The Republicans are absolutely right that the United States can’t keep up deficit spending running over seven percent per year, not without creating long-term inflation and a national debt whose interest could soon reach forty percent of annual federal government spending. But they’re wrong in how they want to deal with the problem. At a time when we have multi-millionaires and multi-billion-dollar corporations who pay little or no taxes and whose businesses are essentially partly subsidized by federal government income and healthcare supports, the Republicans want to cut funds for the poorest of Americans while cutting taxes on the richest and passing tax credits for them as well.

The Democrats, on the other hand, want to keep increasing spending on existing social programs without being able to come up with a politically viable way to support those programs without increasing the deficit.

The so-called compromise bought us some time, but not much else. The plain fact remains that, under the current political stalemate, only corporations and the well-off really benefit. They keep their lower taxes and tax credits, and one way or another, everyone else pays.

One of my neighbors recently retired, not because he wanted to, but because, after forty years or more of working with heavy machinery his knees and shoulders gave out. Even with two replacement knees he couldn’t do the job he once did, and he couldn’t wait to get the maximum social security benefits. While he was more prudent than many, the fact remains that too many workers can’t physically work long enough to get even reduced social security benefits. Yet these are people who get hurt most by Republican policies, and one of the great ironies is that a disproportionate number are Republicans who don’t even seem to see that.

But until those who are hurt the most and don’t realize it finally understand, nothing will change.

I live in Utah, and I’d never exactly thought of the state as an expensive place to live, but changes creep up on you. When we moved to Cedar City, not quite thirty years ago, the cost of living was statistically about 94% of the national average. Today, depending on which index you use, we’re between 99% and 103% of the national average, and I suspect that those numbers are low. My property taxes, while not insignificant and low by the standards of some states, have doubled over the last eight years. The price of natural gas has tripled since last year.

But where Utah has really taken a hit is in the increase in housing prices. Depending on which figures or indices you look at, Utah is on average between the fourth and tenth most expensive state for housing, and housing prices have roughly doubled over the past fifteen years. Housing prices in Cedar City have more than doubled.

Four factors, I suspect, lie behind the rapid and substantial price increases. First, Utah has the highest birth rate in the nation, and has had for decades. Second, immigrants are pouring into the state, especially into Cedar City, which has one of the fastest growth rates in the nation, and the majority of those immigrants, at least here in town, are from California. Third, the local university has expanded from 3,500 students to over 15,000. And fourth, despite new housing developments everywhere, the amount of new housing hasn’t matched the demand.

There’s another factor, as well – that too many of the developers and builders are concentrating on higher-end housing, and that’s reflected in the fact that Cedar City now has a small but growing number of homeless people, while high-priced houses up for re-sale take a long time to sell, because the majority of newcomers insist on building new houses, most likely with the gains from selling houses in California and elsewhere.

But then, what’s happening here is also occurring in far too many other areas as well.

Over the last week in this part of Utah, there have been at least five serious accidents reported (and there may have been more that didn’t appear in the local media) caused by someone running a red light, with an impact on not only two vehicles, but others as well. This past week, there was “only” one fatality, but there easily could have been more.

In the same period, I’ve also seen, while driving, three other instances where someone either ran a red light or entered the intersection as the light turned red… and what I’ve seen has to understate the frequency, because I doubt I average even a half hour a day driving. Fortunately, in those three cases, no accident ensued.

I’ve mentioned this in passing before, but such collisions are definitely becoming more frequent, and not just in Utah, I suspect.

Anger may well be one of the causes behind some of these accidents or near accidents, given that we’re also seeing more and more incidents of road rage.

And arrogance is definitely a factor, the idea that the driver is more important than anyone else, which was certainly the case in one accident here in Cedar City, where the driver was driving on an expired and revoked license.

But the largest factor, I’m convinced, is that too many people are trying to do too many things too quickly and aren’t paying enough attention to the road. Multitasking is often an excellent way to screw up all those activities/chores/etc., that you’re trying to do at the same time, and it’s especially dangerous when driving… and even more dangerous when the driver is late and trying to catch up.

All of which beg the question – why are so many people so angry, so arrogant, so hurried, and so distracted while driving at excessive speeds a vehicle that can instantly become a killing machine? And so blind or indifferent to how deadly their vehicle can be?

It’s almost as if they’re saying, “A red light, that doesn’t really mean anything.”

What is the real defining split between conservatives and liberals? According to a recent article in Scientific American, research from the University of Pennsylvania indicates the fundamental difference is that “Conservatives tend to believe that strict divisions are an inherent part of life. Liberals do not.”

So… in practice this means that conservatives tend to be hierarchal absolutists, seeing all the elements of life as either black or white, and dividing elements of life into ranked categories with absolute bounds, while liberals are more likely to see things in shades of gray and to minimize categorical differences.

That’s why conservatives see gender as binary, despite the fact that every year babies are born with indeterminate sexual organs. And there’s been a fight over this as well, with the liberal side saying that one in a thousand children are born intersex, while the conservatives cite figures a hundred times smaller. But the plain fact is that there is a spectrum between genders, regardless of the numbers, and this spectrum has been found in 65,000 different species of animals as well.

The problem created by the conservatives is that they want to impose absolute rigidity, which is a form of despotism, because people are different, and in the United States there are definite sub-cultures, even within the smallest of least populated states, so that excessively rigid rules and laws are too restrictive and actually generate conflict.

On the other side, liberals too often fail to recognize that a working society simply can’t physically have and maintain the scope of laws and regulations to suit everyone perfectly, and there do have to be some limits.

When I was a young man, too many years ago, mass shootings were almost unknown, and never occurred at schools. Crude and lewd language was largely kept to back alleys or behind closed doors. Politicians – with a very few exceptions – shaded the truth rather than obliterated it.

Statistics show that crime spiked in the 1970-90 period and most crime rates, including murder, are at the same level as in 1950, although total numbers are up because the U.S. population has almost doubled since then.

The biggest differences I see involve the loss of societal and social limits on personal behavior. From what I can tell, most towns or cities over 50,000 people have problems with homeless people invading public spaces and even private commercial spaces, to the point that, in a growing number of cities, business owners have to clean up human filth and debris every morning before opening. With the outcries about past inhumane treatment of the mentally ill, governments have effectively abdicated most responsibility for either adequate treatment or lodging of those individuals, while dumping the problems these individuals create on the rest of society, as well as imposing additional costs on local governments.

We’re also seeing more drivers ignoring speed limits and running red lights, a significant increase in retail shoplifting, as well as increasingly violent disruptions at public meetings, and a growing lack of civility at all levels of society, even in Congress where shouting and heckling the President – something once considered unthinkable – has become common. College students organize protests and harass and heckle speakers for having differing beliefs. Racist demonstrations have become common.

One of my grandchildren attends a public middle school. In her class is a young male who repeatedly disrupts the class, who has attacked classmates violently, and upon one occasion, assaulted another smaller and weaker withdrawn student who’s never said or done anything offensive, and it took three teachers to remove him. Despite suspensions, the behavior has continued for the entire year. The administration appears helpless, and the parents won’t do anything, except insist that their son remain in school – no matter what the cost is to the other students and to their learning. This is hardly an isolated instance, but it’s the result of a society that refuses to say, “Some behavior is unacceptable, no matter what your background or problems are.”

All of these are the result of a societal failure to enforce socially, rather than legally, a norm of acceptable behavior.

While societies need rules, without also an accepted code of social behavior, laws are insufficient to maintain order – unless you want an iron-fisted autocracy.

And if there’s a continued growth in the lack of self-restraint, the U.S. will end up either in anarchy or under a right-wing autocracy, because neither the left nor the right appears willing to call out bad behavior and incivility on the part of its own partisans, and the right is perfectly willing to legislate controls over those who disagree with their perception of the ideal society. And neither seems able or willing to reach a consensus on acceptable social and public behavior.