Republicans are grappling with public polls showing the public places more blame on them, rather than the Democrats, for the shutdown, even as they argue they have the moral high ground in the shutdown fight.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Republicans stress that they put no partisan poison pills in a GOP-crafted, House-passed stopgap to fund the government through Nov. 21. Democrats in the Senate have repeatedly blocked that bill as they demand that Republicans first negotiate with them on health care issues, particularly on enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies expiring at the end of the year.
Poll after poll finds that slightly more Americans think Republicans are to blame for the shutdown than who think Democrats are at fault.
I wasn’t sure so I went looking. It fluctuates, but 150 days a year is what I found. So that would be 50 days per 4 months. Or rather that they have shown up about 40% of the norm.
So for them this isn’t even much different than normal. And they’re still getting paid. Not that many of them need their government salary with all the campaign donations and insider trading. And guaranteed lobbying jobs at triple the salary or more after they’re done.
Id say it’s more than a bit different. It would be like if you or I started going into work Monday and Tuesday, and skipping Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Except yeah, they still get paid the same. To bad we couldn’t all have jobs like that.
The crazy thing is, with the productivity improvements recently in human history, and the amount of time wasted doing what amounts to fluffing people higher up the chain with busy work or literally just sitting there work, we could all probably work notably less than we do if that work was spread equally and not wasted on bullshit like ensuring poor people feel bad.
Agreed, I think with automation and technological improvements the only way forward is to supplement people’s livings based off loss of work at a national level. 200 years ago, 70% of the U.S. were farmers. 1900, 38%. 1925, ~25%. 2025, less than 2%. Sure we can say about 10% of jobs surround agriculture in some way, but that is a drastic amount of work that has been offset. If we have offset 50% of the required work needed to keep our country fed, clothed and roofed, we need to develop ways to cut the workload by half for the people, and find other activities people can partake in that aren’t just about making someone else money.
I can already think of a myuriad of things, though admittedly some would be surround eventually making money, but mostly because I want things to exist that don’t exist.
Imagine working 2 days a week instead of 5. That’s a pretty big difference.