As the April 8 deadline approaches, lawmakers in Washington are struggling to pass a budget in order to avoid a government shutdown. With Republicans unwilling to accept deals proffered by Vice President Joe Biden and Democratic congressional leaders, and conservatives like Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan (head of the House Budget Committee) unwilling to compromise, it seems likely that the two sides will reach an inconclusive deadlock. What then, is going to happen on April 9?

The answer: Not much, because, according to the AP, most Americans won’t be seeing much of a change. In total, roughly one in four government workers will be staying home. The mail will still come, air traffic controllers will still man their posts and the FBI will still investigate crimes. The IRS will still accept checks, though they won’t send out any refunds. All in all, the real ramifications are rather small.

There is, however, one huge downside to a potential shutdown: the cost. The Government Accountability Office, the auditing branch of Congress, estimated that the 1995 government shutdown, the last to occur, cost the US government about $200 million. If 1995 were to repeat, the result would probably be a similar cost to a deficit-ridden nation.

The similarities between the 1995 shutdown and the potentially upcoming one do not end there. In 1994, the Republicans rode a wave of anti-Clinton sentiment and ended up with majorities in both the House and Senate. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich followed what he believed to be his mandate to cut welfare spending, grants to NPR, PBS and the arts, and other government services that he and his party believed to be part of the “welfare state.” Gingrich’s refusal to compromise with Clinton led to a government shutdown. It was a classic case of over-reach: Voters elected Gingrich and his fellow Republicans to inject some sanity into what they saw as a rapidly expanding federal government. What they got was a Republican leadership unwilling to compromise and unwilling to find a solution. The result? Clinton’s approval ratings rose, and he sailed into reelection in 1996. Gingrich’s presidential aspirations were shattered, and he ultimately resigned in 1998.

This historical precedent begs the question: what are the Republicans thinking? The answer seems to lie in the fragmented nature of the party. Speaker John Boehner seems to recognize that a government shutdown would harm the image of the Republican party and leave the President either unscathed, or worse for them, more popular than before. Unfortunately, he’s finding it difficult to keep the firebrand freshman Congressmen and women, mostly from the Tea Party, from sabotaging his efforts to work out a deal. Congressman Paul Ryan, among others, has proposed a rather radical budget, one that would cut programs like SCHIP, a popular federal program that helps states pay for the health insurance of underprivileged children. The politically motivated nature of cuts to programs like Planned Parenthood, whose piddling federal budget of $317 million seems infinitesimal compared to the 2011 deficit of $1.27 trillion, certainly doesn’t help bolster the Republican party’s claim that this is all in the name of balancing the budget.

In the end, however, both parties miss the point. Non-defense discretionary spending, the kind that most lawmakers are arguing over, is roughly 15 percent of the overall federal budget. The majority of the budget goes into pensions, in the form of Social Security ($695 billion in 2010), the Defense Department ($663 billion) and federal insurance and welfare programs like Medicare ($453 billion) and Medicaid ($290 billion). Arguing about whether or not cuts should be made to such small programs as SCHIP or Planned Parenthood is re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. And with the coming wave of retiring Baby Boomers, expenditures on Social Security and Medicare are only going to increase. It seems that defense spending isn’t going to fall anytime soon, either. The intervention in Libya cost the US government an astounding $600 million in its first week.

In light of this, it seems that lawmakers from both parties need to have a sane, rational discussion with the American people about what we can and cannot afford to do. Yes, hard decisions will have to be made. Republican leadership will not be able to simply pluck the low hanging fruit; they will have to realize that we cannot afford to spend half a trillion dollars on defense. And Democrats will have to accept that spending billions of dollars on untenable entitlement programs is not sustainable in the long term. The sooner we have this discussion, the sooner we can begin to fix the problems that ail this nation.