Earlier this week, Uncle Sam’s red-white-and-blue getup, a la Cinderella’s dress, morphed into dirty rags once the clock struck midnight.
If an unpropitious way to start the fiscal year, it seems more honest than the 365 days that preceded. October 1, after all, admitted that the federal government is broke. The days before it, a la Kevin Bacon in Animal House, insisted “All is well!”
The counterintuitive, Baconesque, if you will, message of the government shutdown is: Remain calm. All is well!
The real problem, of course, occurred not on October 1, when rules forced the federal government to spend within its means. It occurred on all those days when legislators could spend all sorts of money that the treasury lacked.
The federal budget deficit reached $2 trillion for the 2025 fiscal year. This occurred because legislators spent $7 trillion — about a quarter of the gross domestic product. This pushed the national debt close to $38 trillion.
Recklessness, then, occurred on all the days when legislators spent money not in the treasury. Prudence, even if of a false, forced variety, occurred during these last few days in which legislators could not spend money on all sorts of things we cannot afford.
A government shutdown means, like so many Washington euphemisms (Washiphemisms?), not a shutdown of the government but instead a government that prioritizes spending.
After all, Social Security checks do not stop and the post office remains open. The Environmental Protection Agency, on the other hand, goes on leave.
Is all that so horrible? It sounds to a lot of people like a government that acts more in concordance with the Constitution and basic rules of accounting.
The progressives of all parties, their media enablers, and so many others push the idea that a lack of money to spend, i.e., a government “shutdown,” is the problem. Addicts speak in such terms when they run out of cash to fuel their habit. Clear-thinking individuals grasp that what the addict — heroin, spending, or otherwise — views as the solution is really the problem. And the “problem” increasingly strikes them as the solution.
Ultimately, Americans outside of the Washington, D.C., area do not worry all that much that the federal government now closes this museum or furloughs those workers. It does not affect them, except to illustrate that so much of what they spend their tax dollars on remains extraneous to their lives.
Democrats hoist themselves on their own petard here. This amounts to the third shutdown under Donald Trump (none occurred under Joe Biden). By normalizing shutdowns, Democrats ensure that Americans no longer fear them — or fear what happens when one must walk without a ranger in sight in Acadia National Park. The takeaway for most Americans? We don’t need all this stuff that progressives insist we need.
A better strategy for progressives occurs on the local level. Whenever local do-gooders want more tax dollars, they do not threaten to lay off the diversity officer in the local library. No, they tell everyone that the situation demands that the town forfeit the high school football team’s season or impose onerous user fees on student athletes if they do not get their fix of higher property taxes.
The federal government, in contrast, stops nonessential services. This lacks an oh-no quality. It’s like a horror movie that casts a ladybug as the villain.
If, instead of nonessential government services, politicians tied the government shutdown to, say, a ban on fun-size Halloween Krackels, YouTube videos of baby Orangutans, or NFL games, then Americans would care. As it stands now, the closure of the visitor center at the Capitol does not seem to move the needle with many Americans. And the shutdown seems to give the Trump administration ideas about permanentizing it for some nonessential programs.
The Democrats played into their own checkmate here.
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