Where Words Meet Action

The government shutdown is one of the worst weapons Congress ever granted to itself. And you will notice one unique feature of their shutdown weapon: they can withhold the pay of others but never withhold pay from themselves.

Just how many were impacted by this shutdown? Well, it was 1.4 million federal workers, half of whom were furloughed while the other half were working without pay. Then there are another 1.3 million active-duty service members for whom Trump came up with a workaround that angered the Democrats. Additionally, there are government contractors, which total about 4.1 million Americans, many of whom are now furloughed, but some have critical jobs and are working without pay.

It is bigger than you think, and frankly, it is unforgivable that the Democrats used this weapon by taking millions of Americans who work for the federal government hostage because they want to undo $1.5 trillion in reductions that were legally passed into law in a previous bill that was voted on a few months ago.

Think about this game of chicken that Chuck Schumer is playing with the lives of millions of Americans. Frankly, it is a shakedown as Chuck tries to convince the American people that they have to suffer to find a “compromise” on a stance that, if a compromise were to be made for spending, it would be spending that, in my view, is waste, fraud, and abuse. The kind of spending that would only make other areas of our American system fail. It is nothing more than a game of political chicken designed to see who will blink as a result of causing hardship to millions of Americans who will be voting in the midterms a year from now.

Well, Chuck created the shutdown because he wants to blame what the Democrats did on the Republicans. The very Republicans who have now voted thirteen times to reopen the government, while the Democrats have voted thirteen times to shut the government down. The Democrats are using the pain they inflicted on millions until they force their way to the “compromise.” But that is not a compromise; that is a threat.

Frankly, it should be illegal for elected representatives to shut down anything dealing with the American people to play the blame game for votes in a future election. How is that being representative? This is what the Mafia does, or terrorist groups do when they basically say, “Give us what we want, or we will make the pain so great that you will be forced to do it our way.” For the Democrats, it is from their standpoint because they will use the legacy media to blame Republicans for their bad behavior.

Senator Schumer has always been against government shutdowns because he knows it is really an evil weapon. Yet here he is doing this awful thing, and the question is why? Well, he is trying to save his seat in the Senate, but in doing the shutdown, he blew his chances, and his only way to save face now for his last reelection is to win this game of chicken. The problem is this game of chicken might work with many politicians, but it is not going to work with Trump. Even world leaders know not to play chicken with Trump because if you do, you will lose every time. Trump is too fast, too smart, and the Democrats are already losing the war of public opinion. They now have the lowest rating of confidence ever, and it’s getting worse day by day.

So, the question is: if the Democrats hated the original bill that much, why did it pass to begin with? Simple: that bill, known as the big, beautiful bill, only required a simple majority to pass in the Senate, which was fifty-one votes out of one hundred. But continuing resolutions (CRs) for continued funding of the government require a supermajority vote, and thus sixty votes out of one hundred. So, Chuck and his gang of co-conspirators reasoned that they would try to undo what was done in the previous bill, which frankly was done because it was the will of the American people. How do I know that was the will of the American people? Simple: they voted Trump and the Republicans into office to make that change found in that bill and bills yet to come. So, to thwart the will of the American people, this shakedown tactic was used.

Frankly, the “supermajority” is yet another weapon against the American people that Congress uses, forcing way too much compromise, and it is within those funding compromises that we ended up with $38.3 trillion in debt, a number we just passed this week.

I know lots of people believe the “supermajority vote” is a healthy process, but while I understand their arguments and could give them the very same argument, I would simply state that the god-awful results of this tactic prove otherwise, and our debt is the evidence it has failed the American people.

Can you imagine being a representative of our nation and believing that it was somehow moral to abuse millions of American people in this way? I would never consider it and would even pass a law to ensure that no future group of political knuckleheads would use a threat of a shutdown because the options for a shutdown would not be there to be used.

But it gets worse. And what I am about to share with you will open your eyes to how our political representatives ran up our nation’s credit card debt. And please do not take political sides about whether this is the Democrats’ fault or the Republicans’ fault, because what I am going to share with you is equally the fault of both of them. Each year, Congress works to approve a budget, which is due by law on October 1st of each year.

For example, in 2025, Trump turned in his budget proposal that was due by law on the first Monday of February, which meant he was only in office for just over fifteen days. So, in reality, much of his budget was from the Biden era because there was little to no time to turn the aircraft carrier around and go in a different direction. The Democrats were upset at the Trump budget not because of the budget itself since it was mostly their Biden budget but because they were committed to resisting Trump even if it was mostly their budget. By mid-April, the House and Senate are supposed to agree on the concurrent resolutions by law on the budget and set the overall spending limits.

By October 1st, the new fiscal year begins, and by this date, all the annual appropriations bills should be enacted into law. The god-awful continuing resolutions, or CRs, are the tools Congress uses when a budget is not passed.

So, every three or four months, we all see the game of yet another CR that has to be passed to keep the government open. It is in that process that the threat of government closures occurs, and to avoid the threat, they force each other to spend like drunken sailors; to avoid the threat and the truth, both parties have done this equally. This current shutdown was made worse and even ironic because this CR is only for 60 days before it is all worked out in Congress for the 2026 budget. In a bill process that doesn’t require a supermajority. But the Democrats really do not want compromise then; they want to force the leverage now under a process that requires a supermajority that comes from the leverage of making millions of American federal workers suffer.

Now, to utterly understand how diabolical this all is, you have to know the last time Congress passed a budget on time. When do you think it was? Well, if anything should burn your hide, it is this revelation: it was October 1st, 1997. We are talking about 28 years ago. And so for 28 years, we have been working under CRs that have hijacked the whole budget process. I bet you did not know that, but you should.

And the reason you do not know about it is that the vast media complex profits from the budget overruns, and so clearly, they do not want it fixed. So, it is not a story, and it sure is not headline news. Just remember, nobody makes more money from the political divide than news organizations, which help create the fear that raises funds for the political elites, who then spend that money back on the media in the form of advertising that promotes the fear that the media used to help raise the funds. It is a racket you cannot unsee once you see it and understand it.

And if you track the explosion of our national debt, that was the point in 1997 when Congress stopped passing budgets and started using quarterly CRs, which got our nation on the path to being the largest debtor in the history of the world. It would take China, Japan, the UK, France, and Germany to equal our debt, which combined is six times our population. Our debt is 123% of our Gross National Product (GDP). In 1997, our national debt was high, we thought then, at $5.4 trillion, but our debt then was only 44.12% of our GDP. You don’t have to have a Pulitzer Prize in economics to understand this is a problem and a problem that was avoidable all along.

The CR process is the complete and total failure of Congress to pass a budget and instead wages war with itself and then drags the American people into the process, with each side telling only part of the story. The divide in the country started in Congress, and the greater the divide they had, the greater the divide we had within our nation. The divide in Congress is to retain power. The divide in the nation is generated by fear produced by the media.

You can see some members of Congress with a level of hate so unhinged that they should not represent anyone because they cannot present themselves properly. And what is the tool they use to stay in power, you ask? It is simple: they use FUD, which stands for fear, uncertainty, and doubt. It is captured in quick headlines that simply promote the fear that is not real. People are so afraid they spend billions on both sides of the political spectrum to protect themselves.

Which is why I write long-format articles constantly to give you a framework of what you cannot see in a headline. Sure, people complain about my articles being so long. But guess what? “NOTHING WAS EVER SOLVED WITH A HEADLINE.” In fact, headline news is a form of brainwashing where you depend on the headlines that you believe are from those who are trustworthy, but in fact, the talking heads are not trustworthy and do not know much more than you. The greatest lies told by the media are found within the headlines created by those who know that you will never research the details behind their headlines. And from those headlines, they can make you hate fellow Americans who have also been taught to hate you. This is because news organizations profit from bad news and I’ve never made a dime from good news. And when the news is bad enough, they manufacture it. It’s truly despicable.

In truth, I am a very, very average person, with a very average IQ, I suspect. I have zero credentials for anything that I talk about. I am not a writer, but here I am writing to you; I am not an author, but I am authoring books on many subjects. I am not a cook, but I love to cook and many believe me to be a chef; I am not a poet, but I have written hundreds of poems. According to the world, I have no credentials to speak on political or policy matters.

If anything, I am a reader who is willing to read beyond the headlines and try to explain what others do not talk about but should. I talk about these issues because I do not like living in a country where we constantly deal with the bad decisions made by others. But I do have a gift, which is that I can make sense of stupidity where it is found in great abundance. I suppose my credential is that I am not stupid because I have common sense and know how to explain the complex in simple terms. That is about the extent of my limited skill sets. I think we all inherently know that the average everyday American citizen could do a much better job running Congress than the supposed experts have been doing.

Living within our means as a nation is not a left or right issue; it is flat-out in the middle, and it is a middle ground issue because common sense is by its very nature not political. But overspending has been justified because it has been made political, and it has placed all of us in debt. And more than you think.

Take the nearly $40 trillion we now have in national debt, then add to that the debt of states, the unfunded liabilities, and the $1.2 trillion in interest charges we pay per year, and you all of a sudden have a total debt of $300 trillion, which means every American is in debt $857,000 before they add their own debt to that amount. And if you have three kids with a household of five, then those that represent you place you into $4.3 million in debt.

Something again the media should tell you, not me. And I bet most in Congress do not know half of what I have told you because they are too busy focused on the rules of the House that break the lives of Americans who are trying to live life in their house.

Chuck and his gang shut down the government, inflicting pain into the lives of millions of Americans for leverage, like you are a pawn on a chessboard. For what? For Chuck to try and keep his job and prove that the other side of the aisle is more wrong than him? Are you kidding me? And most of the money they want is not for Americans. They say that it is, but it is a shell game because the money is given to the states, who then use the funds for those who have not used due process to come into the country. So, Chuck can technically say, “No, we are not giving money to illegals,” which is kind of true, but he gives it to states that do. So, in truth, he is not telling the whole truth, and it’s this kind of stuff that led us to trillions in debt instead of trillions in surplus.

And yes, we should have at least $10 trillion in surplus, which means we have a $48 trillion dollar swing to get out of debt and into a surplus that we all deserve. The safety net of our country should not be built on debt. It should be built on surplus. But do you think that thought even floats around the halls of Congress? I don’t think so. But I know my everyday average reader understands this basic truth of living within our means and having a safety net based on surplus, not debt.

And here is the sad truth: because the American people are lazy about government and politics and simply rely on headline news, we have allowed truly crazy political hacks to drive us off the financial cliff. It is not reasonable; it is not fair, and it is unforgivable, the financial wreckage we are passing on to future generations. To make matters worse, we use technology to make the insanity of it all go faster. How ironic is that?

So now you know what is broken and why. Now you know it’s not a left or right issue, and now you know that for 28 years, no matter what party was in charge, it got worse. And none of it is sustainable; it is the world’s largest Ponzi scheme. And the problem with Ponzi schemes is that when the failure is fast, you do not see it, and you do not feel it until the bridge we are all on simply fails. We have no way to get off the bridge; we just go down with it all. How fast could we collapse? It could happen over a three-day period. And then our world would forever change.

We need smart people to represent us to shrink the size of government, expand the economy faster than our debt, and not raise taxes but expand the tax base through growth of income, not growth of taxes. And you know why we do not do those things? Simple: we need more businesspeople and fewer attorneys because attorneys do not know how to expand the economy, especially Democrat attorneys, who would rather tax the economy. Why? Well, because attorneys know how to define a problem, but they know little about fixing them, yet as a profession, they sure can complicate the heck out of anything, slowing everything down and increasing the cost of everything at the same time. We need people who can speak plainly and understand the difference between a solution and a theory.

What do we need to fix that closed the government? Kill the CR process, kill the supermajority vote, get a balanced budget in place, and pass budgets on time as required by law. And if Congress cannot do that, then they should not get paid for not doing their job until they fix what they broke, instead of failing at their job and using leverage by telling millions they can get paid.

Just saying the obvious once again!