Government Shutdown, DC-eye View

[neadods]

At this point, I'm actually all for a shutdown rather than drawing out the endless "one more week/two more weeks/another day or so" uncertainty that we're all dealing with. That doesn't mean I think Government shutdowns are a good thing beyond giving a lot of people a real clue-by-four about what the government actually *does* and provides, and it's more than most people think.

I was around during the last shutdown. Here is an excellent article on what actually stopped.

Government Shutdown = Government-run museums and landmarks shut down. That means the entire Smithsonian complex. Also any monument that you have to pass a door to get into. (You can still look at the Jefferson memorial, for example, or see Lincoln in his chair, but you can't go into the Washington Monument. In NY, you can't go up the Statue of Liberty.) No Library of Congress, not even online (because no IT personnel to monitor it). No National Zoo. (Wherein last time the manure piled up because while people made sure the animals were fed, nobody was being paid to shovel the shit.)

Government-provided benefits and services slow or stop. No tax refunds. Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid slow down; no new people join the system. No veteran's benefits.

In DC, it means massive numbers of people out of work. And I'm not just talking about the mid and low-level Government employees. I'm talking about:
- Government contractors (who outnumber Govvies something like 10 to 1)
- Food service personnel. Not just the food service/cooks inside the government buildings, but the ones inside the many Smithsonian buildings and all the restaurants around the now-shuttered buildings which are no longer feeding tourists and workers.
- Cleaning service personnel.
- Tour guides/souvenir stands/cabbies/etc facing a severe reduction in tourist dollars -- and right when the tourist season kicks off, too.
- basically, anyone and everyone doing support.


And the ones who are working, the essential personnel who have to keep showing up regardless - they don't get paid. They can't go find other work, they have no guarantee that they'll get paid for the work they're doing. I'm seeing people saying "oh, the cops'll be okay; nobody will stop soldiers' pay; mailmen still get their checks."

No. They DON'T. Work, yes. Pay? Not so much.


What does that add up to? THOUSANDS of people who, even if they have savings enough to make it through the uncertainty for however long it lasts -- last time it was almost an entire month -- who are all doing one thing in unison - Not. Spending. Money.

And that trickles down the economic uncertainty to all the places locals support - an instant throttle on food, entertainment, travel, education, repair, even health - any non-essential item will be put on hold until a shutdown is over and back pay is made available, if it ever will be.


Now isn't that just what a shaky economy needs?

Comments

[redpanda13.livejournal.com]

From one of the Guardian's American columnists:

Meanwhile, a few things have been left largely undiscussed.

To begin with, the domestic discretionary portion of the budget has shrunk drastically over the years, from 22% of the budget in 1980 to 12% today. To be sure it has increased under Barack Obama – as it did under George W Bush – in raw terms, but overall it's a much smaller part of what government does. Why? First, because our entitlement programmes (social security, but especially Medicare and Medicaid) are eating up more of the budget. Second, because military spending has gone wild in recent years (turns out wars cost money, even though Bush tried to keep the wars off the books) up almost 60% over the last decade.

Third – and here's the big thing: the government is collecting far less in taxes, adjusted for inflation, than it used to. Especially from the rich. If wealthy Americans were paying taxes at the rate they did 50 years ago, says former Clinton labour secretary Robert Reich, the government would be taking in $350bn more a year: budget woes over.

But forget going back 50 years, when taxes were high even by my standards. If we merely went back to the 1980s, the days of the great conservative hero Ronald Reagan, we'd be in far better fiscal shape. Taxes on capital gains, rich people's chief income source, were 35% then. Now they're 15%. Inheritance taxes have been reduced to a fraction of what they were. All this as the super-rich have grown richer, controlling more and more wealth. And while income taxes for middle-income families have gone down a bit, they still pay a far higher percentage of their income in payroll taxes.

Obama and the Democrats must put these issues on the table. The Tea Party argument that there's bloat and waste in Washington will always fall on receptive ears in America. But the counter-argument isn't to quibble about how much to cut. The counter-argument is to say we believe in a society where the wealthy pay their share, which they plainly have not been doing.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/apr/05/us-government-shutdown-tea-party

[neadods.livejournal.com]

The counter-argument is to say we believe in a society where the wealthy pay their share, which they plainly have not been doing.

THIS, THIS, THIS! Why are the big businesses not paying taxes? The tea party wants to take government spending back to pre-war levels; fine. But it doesn't want to take business tax back to pre-war levels, which was how the system worked.

And don't start me on Reagan. We don't all think he's a great hero...

[redpanda13.livejournal.com]

Reagan: far from it. But the point is that even the conservatives' idol of the 1980's would be a "socialist" by the GOP's wacked-out standards these days. Things have been dragged so far to the right in this country that I'm in a constant state of scream.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

Glenn Beck was right (even a stopped clock, etc.) when he said that the Overton Window has shifted significantly.

Problem is, it's shifted into Cloud-Cookoo Land.

[suze2000.livejournal.com]

OMG it's the same here. The govt keeps cutting company tax and the like. I don't get it. The rich have the money to lobby govt, and they spend it. While the poor just get poorer, but at least they have a couple of lobby groups (ridiculously underfunded). Meanwhile, those of us who are neither rich nor poor have no-one to speak up for us. We're sick to death of supporting both groups. There's never ANY consideration in the budget for us, it's always tax cuts for the rich and the poor, while we're slowly, inexorably joining the poor. Mind you, our outrageous housing costs have a big part to play in this, but the govt is not fixing this either because the baby boomers are getting richer off it and they are the biggest voting block. *sigh*

I can't believe there are people who have to come to work for NO PAY!! What's with that? I predict a mass sick-out. That's what I would be doing (calling in sick). Hey, if you won't pay me, why should I work?

[neadods.livejournal.com]

I predict a mass sick-out. That's what I would be doing (calling in sick). Hey, if you won't pay me, why should I work?

I don't think a lot of people will. Because there's another side to the equation, the one that nobody ever talks about when they're bitching endlessly about parasitic Government workers:

Gov't people very often get paid a lot less than their compatriots in private sector. So the real reasons most of 'em go into that work are:
- better benefits (which can't be taken away in a shutdown) and
- a deep knowledge that the job they do *IS* too important to walk away from. (And in many cases, they're right. We need cops, firefighters, teachers, counter-terrorist specialists, Medicare doctors, etc. 24/7/365)

[suze2000.livejournal.com]

Yes, I work in a hospital and I feel a strong calling/obligation to my job. I also feel though that 80% of the work that I do is non-essential and if we went out on strike or had a 50% cut in staff for a few days, it would be okay in the end.