As was made apparent by the high number of social media posts, news sites and broadcasts, and complaints throughout the country, the news was no surprise to anyone that our federal government was in a shutdown from Oct. 1 through the 16. Not only was there a shutdown, but the United States government almost went bankrupt. It would have been the first time the United States gov’t. defaulted on its loans.
The shutdown started on Oct. 1 when Republican and Democrat leaders failed to come up with a solution to keep the government open. In order for the government to have stayed open, a bill called a continuous resolution needed to be passed. A continuous resolution is essentially a bill that allows for something that had already been happening to continue to happen. This CR (continuous resolution) allows the United States Treasury Department to borrow money to pay its bills. To be more precise, it allows the Treasury Department to sell bonds that later can be redeemed by the purchaser for more money than what they bought them at – works like a CD at a bank. The reason why this bill did not get passed is because congressional Republicans continued to attach additional resolutions (bills) onto the CR that would defund Obamacare. With a Democrat controlled Senate and a President who vowed to veto the bill should it pass, both the House and the Senate knew this was a doomed tactic from the start. The CR bill never even passed the Senate.
The reason why this is important is because without that CR confirmation,the Treasury Department would not have money to pay its bills and the United States government would start writing bad checks, which would make us default on our loans. And if we had defaulted, most economists feared we would slide into an economic depression similar to the one of the 30’s.
There are a lot of critics who think, “well the government doesn’t really affect me” – a lot of these being college students hoping for FAFSA money. It would be almost impossible for that money to go out to the students and, even if it had, the interest on it would have skyrocketed. Private loans from banks like Wells Fargo and US bank would have shot up at an even faster rate along with all their other loans as well.
But in the last hours of the final day, Congress did what most did not think was possible – they passed the CR bill with little real change to Obamacare. Senate majority and minority leaders, Harry Reid (D-NV) and Mitch McConnell (R-KY) broke party lines and hammered out a compromise with Democrats getting most of what they wanted and Republicans getting almost nothing.
According to an article on money.cnn.com by Tami Luhby, there will be two reports done verifying whether a person income is low enough to receive the lowest cost health care options. She wrote,
“Even with the new verification reports, confirming someone’s income will never be an easy or precise task. That’s because the subsidies are based on the following year’s income, and few people know exactly what they will earn in the future.”
But even as Republican leaders, like minority leader Mitch McConnel (R-KY), say, “A government shutdown is off the table, we’re not going to do it.” There are still some within the Republican party, particular those of the far right – like Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), who have yet to rule out another government shutdown as a tactic going into the future.
