A view from the northwest of the United States Capitol as seen from 3rd Street NW along Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.

I think that I can reasonably predict that the next two years are going to be gridlock both at the national and state level. GOP leaders in the U.S. House of Representative have signaled that they intend to take revenge for the extended investigations of the Jan. 6 Select Committee. They possibly even may investigate the members themselves. The two GOP members will be missing because they lost their elections. The U.S. Senate leaders appear to have taken a more moderate approach while the Democrats still maintain control. In any case, the big budget bills of the past two years will not be repeated.

Although the GOP maintains control of the NC General Assembly, the leaders do not appear ready to create some of the repressive Anti-LGBTQ+ legislation that has passed some of the other southern states. I think they learned from HB2 that such laws are bad for business. The hanging issue for the past decade has been the expansion of Medicaid to cover some 600,000 people who are without medical insurance. With a $6+ billion surplus, it is hard to understand why they continue to play Scrooge. Maybe they just believe that poor people deserve to die, and thus reduce expenditures on the wards of the state. Even though the Feds would pick up most of the tab, they claim there could be liabilities in later years.

The Raleigh City Council doesn’t appear to have gotten off on a more congenial start after the elections even though there are several new faces on the council. The big issue seems to be affordable housing, which is about a decade late. When the Feds eliminated public housing, they dumped the needs of the working class onto the states and local communities. If you are a city employee, you live way out in the surrounding communities because of the higher cost of living in the city. Who knows what will happen to the costs of houses and rents if the predicted recession occurs late next year?

We may see some action on bus rapid transit, but commuter rail is still several years down the road. It’s the old lesson that playing catch-up is always more costly than planning. Oh, that’s right - we’ve had lots of plans - just little action except for improved bus service.

My crystal ball is about as fuzzy as everyone’s, and I won’t even try to make any predictions about the economy. Most of it depends upon Russia.

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