The quarterly threat of gloom and doom and dire consequences is rolling out the red carpet again. Red being the important color, as in a sea of red ink. The threat of government shut downs has become such a routine occurrence, about every three months, that I don’t think I can muster up the necessary “fight or flight” level of fear yet again.
It’s not that this time might not actually be THE time that the treat turns into reality; it’s just that I have reconciled myself to knowing that there is nothing I can do to influence the situation. Praying for a resolution is to acknowledge there is hope. Writing to my congressional representatives is an exercise in futility because their actions, or inactions, demonstrate they are either (a) not aware of how their constituents (me and millions like me) feel or (b) so entrenched in party politics they don’t care what we want or expect.
If the situation is truly so dire that something must be done yesterday; why is it that one seat of congress can pass a stop gap spending bill today, but the other seat of congress can’t vote on it for three more days because they have to read all the language, and its impacts, first. How I wish they had taken that approach before voting for some of the stimulus bills or the bailout bills or the health care bill. How many rational Congressmen (I see another oxymoron in the making) would really have voted “Aye” if they had actually read the entire language of those bills? Wait a second, if they had read those bills, they would probably still be reading the long drawn out bureaucratic mumbo jumbo and nothing would have been voted on yet.
It is another wonderment how these representatives actually got elected. No one I talk with admits to voting for them. So, if I didn’t vote for them and no one else that I know voted for them, how did they get elected? Just about everyone wants to “throw the bums out,” but they continue to be re-elected. Rarely does a campaign promise get fulfilled. Since the turn of this century my living standard has continued to decline regardless of their rhetoric that “the sun’ll come out tomorrow.” Absolutely everything involving money has increased except my salary and my savings.
Financial experts warn us to stop, or slow down, spending and save our funds for times of dire need…like government shut downs. And just how are we supposed to do this when taxes are our largest “spending”? What if Congress were to start saving for the pending shut downs? Maybe we could actually get out of this cycle and have a normal life without all the start, stop, start, stop, starts that have occurred.
I’ll end this opinion piece with a thought: If Congress were to pass the current Jobs Creation bill of $447 Billion and spread the funds even amongst all of the estimated 300 Million American citizens, regardless of age, an estimated $1.5Million a person; imagine the jobs and economic stimulus we could create.