Shutdown States of America

As of today, the U.S. does not have a budget and pretty soon might not have the money to pay its debts. The world’s lone superpower seems unable to manage its own affairs. This is not the America that its founders envisioned.

The Founding Fathers did not want their newly founded republic to transform itself into a dictatorship down the road. In order to prevent this, they created an intricate system of checks and balances. The system was not meant to paralyze the country — the Founding Fathers simply could not foresee that their descendants would be so incapable of compromise. The American political scene has become so polarized that even the most drastic of actions seem to be routine and fail to spur the political establishment toward compromise. The budget crisis unfolding in the U.S. is really a crisis of the political system, in which federal government workers have become the bystanders of a fight between President Obama and the tea party wing of the GOP.

At stake is the president’s signature legislative achievement, namely the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, seen by conservatives as an encroachment of big government. Obama has the Senate on his side and sees the 2012 presidential election, which was in essence a referendum on the law, as a mandate to push the law into being. But the president’s opponents can’t quite come to terms with the fact that the health care battle has already been lost. Thanks to the fact that they control the House of Representatives, they get to have equal say in what ultimately gets to the president’s desk.

The first casualty of the battle between Obama and the GOP has been the budget for the next year. Many institutions have been closed, and over 800,000 government employees have been sent home on unpaid leave. But that is not the only problem faced by the country with the most powerful economy in the world: By the middle of this month America’s debt ceiling will have to be raised again; if not, the country will default on its loans and declare bankruptcy. The consequences of this potential scenario are still not completely known. No one knows how the markets will react, what will happen to the dollar and whether anyone will be willing to buy American bonds again. The game that the tea party is playing has ever-higher stakes. If the U.S. were not so influential, the current crisis might be met with nothing more than a shrug. Unfortunately, thanks to the tea party Republicans, the paralysis affecting the U.S. has a negative effect on Poland as well as the rest of the world. American problems scare off investors, including investors in Poland. Our country and the rest of the world will be apprehensively observing the crisis unfolding in Washington. We hope that rationality and compromise will prevail over conflict and pettiness.