The narrowly-avoided shut down of the federal government comes down to games — politicians playing games without actually solving anything.
With the largest budget crisis our government has seen since the Great Depression, Congress pushed through a short-term measure that will extend its idiotic game into extra innings.
Republican congressmen have put up flimsy roadblocks for the sake of shouting down Democrats and appeasing their extremist tea-bagger constituents.
One of the moral picking-points that prevented the budget from going through was cutting Title X funding to Planned Parenthood.
The basis of this cut, according to the bill sponsored by Indiana Rep. Mike Pence (R), was that Planned Parenthood provides abortions and that “the time has come to deny any federal funding to Planned Parenthood.”
Besides the fact that Title X itself disallows any federal funding to be used for abortions, cutting funding to the nations leading source of sex education, free contraception, and medical services to underprivileged women is inhuman. As the economy struggles and more and more young women grow up in poverty, the need for a group like Planned Parenthood to provide its services increases dramatically.
Three areas Congress could theoretically cut from are Social Security, Medicare and defense.
Some elderly eat with their Social Security checks, and cutting them off abruptly is wrong. But Social Security can’t operate in this economy and someone, at some point, is going to get screwed. If Congress is serious about cutting the budget, it needs to pick a year to end Social Security and stick to it. People are going to be mad, but hard decisions need to be made in tough times.
Cutting Medicare is out of the question. People will die if cuts are made.
But where the major cuts can and should be made is in defense. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the U.S. accounted for 47 percent of the world’s military spending ($349 billion) and spent more than the next nine countries combined. Two wars and troops in over 150 countries have us living well outside our means.
The political games being played by fiscal conservatives hurt the government and continue to try the patience of the people. If they were serious about cutting the budget, they would cut from all areas of the budget, not just the liberal-supported ones.
Our government needs to quit playing games when federal employees’ paychecks and some federal programs hang in the balance.
Politicians need to compromise, do what’s best for the nation, and avoid appeasing the extremists on both sides. The majority of Americans just want to go about their lives with the programs they need to get by without having their livelihoods gambled away on the political playing field.

jameyer@mesastate.edu