US Government Shutdown

Over the next week the news is going to be dominated about stories about the US government being shut down. It's a great example of the three branches of the US government (Execitive, Congress, Judicial) being unable to solve complex, nuanced, problems. This post briefly describes what the impact of a shutdown may be, why this is happening and why it matters to Canada.

What It Might Look Like
The US government shut down in 1995 and again in 1996, when Bill Clinton was President giving us some idea of what a shutdown may look like. All non-essential functions of the government stop in a shutdown, which can get pretty bad pretty quickly. Exactly what gets shutdown, or slowed is a grey area, but some examples are likely to include:

• Ancillary education programs such as head-start
• Workplace safety inspections would stop. 
• National parks would close 
• Regulation of the financial markets would be weakened
• Environmental regulation would be weakened
• Processing of new visa, passport, social security and medicaid applications or changes would stop or slow
• Military workers would likely continue to work without pay, under the assumption they would receive back pay when the shutdown ends

Essentially, if you're a person who receives a paycheque from the US government; that cheque doesn't come when the government is shut down.

Why it is Happening

In an attempt to make a highly controversial debate simple, I'll try this in point form:

1. The US creates spending commitments in their budget. Since either 2000 or 2001, the US government has committed to spending more than it has taken in revenue each year, known as a deficit.
• See: 9-11, Iraq War, Fannie May-Freddie Mac, Economic Collapse in 2008, aging population, etc. for reasons why that happened.
2. In order to pay for this deficit, the government has to borrow the money. The amount of money that the US can borrow is known as the debt ceiling. Every time the US borrows up to this ceiling, they have to raise that ceiling to continue to pay for the commitments made in the budget.
3. The total US government debt is increased every year that they run a deficit. If the government was to run a surplus, they could choose to pay off debt.
• IMPORTANT: The debt ceiling is not the budget. The debt ceiling is the artificial limit Congress imposed on the country for how much money the government can borrow. 
4. Therefore (and this point would see some debate from extreme Conservatives) a refusal to raise the debt-limit is a refusal to pay bills they have already committed to.
5. The US is about to reach their debt limit and congress is saying they will not raise the ceiling without putting conditions on a bill approving a raise to the ceiling:
• Congress is broken in to two houses: Senate and House of Representatives. The House of Representatives has a majority of Republicans and the Senate is majority Democrats. The Republicans in Congress are mostly made of members who would describe themselves as Tea Party members, an extreme Conservative group who believe that government is generally a bad thing and should be limited.
• The main condition the Tea Party members want to place on raising the debt limit is to not fund the health care law that all three branches of Government approved in President Obama's first two years in office.
• If Congress sends a bill to the President for approval that raise the debt ceiling but has any conditions, the President has said he will veto that bill. This is likely where the government shutdown will occur.
6. This should all come to a head in October. Currently the treasury department in the US is saying that if the debt ceiling is not raised the US will default on it's bills by the end of October.

Why This Matters to Canada
It's challenging to say what the exact impact on Canada will be, but some examples could be:

• Longer lines at US borders, as customs officials are government employees.
• Impact on manufacturing in Canada, as the US is our largest customer.
• Financial Markets are likely to plummet, with many people around the world having vast sums of money invested in the US market or ties to companies listed on those markets.

Links
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2013/09/20/government-shutdown-101-what-happens-when-the-lights-go-off/
http://www.sfgate.com/business/bloomberg/article/Republican-Clash-With-Obama-Adds-Risk-of-4832222.php
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/21/us/politics/house-spending-bill.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/house-gop-debt-limit-increase-96982.html

So, what have I been writing about?

For the time being, the easiest place to see the articles I had published in the Mercury for the past year is through my linkedin profile, I think they are visible publicly:

• ca.linkedin.com/pub/robert-routledge/a/995/736/

I will link them through the blog eventually. You can find them through www.guelphmercury.com and searching for Robert Routledge, but that site has a limited number of free views.

I'm back...a little

You may have noticed that I just posted on my blog. If so; congratulations! You're one of a handful of people who read it :). I became a member of the Guelph Mercury Community Editorial Board last year and whenever I was inspired to write something down, I generally contributed there. As I have left Guelph, although still technically a member of the board, I'll be slowly starting to get my blog up and running again.

As always, there's likely to be a fair bit of political or community organizing slanted articles. It's also been suggested to me that I start to incorporate translating National or World events into plain English and put them in context (eg: Syria, Energy East, DOMA, Trayvon Marting and George Zimmerman, etc.) Many of these are way beyond the scope of anything I feel comfortable writing about, but I might take a stab at something every now and then. I'll also likely start to incorporate some of what I actually do for a living, since I think I've learned a little about working with post-secondary students and residence life over the past ten years :).

Thanks for taking the time to check this out. Hopefully it was worth the click!

Generation Y, Millennials, Entitlement and a Little bit of Go Fuck Yourself

There's been social media attention recently to the issue of Generation Y (generally accepted to be people born after 1979ishand before 2000ish) being unprodcutive and generally unhappy in the workforce. You can see a popular story/meme here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wait-but-why/generation-y-unhappy_b_3930620.html

The essence of this story is that people in this demographic have unrealistic expectations, face unrealistic and somewhat imaginary pressure from their peers and are going to struggle with career paths as they discover that they aren't special and building a successful career takes work.

I stumbled across this story for the first time while reading a rebuttal on deadspin.com:  http://aweinstein.kinja.com/fuck-you-im-gen-y-and-i-dont-feel-special-or-entitl-1333588443. The author of this story stumbles across a couple of nuanced points; that the Millenials may feel special when they shouldn't but that society is so stacked against them that their fucked anyway so why bother? It's an interesting point, as part of conferences I've attended in my career I've heard more than one speaker casually reference how the baby boomers (children of the generation that fought the two world wars, particularly the second) have let society down and created situations like global warming and a series of rapidly escalating financial crises. I wouldn't say I would agree that any of these loosely defined generations are better or worse than eachother, but I would agree that a) The students I work with by and large all face issues of entitlement b)  Many young professionals I have hired face significant issues with entitlement and c) When you look at macro issues such as North American health care system or the growing wealth gap, we clearly have a problem.

This brings me to my last thought: I saw an interesting interview on the Daily Show last night with Robert Reich. Available on this link in Canada: http://www.thecomedynetwork.ca/shows/thedailyshow?videoPackage=138682. He tells Jon Stewart, the host of the show, to be optimistic because ultimately Americans make the right decision. If we extend this argument to theoretically all of us may eventually make the right decision, then another part of extending Mr. Reich's hypothesis comes into play: These problems will be fixed when we decide to fix them. If we decide that the growing wealth gap in Canada reported in the last census (from September 13, 2013), http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/wealthiest-1-earn-10-times-more-than-average-canadian-1.1703017, is a problem then we can demand that the problem be fixed. We are not constrained by the current choices presented to us, we need to demand better.

When faced with this kind of thought, I refer back to Saturday Night Live. Fix it. Find the problem, fix it, repeat as necessary. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo3uxqwTxk0. I don't claim to have the specific answer, but if you're a person who finds yourself relating to either of the stories I referenced above about the Millenial Generation (aka Generation Y) then I suggest you take this approach. We face solvable problems, we just need to fix them.