A few thoughts on the impending shutdown of the US government -- and the state of our politics.

Those who follow my work on social media will be aware that I write in multiple domains of human endeavor, not just in policy for management of chronic pain.? The following has been posted to my Facebook page and other social media, on the eve of our impending government shutdown.? The issues here are large ones. They will not be solved by small thinking.

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A few thoughts on the impending shutdown of the US government and the state of our politics.

It seems that Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and a few others of his party are determined to shut down the government unless they get their way on massive spending reductions that Democrats will never agree to. By any reasonable analysis, their position is simply untenable, though the damage they will do to Americans is mostly nuisance if it doesn't last too long.? Political theater at its worst.

However, there are larger issues in play. In principle, conservative legislators are correct that the country cannot continue massive budget deficits without causing loss of international confidence in the US economy as a place to invest and store wealth. Spending and taxes must be brought into closer alignment.

Republicans conveniently neglect to notice that present deficits have been made significantly larger by the Trump tax cut to the richest 0.5%. They refuse to acknowledge that there is something seriously out of balance in a tax system where corporate executives pay a smaller percentage of their incomes in all taxes, than do the administrators who sit at the front desks of their offices, or the workers who staff their manufacturing plants. Such disparities are partly what is driving United Auto Workers’ strikes against large US auto makers.

Democrats also have their mental lapses. They perceive benefits to the disadvantaged as an ultimate positive good for voters — and they may be partly right in this perception. But they also refuse to admit that there must be limits on how much government can do and how it will be paid for.

I have written elsewhere that a nation that could elect Donald Trump president and where half of the Republican party wants to do so again in 2024, cannot be fully sane. I continue in that conviction. Donald Trump is a self-admitted serial sexual predator, twice impeached and four times indicted on felony charges. A New York judge recently found that Trump's business "empire" is largely a fraudulent hollow shell of assets inflated to justify hundreds of millions in loans.

From the public testimony of former Republican officials, it is clear that Trump actively participated in an attempted coup to deny the orderly transition of power to a new Administration that had fairly won the 2020 elections. Over 30 court actions initiated by Trump failed to find any evidence of the election fraud that he continues to proclaim, knowing that it never existed. Rudi Julianni has been dis- barred for his participation in this charade.

Arguably, the man is a con artist, and millions of Americans have fallen for the con. Surely conservatives could do better than THIS!

Trump’s businesses are not the only hollow shell we must confront. Due to automation of manual labor with off-shoring of jobs to cheaper world markets and under-investment in civil infrastructure, US wages have stagnated for 50 years while the gap between rich and poor has widened. We witness these realities in structural unemployment in both rural and inner-city communities, the collapse of American families and a continual exponential raise in “accidental” drug overdose deaths throughout America.

We are living out a crisis of hopelessness, not medical exposure to prescription drugs.

Of potentially even greater near-term impact, our inattention to the consequences of fossil fuel economies, has led to our entering a climate crisis that may make large swaths of the Earth’s surface uninhabitable by our great grandchildren. Our ocean fisheries are choking on plastic waste. Rain forest that sustains world wide atmospheres is shrinking. Fresh water is increasingly in scarcity.

To return to our elections:

As we move toward November 2024, the country is ever more polarized. But even in this, we must recognize that although some Republicans are racists or white supremacists, most of them are not. Many are simply disaffected with political elites that seem to have forgotten them in the power games of State and Federal government.

Independents are disgusted with both parties.

MAGA Republicans may view themselves as patriots trying to win their country back to values of past generations. But they fail to acknowledge that those values were very often not lived by non-white citizens, even a hundred years after the American civil war -- and still aren't whenever a person of color encounters a policeman. It is time to own that disparity and do something about it.

These basically good hearted people focus instead on another distracting "crisis" of brown skinned people seeking entry at our southern border. But many of us refuse to understand that for our aging population, we desperately need more young legal immigrants to pay the social security taxes that fund retirement for a majority of our retired seniors.

In the midst of this mess, my own view is that all of us must begin to once again seek the center of our political process. Neither left nor right can expect to "win" the arguments that they're having now, and positive change cannot be instant. We must compromise or collapse.

In the next election, we may again face the real risk of political violence such as happened on January 6th 2021. Foreign influences (notably but not exclusively Putin's Russia and the People's Republic of China) seek to promote such violence by injecting ever more partisanship and animosity into our social media.

This must not become the face of our next election. But to avoid it, we must all rededicate ourselves to finding our political and social center ground.