The shutdown is your fault

The 535 members of Congress and the kids over at The White House are gathering a lot of blame for this shutdown thingy and the complete cluster that is our federal finances. But the blame is yours. And mine.

While we’re at it, we can blame our spouses and parents and cousins and good friends  and old girlfriends and those jackasses on cable news shows who argue over pennies while dollars are flying at mach speeds out of the unsecured cash register at Crazy Sam’s Big Entitlement Store in Washington.

Roby Brock, our content partner, recently conducted a poll asking a fair sampling of likely Arkansas voters who they blamed the most for the federal shutdown. President Obama and the Democrats garnered 40% of the blame, Congressional Republicans had 35%, and both parties were to blame by 24%.

There was no option for “You, the voter, are to blame.” This response was never asked for nor proferred: “Well, Roby, I have to admit that, well, gosh, maybe I’m to blame here because in all my votin’ days I guess that, well, I’ve kind of been a dumbass for voting to re-elect the gosh-darned incumbent. So, as much as it pains me to to admit this, you can mark me down as sharing some of the blame.”

Yep. We voters and non-voters are to blame. (Yes, you non-voters, also. Not voting is voting. You may not mark a ballot, but your absence is reflected.) Between 1964 and 2012, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives was re-elected more than 80% of the time. In 2012, 91% of Senators who sought new terms were re-elected, and 90% of House members were re-elected.

We voters, knowing full well that this incompetent brew of good suits were part of our collective national disorder, agreed to send 9 out of 10 members of Congress back to the scene of the crime. We’re the abused spouse who just can’t bring ourselves to seek a restraining order.

This shutdown we now enjoy (as of Oct. 16) is primarily the result of an inability of anyone to be honest about the realities of the new healthcare law and our entitlement spending problem. I could attempt to make the case that Obamacare is not the solution, but many other folks from across the political spectrum have in the past few weeks already made that case.

Jon Stewart, the darling of the progressive crowd, recently skewered DHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius about the individual mandate. The unions, who certainly support the President, have become opponents of key provisions of the law. Mark Bertolini, the CEO of Aetna Insurance, noted during a CNBC interview his concerns with the process of signing people up into the new healthcare exchanges.

"There's so much wrong, you just don't know what's broken until you get a lot more of it fixed,” Bertolini said in the CNBC interview.

Bertolini said the program should have been delayed, but “politics got in the way of a good business decision."

The thing is, we need healthcare reform. As one of those unfortunate to have a pre-existing condition, it would be nice to have a system that doesn’t promote the racket that is Blue Cross Blue Shield and other insurance companies who are afforded protected margins under the previous federal health care system (That’s right. We had a broken kaleidoscope of federal health care laws before this newest of questionable conglomeration of health care laws.).

But neither political party is capable of leadership on the issue of healthcare and our federal finances. And those issues are linked because the healthcare law threatens to exacerbate the primary problem of growing entitlement spending that is the parasite killing the host.

The GOP is too tied to balancing what is an unbalanceable mix of religious right wingers, the Tea Party and corporate interests who seek tax and regulatory breaks.

Democrats are tied to a constituent who believes government is the answer and we just need to boost taxes on the rich and powerful to pay for the “right” to healthcare and the “right” to not be poor and the “right” to get an advanced education and the “right” to put a muzzle on folks who believe the federal government is not always the answer.

But, here we are. We are shutdown for more than two weeks over a healthcare system that almost everyone agrees is, at best, fundamentally flawed. Democrats won’t admit it’s fouled up, and the GOP has proven incapable of providing an alternative.

Us small-government Libertarians are screwed. We find no quarter amidst a society that believes we’re just a few more government solutions away from solving the myriad of societal problems often resulting from unintended consequences of previous government fixes. Both parties use the sway of big government to reward their supporters, with those rewards serving to create a gap between spending and revenue that has us in a pickle that requires a debt ceiling increase more often than a teenage boy thinks about boobs.

Political satirist P.J. O’Rourke once noted: “The difference between American parties is actually simple. Democrats are in favor of higher taxes to pay for greater spending, while Republicans are in favor of greater spending, for which the taxpayers will pay.”

To think the federal government is the sole and best answer to our healthcare woes is to completely ignore the fiscal and/or physical condition of Social Security, Medicaid, our national infrastructure, Veterans Administration health care, education funding, and, probably, programs to keep teenage boys focused on other things.

A friend recently suggested that these guys and gals in Congress are all fiddling while our financial future burns. I disagree. Fiddling, even if moderately bad, would at least provide some entertainment and would constitute action. There is nothing actionable nor entertaining about the firm of Reid, Obama & Boehner Inc. (aka, ROB Inc.)

And anyway, it’s not their fault. Remember? It’s your fault. Think about this: What would happen if there was a law saying that until our financial house is in order, there is instituted a suspension of episodes of Duck Dynasty, the next college football season (to include the act of college officials looking the other way while players are paid), those funny and unexpected television cameos by Will Ferrell, and kittens on the Internet?

That’s what I thought.