The major perk of our current, temporary "budget autonomy" arrangement isn't that we get to make our own budget decisions, because we don't, but that our locally paid-for city services (like trash collection) won't come to a halt if Congress can't pass a federal budget.
Parsons and three others -- the hunger strike is not an Occupy DC action, but the would-be strikers are all occupiers -- will be asking for three things as a condition of ending their strike: D.C. budget autonomy, legislative autonomy and voting rights.
A study for Bruegel, a Brussels think-tank, concluded that "having budget autonomy doubles the effect of additional money on university research performance".
CORRECTION: A previous version of this post incorrectly referred to the budget autonomy bill as introduced in April of 2012, several months, rather than several weeks, before Joe Lieberman retired from the Senate.
In 2012, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) famously tried to make past D.C. budget autonomy efforts contingent on the adoption of a new, city-funded bureaucracy to deal with guns and laws to weaken the power of the city's labor unions.
There have been other legislative efforts to achieve local budget autonomy for D.C., including through the use of a local referendum.
There have been gains, with the District's budget autonomy votes and Obama's ever so slight gesture of a fancy new license plate (#notaxworep), but the big wins are still the activists like Sam Jewler and Nate Bennett-Fleming.
The D.C. budget autonomy bill proposed Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif).
If the budget autonomy isn't there, legislative autonomy isn't there and the D.C. vote isn't present, then we won't eat," he says.
WASHINGTON -- Three Occupy DC protesters began a hunger strike for D.C. voting rights, full budget autonomy and full legislative autonomy at 12 noon Thursday.
