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.
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