Gary Johnson Slams DC for Potential Federal Government Shutdown

Former Gov. Gary Johnson of New Mexico, who was the Libertarian Partys presidential candidate in 2012, compared politics to a reality show -- except that the actors are completely out of touch with reality in an email sent out to supporters on Thursday.

While the rest of us are trying to make a living in the face of unsustainable government debt, ever-increasing regulations, and abuses of our freedoms, our elected senators and representatives are playing games, Johnson wrote. For months, everyone has known that the last budget deal President Obama and Congress cut will expire Monday. Unless they come up with a new deal or pass something to kick the can down the road for a few more days, we will see the silly exercise of a government shutdown. Here we are ... and they are just now getting serious about pulling off some trick to keep the government operating on Monday.

What business, what organization, what family would operate that way -- if they expected to survive? Johnson continued. Dont get me wrong. I would love to see the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) defunded. In fact, Id like to see a lot of government programs and entire departments defunded. But the reality is that it isnt going to happen in the next four days. What IS going to happen is that the politicians on both sides are going to cut another deal. And when we get a chance to see that deal, it will do nothing to stop the government from spending hundreds of billions of dollars that it will either have to borrow or print.

Thats not an accident, Johnson insisted. Believe me, the folks in Congress and the White House know exactly what they are doing. They manufacture a budget crisis, dominate the news and the Web with their comical games to avoid that crisis, and in the process, the fundamental realities of unsustainable spending are ignored. They spend days talking about defunding Obamacare, but not a word about reforming Medicare, which is the largest real spending problem we face. They spend days talking about keeping the government operating, but where is the conversation about changing how it operates or actually reducing spending? They dont want to talk about that, so they create a crisis and then try to fool us into believing they are solving it.

Johnson played up his own credentials, something he did on the campaign trail in 2012. I have run a government, Johnson wrote. I have balanced a governments budget. And I have negotiated with all sides to make needed changes without manufacturing crises just to make news. Thats why I am so frustrated by the reality show we are watching in Washington, D.C.

Never has the need, or the opportunity, been greater to cast liberty and financial sanity in the national reality show, Johnson insisted.

After getting 1 percent in the 2012 general election, Johnson has remained active, continuing to run his group Our American Initiative. Johnson has left the door open to running for the presidency again in 2016.