Not that I believe there was ever any cunning and masterful strategy infused into the socio-economic-fiscal-dogmatic standoff that is presently looming in America's capital and coursing through all of the extensive system of moneyed and political tendrils throughout the world, mostly such acts, either symbolic or feckless or both, usually are center-ring of this circus.
There are too many other events of greater pitch and movement, however, than this ill-conceived and manufactured crisis--not that forcing the issue won't have devastating effects privately and publically. For all the suffering, anxiety, delay and inconvenience, all tremolo-complaints, really, until they become the big-picture which is certain, caused, this shutdown will be no solution to the fiscal impasse. Already, even if the shutdown does not happen, it has had affect, stymieing the business of government with all attention focused on what Congress will do, and panic descending into chaos has set in: Washington, DC will be severely curtailed should this happen, but so too will those peculiars of the US military and State Department, overseas outposts and embassies where all services are federal, and there is already panic buying at the company stores, the commissariat, with check-out lines snaking around the building. If the Congress begrudges federal employees those lost wages during the possible closure, y2k-like hysteria, looting, riots and pillage cannot be far behind. Though war-fighting will continue not so fleet-footed without the bureaucracy to support and justify it, America's governmental absolution, shirking its duties to its people, is rather embarrassing.
Debt and misappropriation will still be a drag on employment and making families whole and gainful and still insurmountable by any estimation or exotic mathematics. Lashing out over the funding a few social-engineering projects while gaps in taxation and enforcement--or wholesale corporate welfare at the expense of public good--is as desperate and frantic as some of the lightly-mentioned problems over the next rise: default and slipping confidence that America proposes to bolster its coffers (war-chest, rather) with creative marketing, like selling phantom gold reserves from Fort Knox or its massive pile of student loan debt as promissory notes.
