Part of the Plan

I don't think they could run the current national or global economic system without debt, I think it's an integral part of the plan. The Federal Reserve manipulates the money supply by buying and selling "treasuries", which includes notes (short term), bills (medium term), and bonds (long term). I don't think the system could function without them having that tool. Many of my libertarian colleagues believe that's precisely what's wrong with the system, and would prefer we go back to the gold standard. The thing is, there were lots of problems with the gold standard too, as your guy William Jennings Bryan predicted there would be, and also lots of problems with the non-system that they had before that. The current system defies reasoning and common sense. Logically, it shouldn't work at all, but it does, at least as good, and probably better, than anything they've tried before. The economy is a lot like the weather, you're going to have your cyclical ups and downs, and your occasional national disaster. All they can do is deal as best they can with the problems that arise. Truth be known, I think that a lot of it is beyond anybody's control. Nevertheless, people tend to blame the current political administration when things go bad on their watch.

I thought I had already told you that our former Governor Granholm was a Democrat. She was not voted out, she served two full terms, which is all that is allowed by our state constitution. By the end of her second term, however, many people had turned against her and were ready for a change. That's about par for the course with presidents and governors. Sometimes they don't even get a second term but, when they do, they seldom go out as popular as they were when they came in.

While a real shutdown of the federal government would certainly disrupt our lives for awhile, I don't think it would be the end of the world. Most of the essential services would revert to the state and local governments. Any unemployed soldiers who still desired a military life could join the National Guard, only now they would be working for one of the states instead of Uncle Sam. The states would lose all their federal funding but, since nobody would be paying federal taxes anymore, the states could raise their own taxes accordingly. Social Security might present a problem, since people have become so dependent on it, but again, with people no longer paying into the system, there would be more money available to redirect towards whatever alternative system the states come up with. The biggest change would be foreign relations, and most people are unhappy with that as it is. Each state could develop its own foreign policy, or several states could band together to present a united front to the rest of the world. This is all pie-in-the sky anyway, the federal government is never going to really shut itself down, so they should just quit pretending to.

The way I remember that war memorial thing is that a bunch of people got together, dismantled the barricades, and visited the memorial in defiance of the fake shutdown. I don't remember how that turned out in the end, but I do know that some people did the same thing at a couple of national parks in out region and, to my knowledge, nobody even tried to stop them. To bad, that would have made an interesting court case, a government that is allegedly shut down arresting people for trespassing on their own property.

My non-voting paper mill colleague, let's call him "Jack", was a classic devil's advocate. He liked to argue and always took the unpopular side. I don't know if he just did it for sport or if he really  believed in any of that stuff, but he certainly was good at it. Anyway, a "big suck" was the paper mill equivalent of the Gage Park "brown nose". The opposite of a big suck was called a "radical", no matter what his political leanings were. At one point, somebody pointed out to me that half the people in the mill thought that I was a big suck, and the other half thought I was a radical. I figured that was about right and never tried to change my public image.