nuke in Manhattan if a bad guy showed up in Time's Square.
But I agree that it's always been a pathetic cosplay. Most "patriots" I've met are by far the least patriotic and actively hate their fellow countrymen.
The fact that liberty died far before Trump was part of what he used in his cards to gain power. He sold a tale of draining the swamp, and tailoring back the federal of government. Of course, he's basically expanded the more dystopian power, and pumped in more swamp water, but part of the reason why his campaign is successful was that indeed liberty has been lacking in the USA for a long time and to some of the people that actually cared, he whispered the right lies.
With a measure of time, a counterpoint -- patriotism is that essential glue which holds together a pluralistic, multi ethnic, multi religious, multi cultural society.
Can it be corrupted and do excesses poison? Absolutely.
But can such a society survive without it? I say no: there's too much tendency for groups to fragment and revert to an us-vs-them, uncompromising mentality.
That said, my American patriotism is of the 'disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it' variety. Which is a different flavor than the en vogue militaristic machismo bullying.
When my brother and I argue this, that’s the position he takes: the risk is enormous. He’s the most brilliant mind I know (an immigration lawyer who has settled the Government’s hash more than once at the Supreme Court of Canada), so if I had any real say in all this, I would defer to him.
I can't deny that and maybe would even agree with that as an abstract theory, but I just can't stomach the amount of misery and death that would come along with this to ever use a word like "hope" to describe that outcome.
I don’t know if it’s reasonable or not to wish that, as an analogy, the German people had started a true civil war with the Nazis when they seized power. I can see how folks would wonder though.
I don't think this line of thinking has any merit. Genocides have happened before and yet modern genocides still make me sad for humanity and I wish we did a better job preventing them.
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>people like you post and talk about it but take no real action.
Jumping to this type of insult based purely on your own fabricated narrative about me does nothing but further justify my last comment calling out your worldview.
I completely agree. It's a good thing we're in a multipolar world now. The US (and its vassal states) have ruled terribly and the world suffered much over it. Sadly, there is still a lot of propaganda that needs to go away.
A great world leader would spread genuine peace. Not corrupt other countries, start wars and shed blood. The USA has failed to even keep its own citizens safe and secure. All I worry about is that they will drag a lot of other countries with them while they are falling.
So how can you completely agree if even you worry?
I worry more. I am certain, for all bad things the US did, the multipolar world will be much much worse. You think the other power players are better? No way.
Less and less likely they’ll drag others down, the first trump presidency was a warning, it’s gonna suck in the rest of the western world but we’ll survive.
The US hasn't been perfect, but you can hardly say we've ruled the world terribly. Because who has ever ruled it better?
We helped Europe and Asia rebuild after WWII instead of conquering them. To the extent that our previous enemies in Germany and Japan now have some of the strongest economies in the world.
There have certainly been wars, often with dubious justification or horrific results, but good luck finding any superpower in history that hasn't gotten into bad wars. Unlike the US, most of the time those other superpowers used war for territorial expansion, like Russia is doing in Ukraine today.
You can dream of your utopian world order all you want, but at some point you have to judge the US against the alternative instead of the almighty.
I love the DS9 reference. But it also reminds me of Hamilton:
You'll be back, time will tell
You'll remember that I served you well
Oceans rise, empires fall
We have seen each other through it all
And when push comes to shove
I will send a fully armed battalion to remind you of my love!
The idea that the world was better off under American rule is so deeply ironic that my brain is breaking.
The hope is presumably that the water boils fast enough to prompt electoral action before this regime eliminates voting rights and inevitably embroils itself in war to distract from its failings at home.
That this is happening is an indication that power has been seized already.
What do you think their goals with the power are? To make your life miserable? No, clearly, all they care about is the wealth and it's profits. Which they're already swallowing whole.
One side abhors "the government" and actively took an axe to the agencies and programs that the other side cared about. The result is that neither party have any sort of active investment in the current status quo.
For me, I wonder if Congress will ever reopen. I wonder if the trench warfare in Congress has gone so far that it will destroy itself rather than compromise.
But having 10%+ of all Americans panicking after missing a few meals is also enough to topple a country. There’s not a whole lot that can unify the different political factions of the US, but going hungry gets people focused on necessity and to deprioritize the shallow / vapid aspects of politics.
Arguably it’s China’s governing body’s biggest single fear.
I currently think this government shutdown is unlikely to do that to the US because politicians have had lots of practice making each shutdown less impactful for most Americans, but the longer we go, the more likely we are to find some high value thing the US government does that Americans don’t want to live without.
I can't see any rational politician letting this go beyond another two weeks. I can't imagine keeping people away from their families over Thanksgiving is gonna work out well for anyone.
I argue that politicians are absolutely rational. I frequently argue that even the dictator of N Korea acts rationally, only by very different rules than we are used to thinking about. Generally I reserve “irrational” to people who are functionally/mentally disabled, severely traumatized, or acting under the influence of mind altering substances (eg. RFK’s drugs history + trauma of 2 men in his life being assassinated during his formative years).
They are acting according to the expected responses to the stimuli they create. The problem is that the culture, society, previous legislation/jurisprudence, and the parliamentary rules they voted in all make the calculus of predicting what is rational for them uncertain.
China is the world’s most populous country with an autonomous governing body that doesn’t always respond to the voice of the people. And their leadership knows that multiple previous Chinese governments were toppled after the people were famished.
Since the democrats are not the ones in power at the moment, don't they have the bigger obligation towards the position of the people who voted for them.
Which would be exactly the demand they are making right now.
The party who is running the country does in theory have an obligation to all Americans, the opposition has an obligation to their own block.
Democrats refuse to vote the budget because the GOP removed almost all healthcare funding from it and won't compromise on that. If this budget passes as is, millions will die of preventable diseases. How is it on democrats?
Yes it’s true that those provisions expired, the Republicans are not changing or removing anything, and it’s the Democrats that are demanding additional funding to replace the Covid era funding that is expiring.
The rules of the game have changed. The President has declared that it doesn’t matter what is in the bill - he won’t spend on anything in it he doesn’t like.
The Republicans set the agenda and the rules in both the House and the Senate. They knew, before the shutdown started, that the bills they crafted would have to get 60 votes in the Senate to be enacted. And they also knew, before it started, what would need to be in the bills for them to get to 60 votes.
And yet they chose to pass a bill which would fail to get 60 votes. And when that vote failed to get 60 votes, they chose not to enter into any discussions to alter the bill to get it to win more votes, but rather to try to pass the same bill again and again to get 60 votes. Indeed, some have even called for passing a larger bill that includes Democrats' aims and simply ignoring the enacted law, for adherence to the rule of the law is already absent in this administration.
To blame this situation on the party with the least power at the moment is pure lunacy.
At some point it won't even matter if they have a plan. I'm comparing it to throwing a stone off a mountain. You might not achieve much, or you might start an avalanche and good luck trying to control that once it gets going. Then it's just gravity and mass and until that has run it's course you're along for the ride.
The plan is to make the midterms a Republican offer you can’t refuse, so to speak. One thing on the menu or the count, at least. Or something to similar effect. Why swear in any democrat in the house at all?
Well, there's one critical flaw which is that Trump is also fucking up with the military. A lot of military members are going unpaid, and many more are going unpaid and their family isn't receiving snap benefits. An authoritarian trying to seize power without the backing of the military is bound to lead to failure, and even though money is being funneled into ICE enmasse they're an untrained legion of goons with little access or ability to use actual military equipment.
If push comes to shove we're not going to get an authoritarian takeover, we're going to get a military coup. Unless they wake up and realize they need the guys with the hardware to do their whole fascist takeover thing.
People who support the guy aren't rational. He could personally take their every cent, say they're lucky that's all he did, and he wouldn't lose a single supporter. If the military went unpaid for half a year, all his supporters in the military would shift the blame to someone else.
ICE is effectively just a government-paid gang designed to harass immigrants and any citizen they think is a bit too uppity. They don't have any actual power to do things like holding down a city or enforcing martial law without the aid of the actual military or national guard. They have guns but not THE guns.
Didn’t they illegally take funds from the CIA to pay the military and ICE?
It seems to me like this is ideal for them. They break the law to pay for the stuff they want, let everything else rot. Why the Democrats have allowed this is beyond me.
Democrats should be counter-messaging every hours of every day, on all media, to create actual dissent within the electorate. They're acting like they can't do anything but watch idly. It's insane that with all that happened, Trump still sits at ~40% popularity. Americans won't realize how shitty the situation is until you tell them, and make sure to blame Trump and the GOP every step of the process.
Insurance premiums on the rise? Thank Trump for that. No planes for Thanksgiving? Blame Vance. Etc.
Democratic representatives are speaking out almost daily. Voters are protesting in force at least monthly.
Yet too many live in filter bubbles and take the talking points they're given. My conservative parents sound very reasonable when they react to unfiltered news, at least in the moment. But then the talking points arrive and they down play or change their outlook completely. It's like a Borg mind which sometimes has high latency.
And I can relate. I lived with that mindset. Teaching myself to twist information to fit the worldview and compartmentalize to dodge the dissonance. Visiting only the safe outlets who would reinforce the comfortable and familiar perspective. Thankfully public schools, the Internet, patient coworkers, and curiosity popped my bubble.
So because the democrats have no power except to make things worse, that’s what they should do?
They have publicly said that the only thing they are negotiating for is one more year of health care subsidies. That’s a noble goal, but the country voted, and they don’t want affordable healthcare. If the Democrats ever have power again, then they can make policy again as well.
> ...the country voted, and they don’t want affordable healthcare.
Can we say those voting for Trump in 2024 were saying they don't want affordable healthcare? There were many issues on the table and it wasn't a landslide.
Repealing Obamacare has been a _very explicit_ policy position of the Republican party for over a decade. They spent the entire last election telling anyone who would listen exactly what they would do, and now they are doing it. Yes, elections matter, and they have consequences. The midterm elections are in one year. That's the next chance the electorate has to change their mind.
The thing is, the last time the Republicans shut down the government for whatever pet project it was they wanted, I was furious. They lost the last election, yet they were trying to jam their agenda into law anyway through, essentially, blackmail. I'm not so hypocritical that I would be okay with it now because it's "my side". My side is functioning democracy at this point, and that's what the Democrats are risking with this shutdown.
> My side is functioning democracy at this point, and that's what the Democrats are risking with this shutdown.
Which side is yours? Hopefully not the side fighting in n court to take back SNAP benefits already distributed to needy families.
How are the Democrats putting democracy at risk when they cannot control any branch of government? And all their attempts to appease Republicans end up with Republicans pushing further anyway?
Turn on the news. The party agrees with me. I’ve been saying it since this folly was started, but they finally realized that you can’t negotiate with someone when your threat is their ideal outcome.
They want flights cancelled. They want people to starve. They want the FDA and the CDC shut down. They want chaos. More chaos is more excuse to take more control. It’s the classic fascist playbook. See : Reichstag fire.
Two weeks ago, the German state funded publisher Deutsche Welle published a video making a case about the possibility of Donald Trump actually being a Russian asset: https://youtu.be/JmEtx-EmYtc
I would be speechless if a conspiracy theory comes true, and the American state is actually captured by the Russians. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t wish it, but as a fan of the series The Americans, it will be epic..
Nah, he's swung back and forth on Ukraine at least 4 times now. Russia certainly did help Trump get the White House, what with the propaganda and all, as they correctly foresaw how terrible he would be for the American Empire. But he does not receive his orders from Putin, that's ridiculous. He's just cruel and stupid.
Agreed, but bluntly: what's the effective difference for Russia? They can't give direct orders, but they also don't have the rest of the world calling foul [about an illegitimate American leader, as we ignore Ukraine for a moment].
I'd say Trump not being an explicit asset gets them 90% of what they're after, with almost no downsides
The process of repealing a president (impeachment) is a political process. Republicans could do it at any moment, so every day they don't is an endorsement of what the president has done, continues to do, and even what he threatens to do.
This country is founded on the principle of being able to spot the pretexts (tariffs, terror-driven deportation, selective refugee status of whites fleeing black majorities, dissolving of social nets, rampant corruption) to monarchy-authoritarian leadership.
The current DNC is waaay too weak and uninterested in pushing back against Trump for this to realistically happen. They are complete enablers of this slow fascist takeover. Your only hope now is for the democrats to experience a "tea party" of their own, and have actual leftists take the reins before 2028. Seems highly unlikely now.
At a certain point this is like saying that you can prevent a rape by consenting. If the end result is the authoritarian seizing more power, the opposing party has no obligation to willfully participate in that.
I'm perfectly fine if the Democrats want to make this the last stand for American democracy, because if I'm right and this is truly the end goal of all this, it won't be the last attempt.
There is a reason I started my first comment the way I did. For Trump's entire time in politics, there have been people trying to communicate the type of person he is and the plans he has for the US and there have been people like you who have said we're overreacting.
It doesn't matter what actually happens. I could probably list dozens of examples, from the overturning of Roe v Wade to the violence of ICE, of times we have been told that our predictions were detached from reality until they eventually became reality. At this point if you can't recognize that the lines of acceptable political behavior have constantly been pushed under Trump's control, then I doubt you will ever admit it.
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I can't work out what this comment means. I.e., is someone using information about you from elsewhere on the web to attack you on HN? If so, that's bad, but we need details/evidence, which is why it's best to email us.
At some point the opponents of authoritarianism have to draw a line in the sand. If the American government is going to fall, this is as good of a line as any. Because simply conceding here would just empower the aspiring authoritarian to push harder next time.
I'm a Democrat (well, nominally at least) but they clearly need some people from both parties to fund the government. Democrats won't vote for a "clean" bill and Republicans won't negotiate. The crazy thing is people predicted the shutdown in the spring and the government still drove the boat straight into this iceberg.
> The crazy thing is people predicted the shutdown in the spring and the government still drove the boat straight into this iceberg.
The Democrats also had ample opportunity to extend the bonus Covid era subsidies when they controlled all branches of government. They could have included in the overall reconciliation funding bill that bypassed the filibuster. Not doing so was deliberate.
There were a variety of things they didn't predict, including the fact that the executive branch would believe that they have the right to not spend the money congress appropriated to do things. This is the real crux of the shutdown: Negotiations where you demand some spending in exchange for votes are unlikely when the other side can refuse to spend the money, so ultimately there is no credible basis on which to even begin negotiating.
You'd think that after more than half a year of outright destruction of your country you'd stop digging. Indeed, elections have consequences, so why are you so upset with the democrats? Aren't you going to fix things now? This is your finest hour, and it will be remembered for a long time, how you acted and what drove you to keep on digging that hole when it was abundantly clear that the path chosen wasn't working at all.
Just one thing: don't tell me afterwards that you didn't know.
> Indeed, elections have consequences, so why are you so upset with the democrats? Aren't you going to fix things now?
The destruction I see is being done by the unreasonable Democrat Senators holding hostage hungry children and Federal workforce.
> This is your finest hour, and it will be remembered for a long time, how you acted and what drove you to keep on digging that hole when it was abundantly clear that the path chosen wasn't working at all.
The intransigence of the Democrats is what will be remembered here. They will eventually cave, their old guard that did so will be booted in the next primary, and their replacements will have their clocks cleaned in the next general elections.
Republicans could end filibuster, true. That would probably be bad. Republicans dont have a filibuster proof majority, they need to negotiate. Democrats are dying on this one hill which is not a good idea that has little benefit https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/news...
It is true that democrats are not in the majority. However, it is factually true that 7 more democrats must vote for S.3019 (for a total of 60 votes) for the government to re-open.
Yes, that’s the nature of how the Senate has worked at least the last 50 years. If you want a bill to pass, you need to propose one that’s going to get 60 votes. And it’s up the majority party to propose that bill, since the majority leader by and large controls what bills make it to the floor.
Bringing a budget bill that doesn’t have 60 votes and then refusing to negotiate isn’t members of the minority party failing to come to the table, that’s the majority party failing to govern.
The majority gets to block any bill they want by not bringing it to the floor. The minority can only block bills by not allowing them to get to 60 votes.
Budgets are a little different, since you kind of have to pass one to have a functioning government — so you need to build a 60 vote coalition, and since the majority proposes the bill it’s up to them to offer a budget that builds that coalition.
Has the leading party made any efforts to convince any 7 of the other party? Were there reasonable concessions? If you don’t have the majority you have to negotiate, otherwise dissolve government and let the people vote again.
I’m not sure if you’re being tongue in cheek or not but the US government doesn’t really function like a parliamentary one. Elections can’t just be called, governments can’t just be dissolved, and any sort of coalition is within different factions of the two major parties.
Republicans hold a majority in the Senate (which is akin to the upper house, House of Lords, or whatever else) but in order to forcefully end a filibuster (cloture), you must get 3/5 of the senate to vote for it (60 votes since there are 100 senators)
The filibuster used to actually involve senators standing and speaking since the senate generally does not limit the amount of time that a senator may speak. Today it’s just a threat of filibuster. It’s controversial but neither party really wants to get rid of it.
I don’t understand the filibuster thing and how it plays into this.
I’m seeing the vote for the government budget or something being voted on over and over. If there is a certain majority required to pass something then it is implied that there are negotiations. If the opposition party was just expected to vote yes then why vote at all?
That’s why I’m asking, has the content of what was voted on changed significantly? Maybe taking away healthcare from people has to be done a different way. Make a bill that opens the government, then take healthcare away.
> I don’t understand the filibuster thing and how it plays into this.
Senators are allowed to debate bills. A motion to end debate and move to vote can't happen until debate ends. A senator does not generally have a time limit on the amount of time they can debate, so unless they yield the floor, the process can't move forward.
Cloture is a process to force a closure of debate to force a vote (which has its own separate rules). This requires 3/5 of the senate to vote in favor of ending debate. In practice, senators are not speaking for hours on end anymore; it is simply the "threat" of filibuster which eventually stops the bill in its tracks. In this state it cannot progress to a vote nor does it go back to the House of Representatives. In order for it to proceed, they must pass it (and send it to the president) or amend it (and it goes back to the house of representatives).
> I’m seeing the vote for the government budget or something being voted on over and over. If there is a certain majority required to pass something then it is implied that there are negotiations. If the opposition party was just expected to vote yes then why vote at all?
There is negotiation. Senators may try to convince each other to vote a certain way so they can gather enough votes to force cloture. This isn't a formal debate on the senate floor, but done behind the scenes. This may result in them finding enough votes to force the vote or it may result in an amended bill. If a bill is amended by the senate, it must go back to the house of representatives to be voted on. If it passes there, it moves on to the president. If it is amended, it goes back to the senate. Once both houses pass without amendments, it moves on to the president.
> If the opposition party was just expected to vote yes then why vote at all?
Currently they need 6 or 7 votes to pass. They have a few Democrats voting with the Republican majority and Rand Paul, a Republican, is voting against the Republican majority. In order to get the supermajority for cloture, they need to convince several more Democrats. It can happen, though without real amendments, it's unlikely.
> That’s why I’m asking, has the content of what was voted on changed significantly? Maybe taking away healthcare from people has to be done a different way. Make a bill that opens the government, then take healthcare away.
The reason why the Democrats are holding as of right now is because of expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies. If the bill opens the government without an extension, then it is taking that healthcare away, as you say. They are using the shutdown and the increased pressure on the government to reopen as leverage to extend these subsidies. The short term pain is dwarfed by the perceived benefit of ensuring that the funding for these subsidies is secured.
For the Republicans it is essentially the opposite. Extending these subsidies leaves it open to being a wedge point again down the road and midterm elections are coming up next year. They are using the shutdown to try to convince voters that Democrats don't care about government employees or other people because they won't fund the government (i.e not paying US service members, Air Traffic Controllers, Federal workers, etc.). Extending Affordable Care Act subsidies goes against their stated interest in aggressively reducing budgetary deficits over the next ten years.
Plus Trump's fighting in court to keep from having to release (as very fucking clearly required by law) SNAP funds that are already allocated by congress for exactly this kind of situation. Whatever your opinion on the rest of this, that part's certainly, 100%, on him personally.
1. The budget doesn't include some insane, unvotable measure. I don't hold any sympathy for either of the parties, but as an external it seems that the majority and the president have been voted on top of repealing the affordable care act and the opposition is weaponizing the budget on topics that voters have already expressed themselves against.
2. Being unable to spend or spend vacations with family are not things that historically lead to unrests.
So imho, no, Occam's razor suggests me this is simply business as usual, but with the usual increasing polarization and extremism we're seeing all around the world.
>voted on top of repealing the affordable care act
Its much more stupid than this. People voted MAGA to get rid of Obamacare, but same dont even realize it IS the ACA. Jimmy Kimmel Live did whole bit around that in 2017 and it still holds true today.
Anyone who calls all public sector people lazy or entitled, remember ATCs are government workers do work extremely hard and most log extensive overtime. These are government workers and they are American Heros through and through
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