What the government shutdown means to me

It’s here. We made it all the way to government shutdown. It’s only day 2 and I’ve already heard from a few folks including a realtor who lost a deal because the person on the other side of the transaction was worried about accepting a VA loan. One of our good gentleman overseas will not be getting a place because our elected officials could not figure out how to work together. That’s on top of all the other folks that are going to be underemployed, unemployed, or looking for work in a terrible job market because of the combination of sequestration, our economy, and now a government shutdown.

It’s incredibly frustrating for those of us that are directly involved because the rhetoric isn’t just rhetoric for us, it’s real. It’s impacting our lives every day. So while I’ve gotten some comments back from people saying, “Eh this is just an exercise we have to go through in order to pick your political side and you know there’s always going to be some pain associated with the greater good,” and that’s fine. I can certainly understand that on an intellectual level. I do however believe, at least for me, it’s going to be very hard to find myself ever voting for somebody who played a role in this.

I’d love to play an active role in helping support people who would come to office with the idea that what they do here is more about helping this country than helping themselves to the next office or helping their party figure how to capitalize on this country’s misery. It’s amazing to me that one of the most covered aspects of this story, at least from what I could tell in surfing the news channels last night, was who is going to win, who was going to get the blame politically, and who wasn’t, rather than all the people who this political blame game was hurting. The story to me is a little bit different. To me, it’s about all the millions of people that are affected by this.

As someone who lives in this area, almost every single person that you know is involved in some way in supporting government at least tangentially like the people who own restaurants or own any type of store; all those businesses are hurting because the community as whole is hurting. You can say that has something to do with the over involvement of government, the size of government, or whatever it is, but that doesn’t make the pain that those people feel any less real.

I want to go back to my previous post and say again that today’s post isn’t about whether I believe in Obamacare or not, or my political leaning. It’s about being able to plan. It’s about being able to know what has risk, what doesn’t, and where we’re going to stand as a country from day to day. Let’s say that a year from now that we magically and mysteriously get our act together, everyone decides that they’re going to put aside their differences, and figure out how to work together; even if that miracle were to occur things like this take years to recover from. We have to recover domestically as well as on the international stage.

People look at us as a country and see that we can’t get our act together enough or do things that are clearly in the best interest of our country and it’s the people that we’ve elected to get it done. It makes an impression on every aspect of what they do with us from what they do from a trade standpoint, from how they back any international action, and that we take all of those things that are affected by this and none of them for the better. So I think we’ve taken this action that has helped no one except for those at the very top in the political process i.e. the political class themselves. They are only the group that stands to gain. Every other group in this country is going to suffer on the back of that gain whether it be business people, regular citizens, etc. Every single stakeholder in this country with the exception of whoever wins this blame game is going to be worse off today than they were yesterday.

I hope as a country we’re able to figure out a way out of this and rebuild the trust that we have lost as a country, with each other, with the political process, and then with the other countries. I think we have a long road ahead to recovery and as a country that is just trying to fight its way out of a recession, the last thing we needed was to handicap ourselves on that effort. So I’m curious what everyone else thinks.