Welcome, everyone. I'm Adam Michelle, Director of Tax Policy Studies here at the Cato Institute, and today I'm joined by...

Michael Cannon, the Director of Health Policy Studies in Cato.

And Ruminah Botcha, the Director of Budget and Entitlement Policy.

For those of you whose lives were not affected by the partial slowdown of the federal

government for the past 43 days, the government shut down has officially ended.

On Wednesday night, President Trump signed a bill to reopen and fund the government

through January 30th.

The bill funds some programs for things like agriculture,

military construction, veterans, and legislative agencies for the rest of the fiscal year,

but the rest of the government is only funded through January 30th. The bill doesn't include

many of the Democrats' major policy demands on health care programs,

but they did receive some concessions on bringing back federal workers that Trump had laid off

during the shutdown and a promise for a future vote on the continuation of some of these

expanded pandemic Obamacare subsidies with the promise of a vote next month, most likely.

So today we're going to do a bit of post-mortem on the shutdown debate, address some of the bigger picture questions that it leaves us with.

Why shutdowns keep happening? Can we learn anything from these recurring manufactured crises? Are we doomed to repeat this every few years? But I want to start by digging into the central policy question that drove the shutdown, which is the government's role in health care. And starting with you, Michael, can you give us an overview of sort of why the shutdown was centered on these Obamacare subsidies, what they are and sort of where it leaves us?

Sure, but, you know, I always laugh when we talk about government shutdowns because it's not really a government shutdown.

I mean, yeah, my wife is not getting paid right now. But so many parts of the government

are humming along. And it wasn't until now that it occurred to me, the IRS was still humming

along. During this government shutdown, we were all still paying taxes, weren't we? Wouldn't it make

the shutdowns a lot shorter if it also cut off the government's ability to collect taxes from us during the

shutdown, I think that might never occur. It certainly would. And that part of the government.

...