Letter to the editor: In response to ‘government shutdown hurts Nevada County’
So it’s really happened.
The federal government has shut down, threatening the livelihoods and well-being of hundreds of thousands of families like mine. It’s a good time for us to step back and look at who gets hurt — and why.
Small businesses get hurt. They get important loans from the government. California is home to 684,953 small businesses. People who are newly eligible for Social Security, like my parents, get hurt — there’s no one to process their claims. Federal employees get hurt — they’re not rich to begin with and now they are going to start missing paychecks.
That’s just a small sample of who gets hurt because Congress couldn’t do the one simple thing it needed to do to keep government operating. And why? It’s due to a doomed effort by Rep. Tom McClintock and his radical colleagues to defund, or at least delay, the Affordable Care Act. Back in 2010, Republicans tried to block its passage and failed. They tried to have it declared unconstitutional and failed there too. And then they ran a presidential campaign that was based in part on repeal and they failed a third time.
This is patently ridiculous. Rep. Tom McClintock needs to stop playing partisan games and get our government up and running again.
Patrick Stelmach
El Dorado Hills
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