The Year in Government: Lots of spying, little legislating
Perhaps the biggest cause for alarm is elected officials’ inability to tackle urgent challenges: an unemployment rate that stands at 7 percent, an anemic recovery that has been particularly slow to extend to minorities and other vulnerable populations, the steady decline of workers’ wages, growing income inequality, a broken immigration system, low trust in public institutions, not to mention the unmet challenges of man-made climate change.
The year opened as the country reeled from a horror show: Adam Lanza, a teenager with a history of mental illness, walked into an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., in late December 2012 and opened fire, killing 20 schoolchildren and six teachers. Although the faces of the 26 slain and their grieving families lit up television screens for months, lawmakers ultimately decided not to act. Modest legislation to expand background checks failed in the Senate, as the gun-rights lobby outspent gun-control groups $12.2 million to $1.6 million in the first half of 2013, according to the nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation. A running tally by Slate estimates that more than 33,000 people have been killed by guns since the massacre.
Austerity became the de facto economic policy in the spring, as approximately $85.3 billion in across-the-board spending cuts took effect. Sequestration — a policy designed to force lawmakers to come up with a long-term deficit-reduction deal (they didn’t) and one no politician professed to actually like (that didn’t matter) — kicked 57,000 kids off the early-childhood education program Head Start, slashed public-housing support by $1.74 billion, trimmed border security by $595 million and even hit venerated institutions such as the U.S. Holocaust Museum and the Library of Congress, among deep cutbacks in almost every facet of government. Some of that money will be restored in 2014 and 2015 by an end-of-the-year budget compromise, but a large chunk of the cuts will remain in place for the next decade.
Read more: http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/12/23/the-year-in-governmentplaguedbyshortcomings.html
