Essay 2 thingy about the government shutdown

Government Shutdown: the effects getting more effects 

             The government system of this country is essential to creating a nice flow to social living. Many of the people living in this country depend on government actions and decisions as this country is a “democratic” society, where the people choose their representatives. Now that the government is or was “shutdown” in these past few weeks, what is exactly “at-stake” now that this is happening in the modern world? Many of us argue that ideas such as the American dream and self-reliance are what is at-stake which in part is kind of true. But what we are missing here is that everybody in this country has a different perspective of what these ideas are for them. There are even those that think the opposite; that these ideas don’t exist and nothing is at stake with this government shutdown. But one thing is for sure, something had to be affected due to this shutdown due to the fact that they needed some time to think over some points that needed to be addressed in this upcoming year’s federal budget. As we know, money is what gives you power in a lot of cultures. With that in mind, we have to analyze and figure out what is happening in our society and go on out to the national and then an international level to figure out where we stand in a global scale because we know that the world isn’t perfect and everybody has something that is at stake, both politically and socially. There is a lot of ideas that are good and believed that are at stake, but two major ones that are most relevant in most of todays’ world are the affordable healthcare act and poverty going on in a local community level as well as national level due to the fact that these issues will and are always addressed to our future generations and their economic stability and social status compared to other industrialized nations.

             Obama care, or better known as the presidents’  affordable healthcare act, is an act passed that states in a simple way that “Starting January 1, 2014, most Americans will be required to have health insurance or pay a fine”(KQED).  Restrictions apply to this act and thus not favoring some Americans as well as the other way around the subject. There are a lot of reasons why some citizens love it and others hate it. One of the major ideas is because due to the political party that they believe in. Republicans basically don’t want it because they stand against giving money to social programs, while the democrats face the opposition. In major news sites such as fox news, they have been stating claims in news reports such that “Conservatives in Congress have been extremely vocal about their dislike of Obama's signature domestic policy achievement” (Fox news).  This means that most of the ideas come from the arguments that they have in the house, which then extends like a wave. It means that they are not against it, but rather they don’t like the way it is because of many issues that both parties agree on.

         Internally it seems easy for them, but outside here in society it is a whole different story. Medical insurance is expensive as a whole, but with this act, a lot of people are able to get a medical insurance that they wouldn’t of have been able to get before. But with that comes the negative, now that the are new numbers to get considered “poor”, a lot of people stand out of free health care benefits such as Medical and Medicaid, while others lie in the borderline and such. This makes it hard for people to get insured if they fall between these two especially in the economy that we live in. This is a really important issue that has to be handled as soon as possible because according to the live science staff when comparing the United States healthcare to 7 industrialized nations which are: Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, “the United States ranks last on several measures of health system performance compared with six other industrialized nations, according to a new report” (live science). What does that say about how we treat our people? We need to close the gap of uninsured people because being healthy means more productivity. But if we are not healthy, how could we expect for our country to do good economically and socially? No health care means more impoverishment.

           Poverty is a major social issue that is impacting our country as a whole right now. According to Tavis smiley and Cornel west in the book they wrote The Rich and the Rest of Us; “more and more people living in the suburbs are losing their economic stability and landing in the ranks of the poor” (175). Just this concept alone has never existed in America as a whole because it is believed only rich people live in these places. Now to make matters worse, Aaron Sankin in an article he wrote for the Huffington Post stated that “California has a poverty rate of 23.5 percent, the highest of any state in the country, according to figures released this week by the United States Census Bureau”. Now what does this mean? We are living poverty very close to home even though we are blinded with other ideas the media throw out on us.

           One of them is the concept of establishing a federal budget. The federal budget has 2 sections that they put the money they could spend on, which are mandatory and discretionary spending. Mandatory spending is the basic spending this country needs like social security and health care. Whereas discretionary is money that is left over from the mandatory spending and put to sections such as the military and education. According to the National Priorities Project, an organization that follows up in the federal budget, they state in their article Federal Budget 101 that in the 2014 fiscal year, “the federal government will spend around $3.8 trillion”, which makes up about 22 percent of the nation’s economy based on Gross Domestic product. Out of that $3.8 trillion, about “$1.15 trillion to discretionary spending” is how it is getting distributed between the two.

          Here it is with the discretionary spending, this is where the problem starts due to the fact that these funds don’t get distributed how people want them to be, especially political parties. Everything that relates to poverty is tied in to the federal budget because the more they are raising the federal budget gap; the more this country looks bad because of the bad calculations of spending on programs.

        This entire broad but yet intense word that runs in the mouths of everybody now a days is what separates America instead of unifying them, creating more poverty.  An example of this is the 1 percent and the 99 percent Tavis and Cornel talk in their book. What they refer to is that the “incomes of the richest 1 percent of Americans- those earning $380,000 or more- have grown over the past 20 years, the income growth for the 90 percent of Americans, including the middle class, has been virtual standstill” (15). What they are trying to impose here is that why is there is such a big gap and why the rich is becoming richer while the poor is becoming poorer?

            As we can see, these problems are what are being pushed back to our future generations. We have to do something to close that gap because if it doesn’t, matters will get worse. We have to rise and come up to be at the same level as the other industrialized nations. We can’t have our economy and social status to suffer because we didn’t address the issues early enough before it becomes almost impossible to fix. We have to battle our internal problems here first that are preventing our engine from starting before we realize that it has become salvage material. What is as stake is the future of our kids here in this country that is called “America”. It will just be a continuous cycle until it is not taken into account in the House of Representatives and the Senate

     

      Works cited

"Republicans Want to Repeal ObamaCare -- but Maybe They'd Keep Some of It." Fox News. FOX News Network, n.d. Web. 19 Oct. 2013.

"National Priorities Project: Democratizing the Federal Budget." National Priorities Project. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Oct. 2013.

 "KQED." Public Media. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Oct. 2013.

Sankin, Aaron. "California Poverty Rate Highest In Nation Based On New Census Department Figures." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 14 Nov. 2012. Web. 19 Oct. 2013.

Smiley, Tavis, and Cornel West. The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto. New York: Smiley, 2012. Print.

"U.S. Last in Health Care Among 7 Industrialized Countries." LiveScience.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Oct. 2013.   

English 1A reflection

My reflection about this class

        When I walked into this classroom, I thought that it was going to be a normal class that a normal teacher usually teaches in an average university.With a written out schedule and such, as well as those boring lectures that make you do useless research. But as the weeks have gone by, I saw that everything wasn't going to be like those classrooms. After reading The Rich and the Rest of Us, my eyes opened and made me look at the world around me in a whole different perspective. I saw that there was people that were living in about the same economic situation or worse. And what made me upset is that is happening here around where I'm living in one of the strongest industrialized nations in the world. Also in the weeks in this classroom, I've increased my knowledge about what social and economic changes are happening here in the United States. Although with all the talk that happens in the classroom, sometimes I feel a bit overwhelmed with what it is being talked in the classroom. But for me, this "confusion" makes me want to know more about the topic, so I do a lot of research for both sides of what is being discussed. That way I can come up with my own standpoint in what I believe. All the talk that is happening in the class makes me want to take action, but since there is a lot of sides to the topic, it makes it hard to come up with a place to start. Even coming up with a thesis in the last essay was a bit overwhelming because I dint know how to start it or how to make my point clear on paper.

         As of now, I really don't know where I stand in this class and if I'm doing good or not due to the fact that there is a large amount of sides to the story, which makes it hard to come up with something good. Also the response time for the blogs is a bit confusing because I really don't know how I did in my homework and what I need to improve on when it comes to writing papers because the way I'm supposed to write in this class is something I have never done before in my previous classes. My previous classes gave me topics that usually were about something that happened in history but wasn't recent. Also the way to find information is kind of new because in my other English classes, I usually had to cite texts and articles that I found in school databases. In contrast, this class takes it a step further and actually makes you do research in the web as well as from books to websites that are for and against what your standpoint on the topic is. 

      

         To summarize, I like this class but it can be a bit overwhelming with all the information that we have to process.I felt that before I knew somewhat about politics, but this class has made me realize that it isn't how it is portrayed in the media and such. It makes me want to keep going to class and learn more even though it takes time to process.

Rant on education

Robyn Pulgarin 8/24/13 English 1A

Why do I have to support you?

       I’ve been standing up and supporting and going through all your bullshit in your classroom just because it is a “requirement” in order for us the student to graduate from college or high school. But why do I have to go through all of that wasted time of sitting our asses trying to learn such nonsense that we are probably are not going to use the rest of our life. Even you guys say it when your classroom is doing half bad halfway throughout the semester. But why do you care if either way if we fail your class you guys are still getting paid, while we have to find a way to redo the class just because it is a requirement. I know as well as my peers that there are instructors that really do care about their job, even though half of them don’t care one bit about their students and their overall academic standing. My respect goes to all those instructors that at least “try” (if you can call it that) to make what they teach fun.  Those are the type of instructors that we would all like to have in all our classes, the ones who BELIEVE in you and will do anything until the subject that you had trouble with sinks in. Sure part of it is the students’ job, but how will they have self-confidence if you (the people who have that diploma) don’t motivate the students because I know for sure you guys have done what we have done and as well have had lazy teachers who don’t care a single bit. I like to see the irony in that because I personally have seen teachers who aren’t suited for the job of teaching. For example, when you have a fat physical education teacher trying to teach you proper diet and exercise when they can’t even do it. Also, that grumpy old math teacher who assigns hell of a lot of homework that when it comes to going over it at school he/she takes the whole time trying to solve one problem. Does that ring a question on why most of the time we don’t bring complete homework? Doesn’t it ring a bell that we also have other classes where we must also spread out time to do the homework for that class? And most importantly, we also have outside duties that are not part of school that we must do such as work, take care of children, and at the same time deal with the assignments that you lazy asses don’t even check half of the time while we have to have sleepless nights trying to be ready for the next school day. And I know for a fact that you who sit on that chair in front of the classroom don’t read that ten page paper because I have tested it out where the first couple of pages I write and start good and after in the middle I write bullshit and finish it off with a slap of pure goodness. As for math, I have skipped, yes skipped some homework problems and you guys seem to not care because I have gotten full points for writing nonsense on a piece of paper. Most of you teachers don’t ever see this and not even bring the question on what we need help on. Well you can start by seeing the homework and checking where people are struggling on because how should we know what we need help on if we don’t even understand what the research question/ math problem is trying to ask? Isn’t that why you guys are getting paid for to do? I’m not saying that all of you teachers are all bad, because there is a lot of you guys that are worth admiring for.

         I’m not saying that I like the subject that you as teachers are teaching, but the way you guys are giving your lessons are fun to go and learn from. You teachers should keep on doing what you do best, as you have the talent to do so. Now for you teachers that don’t give a fuck, you better step your game and find an enthusiastic way for us to learn because you are not getting paid to just sit and throw at us a bunch of bullshit that we don’t know and we probably aren’t even going to need for the rest of our lives. Just like we earn our money working hard and paying for your classes, the bare minimum you guys should do is find a way for everybody to pass your class. It is in your own hands where the future of this country is, and your guys as instructor have to find a way to implement what we don’t like into our lives. For example, personally for English the thing I really hate for this class is writing papers because I have always struggled to put all my ideas on paper. But thanks to the instructor, ha has found a way to implement the lesson he is trying to teach in a writing assignment, which I don’t feel it as an assignment because it is me just being me and writing however I want.

           It is that that the education in the United States should change, in letting the teachers teach however style they want and set less standards that half of the time they can’t accomplish due to  the fact that they are too many to teach. Also get teacher that truly care about their job and not just let them teach for the money. Also you should put fewer standards to achieve certain diploma because it is proven for a fact that a student that is willing to learn something will do anything to achieve it and it will show. I can prove this by using the personal experiences of my peers and me. For example, a couple of years ago, I learned how to cut hair without going to any type of barber school, and now I can cut hair to the point that I can cut my own hair and I got to say that it comes out nice. Even you guys as board of director of schools say those hands on training is best for teaching rather than just teaching theoretical topics. That is why schools that have better equipment where we can learn from usually do better in you guys’ standardized test, which most of us take as a joke. It is very crucial that you guys distribute education money wisely because we are the future of this country. While it is true that some people are born with natural talent, there are others that need to work harder to achieve that goal. And it is up to you guys to communicate better with the student in order to learn those ideas that we don’t even need but unconsciously are very crucial to everyday living. Topics such as English and math are used in a wide array of areas such as counting population or trying to communicate an idea between one and another. The most important part of this puzzle is to find a way to make both sides of the party happy without any trifling events that might take place in the process. Some of you have that in your teaching style, while other have to work harder in order to make that possible. In the end, we want education that will really impact us in our style of living and will be able to use in our future. Although learning never stops, we need a little push to try out new things in order to expand our level of knowledge and creativity. And that is all that we ask, for you guys to put charisma in what you do and to pay attention to those that need more help, as there is different ways of teaching. Make us build confidence that we will sometime in the near future are going to need when we are independent and won’t have as much chance to making errors as we have now that we are in school. Believe in us just as we believe that you guys are guiding us to the right path.

Questions that I have about the main questions

1. What is the debate/ argument around the govt shutdown?

   1)Why is the government shutdown so important?
   2)What is each political party's standpoint/ argument for shutting the gov down?


2.Why are the republicans making this about Obamacare?
   
    1) What is the republican standpoint on this?
     2) why is obamacare a topic they must cover?

3.What is Obamacare?
    1)  what is the formal name of this?
     2) who will be affected?
      3) what will be the effect on the long run?

4. What is the situation about healthcare in the US?
     1) how many people have health insurance?dont?
     2) Who is the most affected?
     3) how does our health care compare to other industrialized nations?

5.What Happens if the Govt shuts down in the US?
   1) what gov aid peograms will get affected?
   2) what happens to public attractions?
   3) will the workers get fired or continue to get their pay?

6. What is considered "discretionary spending"? Why are these things discretionary?
  1) why doesnt the government decide on this soon?
  2) what is the affect of this if money doesn't get put in programs that fall in this category?

backgorund knowledege about healthcare...

Obamacare background information and what is is and why it is a law?
http://www.kqed.org/news/health/obamacare/obamacare-guide.jsp

President Obama's Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as "Obamacare" is an act that will take in affect next year on Jan 1, 2014. By then, citizens and permanent residents are required  to have some type of medical insurance. From the most basic emergency only plan, to the platinum insurance, that covers everything to everything in between. All these plans have different prices depending from which insurer you are getting the insurance from, as they each have different costs to pay for doctors and such. There are some exemptions to the law where some people are exempt from it, and it all depends on your economic status and household family size and such. Some people are not even required to have insurance, but then again it all depends on an individual familys income and how they are living. as of now, the insurance marketplace is open and is signing up people for medical insurance, and for those that qualify, you can get a deducteable from that. Also those that qualify for medical, they still continue to get those benefits.


As of now, about 7 million Californians do not any type of health care, and that is just in California. and most of these Californians are living paycheck to paycheck.  Also about 4 million of these Californians are legal and have proper documentation, Whereas another 6 million are illegal and don't have any type of documentation. sadly these people wont have the Obamacare benefits at all. But then again it depends on the situation