90% of Nuclear Regulators Sent Home Due To Shutdown 358
An anonymous reader writes "More than 90% of nuclear regulators are being sent home due to the Federal Government shutdown, as the agency announced today that it was out of funds. Without Congressional appropriations, the nuclear watchdog closes its doors for what appears to be the first time in U.S. history. CNN reports that while a skeleton crew remains to monitor the nation's 100 nuclear reactors, regulatory efforts to prevent a Fukushima-like incident in the United States have ceased."
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Wait, "congressional approval"? (Score:3, Informative)
It takes two to tango. Both the congress and president are to blame. Appropriations may originate in the House, but they also have to pass the Senate and either get signed by the President or overriden after a veto by a highly unified body of legislators over at the Capitol.
If the House is holding true to their strategy as used so far this round, they've probably approved this expenditure piecemal and been rejected or not taken up by the Senate. Call it political if you like, but any politician that refuses to do so deserves to to be run out of Washington on a rail.
Re:Wait, "congressional approval"? (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not sure you understand the constitution if you don't understand how passing a non-omnibus appropriations bill works.
Re:10% staffed... (Score:1, Informative)
Another way to look at this, is that the NRC determined it only needs 10% of it's work force for 'essential' operations. Makes me wonder why we pay for the other 90%.
"Essential" operations are also "short-term" operations. I do some work related to the NRC... one thing that they study is hazards to power plants. As it happens, these hazards are often geographically related -- hurricanes hit in one area, flooding is expected somewhere else, earthquakes and tsunamis... you get the idea. Because of this, it is often better to do risk assessment of this type for entire regions. This kind of work can be delayed a couple of weeks without any catastrophes, but it is critical in the long-term. Just because it is not "essential" this week does not mean that it is not important.
Also, it's amazing to go through the list of government services and see which shutdown and which remain open. Often the ones remaining open work off of 'user' fees. For example, certain meat packing plants pay for food and safety inspectors being on site.
And news reports suggest that corruption in the food and safety inspections starts this way.
Re:October 17th Conspiracy Theorists Welcome! (Score:4, Informative)
"The Debt Ceiling can remain ignored for months."
It has been. The actual "Debt Ceiling" was reached back in May. But Lo! and behold! The government found some "extra cash" lying around, and managed to survive until now anyway. Of course you don't hear about this on the news.
"The government takes in enough tax revenue each month to pay the interest on bonds many times over. There is zero possibility of the government 'defaulting' and wiping out their credit rating."
The default scare is just another Big Lie. First, the government HAS defaulted on its debt before. The most recent time I know about was when Nixon nixed the Bretton Woods system in '71, eliminating any last vestige of a gold standard. The dollar (in International Trade) was almost instantly devalued, which for all practical purposes was a default on large portion of the huge foreign debt. In fact, that's why he did it: the U.S. government did not have enough money (including for repaying debt), by virtue of its gold reserves, to cover its exorbitant spending.
Second: not raising the debt ceiling will not automatically lead to a default. The government would simply have to spend less money! Of course, Obama has been showing that he'd rather cut spending on things The People find valuable (or are scared into thinking are essential), than cut spending on things that actually make sense.
Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score:4, Informative)
Everyone in the lapdog press is running around crying Oh No'es but NOTHING bad is happening.
Well, nothing bad other than millions of Americans suddenly becoming essentially unemployed, even if temporarily, for which I can see no possible negative effect. /sarc
Apparently you haven't heard!
They are all going to get paid [washingtonpost.com]
Yes, well, unless grocery stores and gas stations have suddenly started to accept IOU's in lieu of payment, that does them fuck-all worth of good right now, doesn't it?
House came together in a moment of rare bipartisanship to pass a bill, by a vote of 407 to 0, approving back pay for furloughed government workers.
President Obama has expressed his support for the measure.
Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid supports the measure, but said Saturday that if furloughed workers are guaranteed back pay, there’s no reason to keep them out of work.
They should be working, since they will be getting back pay.
Why does Obama keep them home?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antideficiency_Act [wikipedia.org]
Now, how this applies to, say, air traffic controllers, but not worthless-ass congresspeople and their equally-worthless staffers is beyond me.
Re:October 17th Conspiracy Theorists Welcome! (Score:4, Informative)
That's what pisses me off about people who rag on social programs: the cost to run them is but a drop in an endless sea compared to what we spend killing foreigners, propping up dinosaur corporations, scratching banker's backs, etc.
This is untrue [wikipedia.org]. Per wikipedia the DOD is 19% ($670B) of the US budget, while "social security" is 22% ($768B) and "medicare and medicaid" are 23% ($802B). I will grant that this chart is not at all granular and the issue is surely more complicated than this, but 45% of the US budget on just two social programs are hardly "a drop in the bucket." Personally, I think we have to cut military spending, AND social spending, AND raise revenue (however the hell we manage to do that).
I'm also at a loss as to how some people think that massive expansions in spending on medical care somehow makes things more affordable, but I think I'm at the point where I've accepted that the vast majority of people in this nation (citizen and lawmaker, on both sides of the aisle) simply don't live in the real world.
Re:October 17th Conspiracy Theorists Welcome! (Score:5, Informative)
If the debt ceiling is not raised we will default. That puts it on the table. If a single bill goes unpaid we are defaulting. It doesn't matter if it's a bond or a social security check. The market will treat it the same and it's going to be catastrophic. We run the risk of a collapse of the entire world economy (which is predicated on the stability of the US bond market).
Treasury has no way (without rewriting their entire software that controls the payment system) to sort payments by type. They would have to sort manually and with millions of payments due every single day it would take thousands of people to sort them all and pay only one type.
People that are downplaying default don't know what the fuck they are talking about. You want an example of default, refer to Argentina. They defaulted almost a decade ago and they STILL can't borrow money. Every single thing they import must be paid for with hard currency extracted from products they sell to other nations. Much like Venezuela they have shortages, business can't get parts and a whole host of problems that would make living there hellish. The US has a import/export deficit of several hundred billion dollars a month. That means all that stops, nothing will be imported without a corresponding export of equal value. Do you have any idea how much that would impact the world economy let alone the US economy? It would lead to a recession that would be WORSE than 2008. In fact we probably wouldn't recover from it without a big fucking world war again.
Maybe I'm being paranoid but you are seriously playing down severe risks. If we default (meaning we don't pay a bill when required) we are looking at a severe recession with high double digit unemployment that will make the last few years of 12% unemployment look like a picnic.
Re:Obama is at fault clearly (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the House has passed a number of budgets. All have been shot down by the Senate or have not been brought to a vote. Even if they had been accepted by the Senate they would be vetoed by Obama.
There hasn't been a real budget passed pretty much since Obama took office. The old budgeting model was to have a budget for each individual agency or, sometimes, groups of agencies. The last few years have seen continuing resolutions; its very name tells you what it is: a resolution to continue last year's spending with no formal budgeting process.
What the House is attempting now is a combination of old fashioned budgeting with the current continuing resolution model - pass an individual continuing resolution for each department. The Senate is rejecting those.
Re:October 17th Conspiracy Theorists Welcome! (Score:4, Informative)
Well, the house voted 407-0 to approve back pay [washingtonpost.com], so it will be either Harry Reid's or Obama's fault if they do not get paid. Simple as that. But no one really believes they won't be paid. They got back pay the last time this happened [usatoday.com] (see last paragraph). And many times before that. And both Harry Reid and Obama have publically supported the house bill.
Re:Obama is at fault clearly (Score:5, Informative)
The house has passed the exact same sane bills that would be in a clean cr excep separated from a single cr.
How that is not sane is beyond me. Please explain what you think is sane.
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Re:Obama is at fault clearly (Score:2, Informative)
Re: What could possibly go wrong? (Score:3, Informative)