November 14, 2025
Dear Interested Readers,
Mixed Feelings About the End of the Shutdown
For over forty days, the shutdown was painful and, at its worst, hard to rationalize, as it was always doubtful that the Republicans would ever agree to the primary issue of continuing financial support for the ACA marketplace. I was surprised when the two senators from my state were among the renegade Democrats who broke from the wishes of Chuck Schumer and most of the Democrats in the Senate, and voted to end the shutdown — at least for now. The misery could return in January as a fitting first anniversary event in response to Trump’s reign of unreason and progression toward his own personal version of autocracy.
Like most Democrats, I was surprised and somewhat upset because I thought that in the court of public opinion, we were making some hard-won progress, but as I considered the situation, I could understand why the misery needed to end. Our most vulnerable neighbors were bearing the brunt of the pain. It is impossible to know what would have happened if the Democrats had maintained their unity of purpose, but several realities must be considered. First, President Trump is not known for his empathy. He never gave much evidence that millions of people losing their SNAP benefits was never going to be his problem. He was more likely to respond to the anger of travelers and businesses as unpaid air traffic controllers undermined air traffic safety. Some predicted that Trump would eventually force Senate Republicans to end the filibuster, a move he has long advocated for, and end the shutdown with a simple majority vote. It appears that there is a bipartisan desire among senators to maintain their filibuster because it gives them a measure of leverage when they are the party out of power.
Now that the shutdown is over, I will reveal that my wife and I have had tickets for several months to fly to the West Coast this coming Monday. I was worried about the difficulties we might have encountered had the shutdown persisted, but we were willing to tolerate the unknowns of travel in support of a concept we supported. Even with Trump’s signature ending the shutdown late Wednesday evening, our risk is still not zero since it will take several days for air travel to return entirely to normal. My worries were minuscule compared to the everyday challenges of many of my neighbors, who are struggling in this economy and, even before the shutdown, were dependent on inadequate SNAP assistance, supplemented by several very well-stocked food pantries to get the nutrition they needed. Often, before the shutdown, the charitable organizations where I volunteer needed to provide food vouchers for use at local grocery stores for some clients, for whom meager SNAP benefits, combined with what they received at the food pantry, were still insufficient.
Once again, Senator Bernie Sanders has reminded us that economically, there are at least two Americas. For many years and again in the aftermath of the One Big Beautiful Bill, Bernie has talked about the “billionaire” class versus the rest of us. He writes:
It’s hard to miss.
Our country is rapidly evolving into two Americas.
One America consists of less than a thousand billionaires who have an unprecedented amount of wealth and power and have never ever had it so good.
The other America, where the vast majority live, consists of tens of millions of families who are struggling to put food on the table, pay their bills and worry that their kids will have a lower standard of living than they do.
In the first America, the uber-wealthy buy $500 million yachts with helicopter pads, $270 million mansions with 30 bedrooms, private islands, a fleet of jets to take them all over the world and rocket ships that blast off to the edge of outer-space. They receive the best health care money can buy, send their kids to the best schools and can expect to live very long lives.
In this America, the three wealthiest men (Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg) own more wealth than the bottom half of our society – over 165 million people. And their wealth is skyrocketing…
Bernie is almost right. I would point out that there is significant economic variation among the more than 99% of Americans who aren’t billionaires. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were great believers in “supply side” economics, which theorized that if the rich got richer, then some of their excess would trickle down to others. In essence, Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” is the latest effort to apply this failed idea to our economy. There may be some truth that in the physical world “a rising tide lifts all boats,” but in the world of unregulated or poorly regulated capitalism, with an emphasis on “supply side” tax benefits for the rich, that rising tide drowns a lot of families. The shutdown has revealed that the benefit of the “trickle” in “trickle-down” economics doesn’t penetrate very far down through the layers of our economy, since more than 60% of American families can’t easily pay an unexpected bill of $500. Going forward, under the impact of “the One Big Beautiful Bill,” the phrase “heaven help us” becomes the mantra of the “least of us,” whose numbers now are over half of us.
Bernie’s message, which I have lifted from his website, continues:
…And it is not just these three men. The top 1% now own more wealth than the bottom 90% – and the gap between the very rich and everyone else is growing wider every day.
In the other America, the working class struggles just to provide for the basic necessities of life. In this America, over 60% of our people live paycheck to paycheck, millions work for starvation wages, 85 million are uninsured or underinsured, more than 20 million households spend over half of their limited incomes on rent or a mortgage and over 60,000 die each year because they can’t afford to go to a doctor on time.
In this America, 25% of our seniors try to survive on less than $15,000 a year and parents try to raise their kids in a nation that has the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country on earth. And, because of stress and inadequate health care, working people live far shorter lives than the rich.
In this America, workers are scared to death that if your car breaks down, if your kid gets sick, if your landlord raises the rent, if you get divorced, if you become pregnant, if for whatever reason you lose your job, you will find yourself in the midst of a financial catastrophe.
I have bolded the parts of Bernie’s message that have the most significant impact for me. He has consistently delivered this same message for over forty years, directly addressing the Social Determinants of Health. In truth, his recurrent message has always underlined the importance of the Social Determinants of Health. In my mind, the shutdown was always an effort to say an emphatic “No” to the Trump-driven attack on our feeble efforts to improve the Social Determinants of Health. The shutdown was directly driven by concerns about the healthcare of millions of Americans who will either find that their healthcare has become unaffordable when the subsidies to the marketplace of the ACA end on December 31, or that their access to Medicaid and SNAP has been made more difficult by the changes in Medicaid scheduled to go into effect just after the 2026 midterm elections.
The shutdown meant even more. It was a chance to say “NO!” definitively to the push toward more and more favor for those who have much more than they need or could ever use at the expense of those who have much too little and get up every day wondering how they will keep a roof over the heads of their children or food on the family table.
Since the assassination attempt on Trump’s life, one of Trump’s favorite phrases has been “Fight, Fight, Fight.” Indeed, he plans to have it on the “tail’s side” of the one-dollar coin that he is planning to have minted in his honor for the 250th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence. His profile is the “head’s side.”
I think that for him, the phrase really means Me, Me, Me. President Kennedy asked us to consider what we could do for our country; this man, who threw a lavish and decadent party while many Americans stood in a line at a food pantry, is always plotting a new grift to get the country to line his pockets. He wants to be revered, and there are plenty who demean themselves as they line up for the opportunity to bask with him in his glittering palaces of bad taste. He and warriors for wealth are more concerned with increasing what they have than bothering to notice what many of their neighbors lack.
As the shutdown wore on, it was hard to say which side was winning, but it was easy to see who was losing in the moment — our very poorest neighbors. Last week’s elections seemed to give the emotional nod to the Democrats, but were those wins driven by the shutdown or general voter disgust with the president and his obvious cruelties at home and abroad? If he represented America’s greatness, no thank you was the response of the electorate. The issue of the moment for me was whether the real pain that people were feeling would pay off over a longer time frame. Would Democrats achieve the goal of preserving the supports to the ACA marketplace that expire ot the end of the year? That question is hard to answer, but in a recent conversation with a woman I see every couple of weeks for therapeutic massage, I gained insight into the problem. As a self-employed medical professional, she gets her health insurance through the ACA marketplace. She was delighted to let me share with you that, for 2026, the cost of her policy will increase by $500 a month — $ 6,000 a year. Like many other ACA marketplace customers, she is seeking alternatives that may be less expensive but limit her access to care, while shifting the financing of much of her care from “covered” to “out of pocket.” It is predicted that many others who currently use the marketplace will decide to drop their coverage and hope for the best. I struggle to understand how that will contribute to the effort to Make America Great Again.
If you are not quite sure about what the deal was that the renegade Senate Democrats settled for that led to the end of the shutdown, NPR gave us a pretty good summary:
In addition to extending last year’s spending levels through the end of January for most of the government, the bill provides funding for some agencies through the end of next September, including payments for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The program, which provides food aid to nearly 1 in 8 Americans, has been mired in a court battle because of the shutdown.
The bill includes a measure to reverse layoffs the Trump administration imposed during the shutdown, provides backpay for federal employees, and institutes protections against further layoffs.
But the central issue underlying the entire shutdown — extensions on enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies that expire at the end of the year — is not addressed in the bill.
Instead, as part of the deal reached with a bipartisan contingent of senators, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., agreed to hold a vote in mid-December on Democrat-drafted legislation aimed at extending those subsidies.
That doesn’t sit well with many Senate Democrats, who remain wary of the pledge.
In true political self-dealing, there were $500,000 bonuses hidden in the bill for eight Republican senators who felt that investigations by the Biden Department of Justice had harmed them.
I am a fan of Paul Krugman, and since he said goodbye to the New York Times, I have been a subscriber to his almost daily posts on “Substack.” His posting on Tuesday, entitled “Republicans Are Damaged by Their Own Cruelty: They’re pathologically unwilling to help Americans in need — and Democrats should hammer this home,” spoke to me, and I think it explains a lot of the intense feeling behind the shutdown. Trump’s and his wealthy supporter’s cruelty has been what I have been trying to describe. Krugman does it better. The bolding is my editorial edition. He begins:
Like almost all progressives, I was infuriated and disheartened by Senate Democrats’ cave on the shutdown Sunday. The party won stunning election victories Tuesday — and its leaders responded with yet another preemptive surrender? (Chuck Schumer may have voted no, but he didn’t manage, and may not even have tried, to prevent defections.)
Yet while the immediate politics displayed Democratic tactical weakness, the larger story highlighted a different kind of weakness on the part of Donald Trump and MAGA as a whole — namely, their innate cruelty… They have a visceral dislike for policies that do anything to help the less fortunate, and can’t even bring themselves to be cynical, to help Americans temporarily while they consolidate power.
Consider the grounds on which the shutdown fight took place. Democrats made it about the enhanced subsidies that have kept premiums for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act fairly reasonable for millions of Americans — Americans who are now facing huge premium hikes that will create intense financial distress and force many to go uninsured.
With the passage of the ACA and the subsidies distributed through the ACA marketplace, the uninsured percentage of the population has been reduced to 8%. The impact of not renewing the subsidies, coupled with the changes in Medicaid scheduled in the One Big Beautiful Bill to begin after the 2026 midterm elections, will cancel much of that improvement and leave millions who have care now without care. The damage does not end there because the revenue lost as millions go uninsured may cause many hospitals, especially in rural America, to close. Whether this is “mean” as Krugman contends or simply misguided and poor policy from a man who genuinely lacks an understanding of healthcare and appears unconcerned about his own lack of comprehension, I will leave to you to decide. He is pathologically incapable of empathy, and he has proven many times over that he doesn’t care about the impact of his desires on others. He is a narcissistic sociopath. Krugman offers us a disturbing explanation for the mess we are in. He suggests that greed, pure meaness, and lack of empathy tactically add up to stupidity.
My guess is that it doesn’t reflect a considered strategy. Instead, Republicans just stumbled into this because nobody in a position of power within the party understood how the ACA works…
…But the thought of doing something decent, even cynically and temporarily, doesn’t seem to have crossed Republican minds…
…Why reject a deal that could have protected Republicans from their own mistakes? Part of the answer is sheer ignorance. Here was Trump’s response on his “Truth Social.”
I am recommending to Senate Republicans that the Hundreds of Billions of Dollars currently being sent to money sucking Insurance Companies in order to save the bad Healthcare provided by ObamaCare, BE SENT DRECTLY TO THE PEOPLE SO THAT THEY CAN PURCHASE THEIR OWN, MUCH BETTER, HEALTHCARE, and have money left over. In other words, take from the BIG, BAD Insurance Companies, give it to the people, and terminate, per Dollar spent, the worst Healthcare anywhere in the World, ObamaCare. Unrelated, we must still terminate the Filibuster!
Much better insurance? We have been waiting since long before the last election for the product of the “concept of a plan” that he said he was preparing. The issue isn’t whether the ACA is flawless; it is whether our divided government could ever replace it with something better. Giving cash to everyone is not a solution, even if the president thought it was. So far, I seriously doubt that Trump can replace the ACA’s marketplace, complete with all its flaws, which are expensive and obvious, with something better.
Back to Krugman. He continues:
Substance aside, think about the idiocy of the timing here. The health insurance crisis is happening right now, as Americans open letters from their insurers and discover that they are facing huge increases — more than 100 percent on average, much more in many cases — in the cost of coverage beginning in just a few weeks. This is not exactly the time to propose immediately scrapping our existing health care system, replacing it with … something…
…Health care isn’t the only area in which Trump and company’s cruelty and lack of compassion are becoming major political liabilities…
…Let me add that MAGA still seems to believe that scenes of masked ICE agents beating up women and senior citizens work to their political advantage. Either that, or they just can’t help themselves.
The political moral is that the humiliating cave over the shutdown isn’t the end of the story. Democrats can and should keep hammering Trump and his party over their indifference to the suffering of ordinary Americans…
…MAGA can’t help being cruel. It can’t even pretend to care about other people’s suffering. And Democrats should take full advantage of this pathology.
And so it goes. There has never been an easy escape from Trump and his MAGA movement. I hope that in the end, Trump will defeat himself, and his MAGA movement will die a natural death. Time will tell, and in the meantime, we should continue to seek ways to provide relief to those among us who are dependent on the programs that are being defunded or abused. I don’t want to wish away my final years on this mortal coil, but the midterm elections can’t come too soon.
Walking Into Winter
The dreary view in the header of this post was taken last Monday, but the gloom has persisted through the week. The only change has been that the man who puts in and takes out the dock each year has finally taken the dock out. Docks must come out for the winter, or there must be a “bubbler” constantly running 24 hours a day throughout the winter to prevent the water under the dock from freezing, because the two feet of ice thickness we get on the lake each winter will crush a dock that is not removed or protected.
There has been early morning ice on standing water in puddles left by several downpours, which are gradually resolving our drought. I was concerned that our “dock man” would forget us since he usually has the dock out by the third week of October. He explained that he could not find helpers to hire, and that he had recently broken some ribs in a fall. As it was, he and his helpers finally arrived, donned in double wet suits, and efficiently did the job in a flash. As I watched his crew work, I wondered whether they had health insurance. Their job certainly puts them at risk of injury. I would bet that the men our dockman was able to hire for such cold and unpleasant seasonal work come from a population that struggles with the Social Determinants of Health, and if they currently have healthcare coverage, are at significant risk of losing it.
This time of year is a test. Will you take the walk that you need, even when there is a chill in the air? I hope that you find the time and motivation to take care of yourself. I can attest to the fact that taking a long walk can provide some relief from the distressing events of the week.
Be well,
Gene
