Fixing the Problem vs. Kicking the Can Down the Road: Why Are We Dealing with Yet Another Government Shutdown Crisis?

Illustration: AI collaboration using art by author

Many problems in government--and in life--are like surgery. No one wants to have surgery, but you have to do it. What's more, the sooner you do it the better. In many cases if you wait too long even surgery won't save you.

This is exactly what's wrong with the national debt and many other government problems. It involves pain. It involves surgery. No one wants to have surgery, but if you put it off the patient will die. And this nation is not immortal. 

This is the reality we are faced with. 

The same applies to crime. We're afraid to take the necessary steps to deal with it for fear of anarchy. Well, guess what? Anarchy (a state of disorder due to the absence of law and order) is what we've got. So the authorities have two choices: anarchy now or more a destructive anarchy later. The latter might be more than we can handle... 

No pain, no gain. It's either pain now, or kick the can down the road.

To their credit, the Founding Fathers created a Constitution designed to protect us from the kind of tyranny they'd experienced while under the thumb of England. To our dismay, they "kicked the can down the road" when it came to the matter of slavery. The bloodiest war in our history came two generations later and it almost killed us. 

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Another can we're kicking down the road is our bloated bureaucracy. I remember years ago reading that the Soviet Union failed because of its excess government. The government purportedly had subcommittees for every facet of its planned economy, including one to determine how many bristles to have in a toothbrush.

True or not, bureaucratic bloat is readily acknowledged to be an expanding drag on our economy. A recent Wall Street Journal article stated that our Federal, state and local governments have added 327,000 jobs thus far this year. These are not production positions to help us compete economically with China. Instead we are all too often adding new layers of permitting oversight and red tape that strangles the businesses who produce the nation's wealth that sustains us.

Whether we have a government shutdown this week, the reality is that neither party is fixing the problem. Do we really have to hit a debt ceiling every six months? Instead of really addressing the causes of the crisis, each party--using the megaphone of media--blame the other side.

As I said up front, no one wants to have surgery, but we have to do it. What's more, the sooner we do it the better. If we wait too long even surgery won't save us. 

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This blog post is my opinion. What's yours?