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Endgame?

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What will it take to end the shutdown?  There isn’t much that can be compromised in this situation, given that we have two issues at stake – the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) on one side and the continuing resolution plus the debt ceiling on the other.  There’s just not a lot of give when you have this kind of asymmetry.  So it’s almost certainly going to be one side that caves.

As said before, it’s hard to imagine the President and his supporters in the US Senate giving in, so let’s just call that a low probability event.  It’s probably going to be a Republican give of some kind.  And one is brewing in the form of a general revolt of “pragmatic Republicans” who understand how dangerous this game is.

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Dear Republican Friends:

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How ya doin’?  I know this is a tough time and the last person you want to hear from is a Democrat, but many of you are friends of mine.  Some of the kindest and most decent people I know are Republicans, and I care about you.  Much of my family were and are Republicans, too.  You have to know I write this from the bottom of my heart.

I’m really worried about you – as a party.  I think that this nation works best when there are two engaged, committed, fearless, and honest parties mixin’ it up – but also gettin’ ‘er done.  And …. well, rather than just get mad and blame you all for the very public way your party is ripping apart I thought I’d offer my support and encouragement for you to get better soon.  Really, anything I can do to help.  But let me tell you why this is so important to me.

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Opportunity Costs

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I’m too upset by the prospect of a government shutdown to write anything coherent.  It happens.  So I dug through the last time we had this problem potentially looming in 2011 and found this piece.  It’s not only still relevant, but it ties into our recent piece on the Triple Threat of forces on our economic health that no one is really dealing with.  I hope you enjoy this repeat from 31 August 2011.

You can’t have your cake and eat it, too.  It’s a silly old saying with a huge dollop of folk wisdom hidden in the middle of it.  But money spent is sometimes more than just money gone – in an integrated world it’s a choice to make one connection when another one might have been a better choice.

Rather than just measure how much money is going in and out, it might be better to understand what we could buy with the same money.  The technical term for this is “Opportunity Cost”, or what we give up by making the choices we do.

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Resiliency vs Interdependence

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Long ago, most Americans lived as Laura Ingalls Wilder chronicled in the “Little House” series.  Pa Ingalls and family were out in the wilderness, living with the rhythm of the land and putting away what they could to survive long winters and perhaps beyond.  The family’s net worth was what they had around them.

That life has been replaced with interdependence based on a dollar value assigned to absolutely everything.  We all get by with any extra scratch, should there be some, not stored up to get through the winter but properly invested in convertible assets.  This means everyone is subject to  the “free market”, which determines the value of all assets including experience, talent, and work.

That interdependence has changed our world to one with much less hard work or struggles against nature, and yet to many it has become as hostile as any winter on the Great Plains.
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Triple Threat

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What’s the right thing to do to help the economy?  Clearly, Congress has no idea, making bizzy with games designed to impress their constituents.  Major economists don’t agree, either, with at least three different views on what is going on and the appropriate remedies. How can it be so chaotic and disorganized?

It’s always been Barataria’s creed that if you complain about how things are you have to stick your neck out and offer a better solution.  Our answer has always been that there is a totally new economy forming around us as we work through the Managed Depression, and that there is a dire need for public and private leadership to help us create that new world dynamically.  That’s a bit too hard to define , but we can offer is a different way of looking at the situation we’re in.  It doesn’t directly point to courses of action, but it suggests things that should be tried.

Here is a description of the Triple Threat to the US Economy – Business Cycles, Globalism, and Demographics – and how they are working together to make this a once in a lifetime change.

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