Dilema Obama: Pilih Obamacare atau Pemerintahan 'Bangkrut'
- Selasa, 01 Oktober 2013, 08:58 WIB
http://www.bisnis.com/dilema-obama-pilih-obamacare-atau-pemerintahan-bangkrut
Bisnis.com,
JAKARTA - "Apa yang diputuskan Konggres, pengaruhnya terlihat Selasa
besok [Rabu, 2/10 waktu Jakarta]. tak ada..tak ada pengaruhnya, Anda tak
bisa memutup pemerintah," tegas Obama di Gedung Putih Senin malam
(30/9/2103) waktu Washington atau Selasa pagi (1/10/2013) WIB sebelum
menghadiri sidang Kabinet, seperti dilaporkan Reuters.
Ketegangan
yang terjadi antara Gedung Putih dan Gedung Capitol berpangkal dari
proposal reformasi tunjangan kesehatan yang populer dengan sebutan
Obamacare.
Ketika berita ini diturunkan sekitar pukul 09:00 WIB,
berarti di Washongton Kongres tinggal memiliki waktu sekitar 3 jam untuk
tenggat waktu persetujuan anggaran pemerintah pada pukul 24:00 Senin
(30/9/2013).
Reformasi tunjangan kesehatan bertajuk Obamacare itu
memungkinkan warga negara yang tak diasuransikan untuk mendapatkan
tunjangan kesehatan.
Sebanyak 48 juta warga AS yang tak terlindungi asuransi akan mendapat tunjuangan kesehatan.
Di
mata kubu partai Republik, reformasi tunjangan kesehatan itu justru
akan membuat eskalasi biaya bagi perusahaan terkait biaya upah dan
tunjangan kesehatan.
Inilah sebenarnya yang menjadi pangkal permasalahan. Partai Republik tidak setuju dengan proposal Obamacare.
Apesnya,
penolakan itu bisa berbuntut kebangkrutan pemerintahan Obama jika
anggaran negara yang berlaku mulai 1 Oktober tak disetujui Konggres.
Namun, beberapa anggota Senat dari Republik menjadi tidak akan terjadi pembangkrutan pemerintahan.
"Demi
Tuhan, kami ingin pemerintahan tetap jalan. Kami akan menjaga
pemerintahan tetap beroperasi," ujar Marsha Blackburn, anggota senat
Partai Republik dari Tennessee Tennessee.
Dengan kata lain, Kalau
Obama mengalah untuk tidak memaksakan Obamacare sebenarnya anggaran
pemerintahan langsung disetujui Kongres.
Pun kalau toh Gedung Putih ngotot dengan Obamacare dan terjadi deadlock, maka fungsi-fungsi utama pemerintahan tetap berjalan normal.
Misalnya saja fungsi Departemen Pertanian yang masih tetap menjalankan fungsi vitalnya untuk mengawasi makanan dan minuman.
Dalam
konteks seperti itu, sejumlah analis yang diwawancari tidak terlalu
khawatir dengan kemacetan persetujuan anggaran pemerintahan Obama
tersebut.
"Pasar tidak mempedulikan masalah shut down, " ujar Todd Horwitz, Pendiri Averagejoeoptions.com, ujarnya seperti dikutip Bloomberg.
Editor : Sutarno
Pemerintah AS Bangkrut, Terancam “Government Shutdown” 1 Oktober
Ditulis oleh:
Syarif Lee - Sabtu, 28 September 2013
http://www.bringislam.web.id/2013/09/pemerintah-as-bangkrut-terancam.html
Pemerintah federal AS terancam harus menjalani prosedur “government
shutdown” 1 Oktober ini akibat anggaran yang membengkak. Demikian
laporan CNN (23/09).
Program asuransi kesehatan ObamaCare memakan anggaran yang terlampau
besar dari semula hanya sebesar 850 juta dollar, membengkak menjadi 2
milyar dollar. Angka ini di luar kemampuan pemerintah AS.
Membengkaknya anggaran operasional pemerintah federal AS, memaksa Kongres harus menetapkan satu dari dua pilihan.
Pilihan pertama, mengeluarkan undang-undang baru yang memungkinkan pemerintah federal AS menambah hutang.
Pilihan kedua, menutup sebagian departemen-departemen pemerintah AS.
Penutupan departemen ini disebut dalam perundang-undangan Amerika
sebagai government shutdown.
Konsekuensi government shutdown adalah sebagian pegawai pemerintah AS,
baik pegawai negeri, sipil maupun kepolisian tidak akan digaji hingga
ada solusi anggaran. Pelayanan publik seperti imigrasi (pengurusan
paspor), sanitasi (kebersihan kota) di Washington DC akan dihentikan,
wisata publik (kebun binatang, taman nasional, dan sejenisnya) akan
tutup, juga terhambatnya aplikasi jaminan sosial dan asuransi kesehatan
Medicare. Namun demikian, layanan pos dan rumah sakit akan tetap
berjalan.
Government shutdown pernah terjadi pada akhir tahun 1995 hingga awal
1996 pada masa Clinton. Jika Obama mengikuti prosedur yang pernah
dilakukan maka, government shutdown akan memaksa sekitar 800,000
(delapan ratus ribu) pegawai pemerintah AS berhenti dari pekerjaannya.
Menurut Huffingtonpost (25/09), pada pertengahan Oktober 2013,
pemerintah federal AS akan kehabisan uang tunai untuk membayar
tagihan-tagihannya.
Jika Kongres tidak memberikan persetujuan penambahan hutang, maka
pemerintah AS akan menjalani default, yaitu sebuah status bahwa
pemerintah AS tak mampu lagi membiayai dirinya sendiri. Dan hal ini
belum pernah terjadi sebelumnya dalam sejarah AS.
Ironisnya prosedur government shutdown bukannya menghemat uang, tapi
justru menghabiskan uang. Pada tahun 1996 lalu, persiapan government
shutdown sendiri memakan biaya 1,4 milyar dollar.
Kekhawatiran bahwa pemerintah AS akan default (tak mampu biayai
operasionalnya lagi), akan menghancurkan kepercayaan ekonomi kepada
pemerintah. Hal ini pernah terjadi pada tahun 2011, dengan jatuhnya
pasar saham, turunnya rating kredit pemerintah AS, keyakinan konsumen
jatuh, dan perusahaan berhenti merekrut karyawan.
Jika default, maka Menteri Keuangan Jack Lew memperkirakan pemerintah
akan gunakan semua hutangnya paling lambat 17 Oktober. Uang pemerintah
ketika itu hanya tinggal 30 milyar dollar, dan tak lama kemudian
pemerintah AS tak mampu lagi membayar tagihan-tagihan. Jaminan rakyat
miskin AS (Social Security) juga akan mundur diberikan, dari 1 November
menjadi 13 November.
Terancam bangkrutnya pemerintah AS ini hendaknya menjadi peringatan bagi
muslimin akan sangat dekatnya hari kiamat. Hari di mana musuh-musuh
Islam memperoleh kehinaan dan Islam memperoleh kemenangan.
Boleh jadi ini merupakan balasan ALLAH subhanahuwata’ala kepada
pemerintah AS yang selama ini gemar berbuat zalim dengan memerangi dan
membunuhi muslimin. Hingga kini drone-drone AS masih berterbangan
mencari mangsa muslimin. Belum hilang pula dari ingatan ummat akan
serangan AS kepada muslimin di Iraq beberapa tahun lalu. Obama juga
terang-terangan membantu militer Yahudi di Palestina sebesar 3 milyar
dollar pada 2012 lalu.
“Akan senantiasa ada sekelompok umatku yang menegakkan agama Allah,
orang-orang yang memusuhi mereka maupun tidak mau mendukung mereka sama
sekali tidak akan mampu menimpakan bahaya terhadap mereka. Demikianlah
keadaannya sampai akhirnya datang urusan Allah.” (HR. Bukhari)
[antiliberalnews/Nur/Siswanto/Mbudur Online/www.bringislam.web.id]
Summary
GOP House leaders are like the dog that caught the car, looking for
an exit strategy as the government shut down begins. One escape route
may lie in forcing their own employees to live with the full brunt of
the Affordable Care Act exchanges.
Shutdown fever grips Washington, DC
Under pressure from its conservative Tea Party wing,
and having been backed into a corner by firebrand Ted Cruz and his GOP
allies in the Senate, House leaders have drawn a line in the sand that,
for House leaders to save face, seems to require some concessions from
the White House on Obamacare delays or changes.
Shutterstock
The House of Representatives now finds itself in the position of the proverbial dog who caught the car.
Under pressure from its conservative Tea Party wing, and having been backed into a corner by firebrand Ted Cruz and his GOP allies in the Senate,
House leaders have drawn a line in the sand that, for House leaders to
save face, seems to require some concessions from the White House on
Obamacare delays or changes.
But the White House and the Senate Democrats have
shown no inclination to negotiate, and to all appearances seem content
to let the government shut down today.
"They're not doing me a favor by paying for things that they have already approved for the government to do," President Obama told NPR.
"That's part of their basic function of government; that's not doing me
a favor. That's doing what the American people sent them here to do,
carrying out their responsibilities."
The President seems confident that history will repeat itself. The last time a conservative House tried
to stare down a Democrat in the White House, it led to a rejuvinated
Clinton presidency, as the GOP was held responsible by the news media
and, ultimately, the general public.
Last night the GOP House defeated a revolt by GOP moderates, who sought to send a "clean" continuing resolution to the Senate.
Earlier this Spring the Senate passed a formal budget for the first time in four years, after in 2012 unanimously rejecting
President Obama's proposed budget. But the House and Senate have made
little progress on reaching a budget compromise, and as a result the
government continues to stumble along from one make-do "continuing
resolution" to the next.
In the absence of actual budget negotiations,
Republicans have sought to leverage the continuing resolution votes and
the now-routine hikes of the debt limit to force debate and change on
major fiscal concerns.
In 2011 Congress passed a budget deal that expanded
the debt limit conditioned upon automatic spending cuts that would take
effect if specific reduction targets were not met. No one expected the
cuts to take effect, but no deal was reached to avert them.
When the sequester took effect in January of this
year, it was widely expected that it would have devastating impacts on
government functioning and the economy. But the effect proved obscure,
and the issue largely disappeared. Those automatic cuts now seem likely
to survive the current budget crisis, most observers expect.
"This is a huge victory that nobody has talked
about," Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R., Fla.), a member of the House
Appropriations Committee, told the Wall Street Journal. "The spending portion of the spending bill we have won."
The House has now passed two resolutions, both
rejected by the Senate. A game of hot potato seems to have developed,
with neither House or the Senate wanting to be left holding it when the
shut down takes effect.
Plan C for the Republicans, it now seems, may be to
try to force Congress to live by the rules it set out when Obamacare
passed. During the original debate on the Affordable Care Act, as Ezra Klein outlines at the Washington Post,
the GOP had offered, as a kind of poison pill, an amendment that
required Congressional staff to be covered under the exchanges.
The proposal slipped into the bill and became law, but it was later waved in the rule making process by the Obama administration, in a move of disputed legality.
A Plan C that forced the Democrats to implement the
law as written would have the upside of saving face, while forcing
Capitol Hill to live with the rawest side of the new health care law.
But it would have the downside of injuring GOP staffers as well.
Democrats would probably have a hard time voting
against such a move. And short of that, it is hard to see a viable exit
strategy that allows the GOP House to save face.
5 Reasons the Media Is Covering Ted Cruz's 'Filibuster' Differently Than Wendy Davis's or Rand Paul's
Liberal bias plays a role, but it's premature and inaccurate to say that explains everything.
America
seems to be in a golden age of the filibuster. First, there was Rand
Paul's March attempt to derail John Brennan's nomination as CIA
director. Then there was Texas state Senator Wendy Davis's filibuster of
a bill to restrict abortions in the state. And now there's Ted Cruz's "fauxlibuster," a long speech he began Tuesday but will have to wrap up by around noon Wednesday.
There's a raging debate on Twitter over how the speeches were treated
in the press (since that's surely what all three legislators wanted to
happen when they embarked on policy-based stands). Conservatives charge
that Davis, a Democrat, was portrayed as courageous, while Cruz, a
Republican, is being ridiculed and dismissed. Is the coverage slanted,
and if so, does simple partisanship explain it? Here are a
few explanations for the discrepancy.
- Liberal media bias. Let's get this one out of the way now: Many mainstream reporters lean left, and that colors coverage. Many of the complaints are about not news stories but editorials by predictably liberal editorial boards. Now, it should come as no surprise to anyone that the liberal editorial board of the New York Times blasted Cruz. (It doesn't appear the paper wrote an editorial on Davis's filibuster, though the board's blog was generally sympathetic.) But this is a complaint that news coverage is too dismissive, too. Bias isn't enough to explain everything here.
- It's too early to tell. As Dylan Byers rightly points out, Davis became a media fixation -- even her shoes became star. And yet Cruz isn't even on the front page of the Times! But on June 26, 2013, the day after Davis' filibuster, she wasn't on the front page of the Times either. It was only over the ensuing week that her star rose. The trick is to watch how Cruz is covered in the next few days. To speak of a "media blackout" is premature.
- If it's all bias, what about Paul? The Kentucky senator's crusade (which Cruz aided!) against drones drew a round of coverage just as adoring as anything that followed Davis and helped solidify his status as a top-tier presidential contender for 2016. How does one explain such positive coverage of a Republican?
- The politics are substantively different. It's reporters' job to portray the facts of a given situation. Davis's speech united liberals in celebration and earned an approving tweet from the president. Paul's filibuster helped galvanize a coalition of libertarian Republicans and civil-libertarian Democrats. Cruz, on the other hand, has been widely criticized by his own party. While his stand has endeared him to activists, it has earned the derision of Republican leaders, rank and file legislators, strategists, and commentators. If Cruz were uniting the GOP and leading a successful revolt against Obamacare, it would be reported that way and he'd look triumphant. As is, he's dividing his party and won't overturn the law, so the coverage reflects that.
- Davis and Paul's filibusters actually mattered. It doesn't matter if Cruz talks until noon: According to Senate rules, a vote must be held, and Cruz can't talk to delay it in the style of old-school talking filibusters. That's the key difference between Cruz's speech on one hand, and on the other Davis's filibuster -- which ran out a session and killed a bill, although it was passed in a later special session -- and Paul's filibuster, which did stall Brennan's nomination, at least for 12 hours until Paul gave up. Paul also got results: He extracted a letter from Attorney General Eric Holder promising the federal government wouldn't use drones stateside, the sort of concession Cruz is almost certain not to receive from the White House. As my colleague Molly Ball has pointed out, there are some serious logical problems with Cruz's stand. One, he's calling on his colleagues to filibuster a bill they called for; and two, no one believes he will succeed in getting Obamacare defunded. That opens him up to the charge that he's grandstanding. Were Davis and Paul grandstanding too? Of course. But there was a concrete political goal in view as well.
Rather than compare Cruz to Davis, a better parallel might be
liberal independent Senator Bernie Sanders's epic December 2010 floor
speech. It wasn't technically a filibuster either, something many failed to point out.
On the other hand, though, Cruz has attracted far more coverage for his
anti-Obamacare fight over the last week than Sanders did for his. Pop
quiz: Can you even remember what Sanders was talking about? Didn't think
so. (For the record, it was a deal to extend Bush tax cuts through
2012.)
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