If I were a typical Congresscritter or teevee talking head from Central Casting, I'd be busily pushing the story line of our economy as a family budget, and the perils of buying with credit recklessly, and how my children's children will be paying for their parent's 2nd grade education, and how evil that is because the poor suckers won't be able to pay for college anyway (without becoming child prodigies in the derivatives markets) after they settle down and get jobs fulfilling internet orders in windowless warehouses, and I'd just babble and blather blithely on as we all just settle into our bunker mentalities and await the outcome of the latest manufactured crisis in a surreal limbo that makes the worst run-on sentence you've ever seen seem fraught with purpose and resolution.
Now that I've chased away 90% of my potential readers...
Didn't the Koch Bros. turn the last, great debate over the ACA into an acrid astro-turf prairie fire that still smolders to this day? ...Nice trick that, more on it later...
Rotten load of horse-hockey, that. Homes are like financial castles: you make money to pay the bills to keep the marauders away. Our government is to the greater economy like warm water to a tropical storm: it feeds water and pressure into the entire system, and makes it rain everywhere.
The current shutdown we're in is a microcosm of the larger effect. Like a garden hose or shower head. Funding streams of all sorts have been shut off, and people can't go to work.
The seemingly obvious next step, if you Party with Tea, is to say, "Send us back our water! I's outrageously inefficient for us to send it to Eeeeebil Washington and have most of it wasted on poor people and old people and science before a little trickles back down to us!!! We'll operate our waterworks much better at the state and local level"
-That wasn't fair, that should have been in all CAPS!!!!!!!! But I did get a good swipe in at reaganomics.
But, the sad truth is, the overall economy can't be boiled down to water pressure in a pipe, or hose, easily directed at any given purpose at will. The economy is more like a weather system that MUST encompass the entire country. The reason capitalism has done so well as to jointly provide for a quarter of the entire world's GDP with our government's help is because it is as blind to intent and purpose (outside of reasonable regulation for the common good) of capital's intents and purposes as it is to content of speech or religious affiliation.
There have been fantastic shelters for economic pursuits throughout our history that have been of immense use to us and to the world, eclipsed only through military force (1812) or by accident (1979.) But now the auspicious trade winds of our own creation are set to collapse. We don't know what forces will follow.
This immense "hurricane" of our economy has distinct parts: there is the general upward movement of tax revenues and borrowed money to Washington. There is the structure of the "storm": the people and entities that manage the input and regulate the outflow. And there are the "customers." Where the money goes. The "demand" part of the pie.
Normal government payouts are done to perform vital functions. We build roads and bridges' fight enemies, support vital activities in conjunction with the various states... you know the drill.
Maybe it's all gotten so big and un-predictable that many have lost faith in America, or at least the part of it that goes to Washington to serve itself at the expense of the rest of us.
It started with Hurricane Katrina, there was bewilderment and rage as people suffered for weeks while Bush slapped Brownie on the back.
Iraq went out of control, while we handed out cost-plus no-bid contracts and airlifted pallets of cash to not "nation-build."
Then the hidden monsters of Wall Street got bailed out on their Monopoly-Money daydreams while we... lost our real-life lives.
It doesn't surprise me at all that people crowded into town-hall meetings to scream opposition to the next big government program, the ACA.
It does still bother me the dems never caught onto the underlying swindle or tried to fight back.
But now the really big con is going down, it has all the earmarks of a manufactured crisis of epically monumental proportions.
Really, Paul Ryan, you want anti birth-control language? ... Can't you even try to be plausible while you demolish the economy?
There are foul winds afoot. Honestly, there always have been. The United States, itself, has long been a rock-solid safe harbor financially. When we intentionally destroy the output potential of our favorable climate, our entire input system may collapse along with it. If we fail at weathering this crisis and preserving the existing structure, there might be nothing left to build on the day after.