We are now five days from the federal government running out of money, and probably three weeks from default on our debt. Meanwhile, Ted "Long Talker" Cruz is still yakking in the Senate, and we seem no closer to a resolution.

Ah well, moving on.

Take a look at the chart above, compiled by the folks at Quartz from U.S. Census data. Back in 1970, non-family households made up just 18.8 percent of households. Today they account for more than a third of our living arrangements. Likewise, the percentage of married couples with children has fallen by more than half, from 40.3 percent in 1970 to 19.6 percent, and it is continuing to fall. The living arrangements that we choose represent one of the basic building blocks of any society, and those arrangements have changed profoundly in just a few decades.

If your state, county and city land-use planners haven't recognized the enormity of that change and adjusted your housing mix in response, you're in trouble. The same is true of transportation planning. People are making different choices than they once did. In fact, when I wrote earlier this month that Georgia leaders aren't responding to new market signals, these are precisely the type of changes I had in mind. We now have almost as many men and women living alone as we have married couples with kids. In that kind of world, 3,000-square-foot homes on acre lots just aren't going to sell like they used to sell. They are a niche product, not the standard product.

And to switch back to partisan politics for a minute, if your political party doesn't recognize the implications of this profound demographic shift -- if it fails to reflect these changes in the policies that it advocates and the tone it takes -- it's going to face difficulty. And while that's a greater danger for Republicans than Democrats, I don't think either party fully grasps what these changes mean.

That's understandable, in a way. Most people now in top leadership posts in political parties, companies, churches, governments and other institutions grew up in that 1970s world. That's when their world views were formed. At some level, that's still how they still see America. And to the degree that they recognize the changes that have occurred, the reaction among many is to pine for that earlier time and try to reconstitute it through government policy.

But government policy is helpless in the face of cultural, social, economic, demographic and technological changes of the scale reflected in the chart above. It didn't create it, although some will vastly exaggerate government's power in an effort to claim otherwise. It also cannot reverse it. At best, it can begin to adjust to it, and I don't think we've done that very well.