Who's behind the government shutdown?

Personal greed and fear of how regulation and taxation will negatively affect personal wealth, as evidenced as far back as Grover Norquist’s 2004 quotation:
“I’m not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

Yesterday I read the New York Times article, and I found it very distressing. Money should not be able to be poured into efforts to influence the government.

Reid?

I blame those sneaky god forsaken atheists.

oh… after reading your links… that might not be the case. but I’m sure they’re responsible for something.

That is the two groups I would have suspected based on the funding sources for most of the Tea Party candidates.

The government is.
It has spent $17,000,000,000,000.00 that it does not have, nor does it have much hope that it will pay it back.
I would be shut down too. And not too soon.

That’s god forsaking atheists. Small, but significant difference.

CNN… it is where all the shallow conversation is. No normal back and forth in Capital Hill

Elvis, Jesus and Coca-Cola.

I’m embarrassed by it… Useless empty suits…

This is going to build up Democratic numbers in the House, Senate, and Governors offices.

@josie Macroeconomics ≠ microeconomics. What goes for your house (don’t overspend) doesn’t apply to the world’s largest economy.

@josie If your income were so low that you had to pick which of your kids ought to starve, you’r do that instead of take a second job. There are two sides to the deficit spending issue. We, the richest nation on earth, but we can’t afford what all the others do with far less money? We are watching the middle class dwindle. The ranks of the working poor have been expanding for 30 years. The concentration of wealth in the hands of the wealthiest 1% just passed it’s previous high of 40%, which occurred just before the Great Depression. Seems to me its time we look at the revenue side of the equation. When you start cutting the investments that build for a brighter future, you’re cutting too deep.

A 17 trillion pound gorilla is who’s behind the government shutdown.

I concur with what Josie said. But it is not really who is behind the shutdown but what is behind shutdown. $17 trillion is what’s behind the shutdown and decades of living beyond our means.

You can talk about extra revenue as a solution to the problem but at this point in time King Cong has broken his chains and beyond containment. We are all SOL.

@gondwanalon Destroying the economy will make the debt worse, not better. I think my own state’s Senior Senator, Elizabeth Warren nailed the answer to this question.

We’ve cut taxes by 60% and added tons of new loopholes available only to the rich since the time when this country was doing really well and building a strong new middle class, the first in the World. We’re now dismantling the middle class, ballooning the ranks of the working poor, and watching the wealthiest 1% soar in share of wealth they hold. The top 1% now own 42% of the nation’s wealth, and the GOP wants to cut taxes for the wealthy and services for everybody else so they can have way more.

We’re not even rebuilding our infrastructure because the Anarchy lobby hates to invest in anything past their next sumptuous meal. That’s like a farmer growing fat in the winter by eating his own seed corn. Screw his children and grandchildren. Let them figure out how to get their own, or shame on them. He wants it all for himself. right now. I think you are going to see that isn’t the spirit that made this nation great or built the American Dream.

The Tea Party nihilists.