The Department of Redundancy Department

Stop me if you've heard all this before - and you have.  It's Redundancy Weekend - two old stories.  

Only one is remotely like news.  At the last minute, the congress approved some spending bills to avoid a government shutdown. Coverage by Reuters.  

By a bipartisan vote of 75-22, the Senate approved a $467.5 billion spending package that will fund agriculture, transportation, housing, energy, veterans and other programs through the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30.

Let me use a cartoon I've been using since the blog was old enough to walk.  First use I can find easily was 2015 although the cartoon itself is dated 2011.  The website in the bottom left corner is long gone.  (Tonight something tried to load but it was acting strange and I didn't have the nerve to let it continue. It didn't say www.virtual...  it said w01.virtual...)

The key is the last line in the bottom right.  "Yes yes R2.  We'll raise it. Just leave him helpless a little longer and then raise it at the last second so we look like heroes." Paraphrasing to fit the situation  "Just sit on the spending bill a bit longer so we look like heroes."  

Let's be honest about this.  The other way of saying "government shutdown" is "paid vacation" for the lucky Fed.gov 's nonessential workers.  The longest government shutdown ever was 35 days between December of '18 and January of '19, under President Trump.  True, the essential workers had to work without pay until the deal was made before their pay could be issued and that could have been tough.  The nonessential workers were free to get a replacement job to get some additional income but had to wait for the shutdown to be over to get their back pay, too.  

There's no such thing as a debt ceiling because the ceiling has been raised Every Time It Was Ever Hit.  That's not a ceiling.  It's as much a publicity stunt as "sit on the spending bill a bit longer so we look like heroes."  

The story has been going around that the national debt is going up another $1 Trillion every 100 days.  Play with that on your calculator.  That's $416.67 Million per hour, or $115,741 per second.  That's not government spending that's just the deficit.

That which can't go on forever won't.

The other great redundancy story is that it's the weekend when the collective decides everybody gets up an hour earlier and goes to bed an hour earlier until the first Sunday in November.  So that we can go to work an hour earlier, and come home an hour earlier, so that we have more sunlight after work even though we still go to bed earlier.  They call it Daylight Saving Time, but that's an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms.  We can't affect the length of the day any more than we can affect how long the tides run.  All we can do is change what we call the hours.  

The thing is, we're supposed to be done with this in Florida.  In March of 2018, the Florida legislature passed a law halting the twice-yearly shifting of the clocks.  Unlike some other states that have plotted an exit strategy from Daylight Saving Time, Florida was going to stay on DST all year round.  Why not stay on standard time?  Apparently the tourist industry thought that shifting the time to put sunrises and sunsets later on the clocks would sell better to people coming down here in mid-Winter.  Staying on DST was opposed by PTA groups who are concerned about it putting kids en route to school during dark winter mornings.  Still, the law was passed and signed by governor Rick Scott (at the time, now one of our Senators).  

I've read stories that say around the country some states want to stay on DST all year long, and some want to stay on Standard time all year long.  The Fed.gov will only allow states to stay on Standard time.  Which implies staying on DST is somehow wrong. 

It seems a bit melodramatic to say the clocks are killing people, but there are some well-documented side effects of the time shift and the kind of "jet lag" some people get: more car accidents, more accidents at work, higher rates of heart attacks and strokes, and other stuff.