Chatting with my American partner about the government shutdown; is this about right (details inside)

I asked her more about it. Her thoughts:

Basically Congress has to vote to authorize the U.S. to be able to borrow more money in order to pay their bills (i.e., “raise the debt ceiling.”) Otherwise, we don’t have enough. Our government is out of control with spending. Republicans have enough votes that they refused to vote to raise the debt ceiling unless they also include a provision to postpone implementation of Obamacare. They have been trying to get rid of Obamacare and have voted on it 41 times now since it was passed. Obama and the Democrats won’t budge on Obamacare. So, we don’t have enough money to fund the government and it has been shut down until Congress votes to borrow more. If it goes to October 17, we start defaulting on our payments and the shit will really hit the fan.

The truth is, Obamacare is not the problem. Congress is the problem. We need to cut spending. Obamacare is a way to cut spending, but is a huge distraction from legitimate reform. Congress does not want to really cut spending because each of them owes their job to special interests that receive government funding. They won’t vote to cut funding to the special interests that put them in office. It’s ridiculous.

We need to reform the way the lobbying is done and the way that campaigns are financed in this country. We need to cut spending all over the place.

We subsidize oil companies that have record profits with our tax dollars. We subsidize huge agricultural companies. We need to cut stuff like that back some. We spend the most on National Defense. We need to cut that budget some. All kinds of cuts could be made.

They don’t have to be cut completely, but a percentage could be cut from almost everywhere.

Basically, what Snider did in Michigan needs to be done across the country.

It pissed everyone off, but we have a balanced budget now.

What happened to Greece will happen to us if we keep this up.