No way to run a country-美政府关闭-医改的替罪羊.doc

Americas government shutdown No way to run a country The Land of the Free is starting to look ungovernable. Enough is enough Oct 5th 2013 |From the print edition Tweet AS MIDNIGHT on September 30th approached, everybody on Capitol Hill blamed everybody else for the imminent shutdown of America’s government. To a wondering world, the recriminations missed the point. When you are brawling on the edge of a cliff, the big question is not “Who is right?”, but “What the hell are you doing on the edge of a cliff?” The shutdown itself is tiresome but bearable. The security services will remain on duty, pensioners will still receive their cheques and the astronauts on the International Space Station will still be able to breathe. Some 800,000 non-essential staff at federal agencies (out of 2.8m) are being sent home, while another 1.3m are being asked to toil on without pay (see article). Non-urgent tasks will be shelved until a deal is reached and the money starts to flow again. If that happens quickly, the economic damage will be modest: perhaps 0.1-0.2% off the fourth-quarter growth rate for every week the government is closed. The trouble is, the shutdown is a symptom of a deeper problem: the federal lawmaking process is so polarised that it has become paralysed. And if the two parties cannot bridge their differences by around October 17th, disaster looms. In this section No way to run a country Stubborn things Third arrow, please West or east? The widening gyre Reprints Related topics Social policy Health and fitness Political policy Domestic policy Health-care reform Battles over spending are nothing unusual—indeed, Congress has not passed a proper budget on time since 1997. But this battle represents something new. House Republicans are blocking the budget not because they object to its contents, but because they object to something else entirely: Barack Obama’s health-care reform, a big part of which started to operate this week (see article). Their original demand wa