Opinions on the U.S. federal government shutdown
 

How do you feel about the United States' federal government operating at drastically reduced capacity (being "shut down")?

What are the immediate and long-term effects¹ that you expect to feel, and will they be ultimately be beneficial or harmful to the country?

¹ Immediate effects are the ones that have already begun to impact you, or which will occur after established milestone dates like the Department of the Treasury's October 17^th debt default estimate. Long-term effects are the ones that will be seen in a timeframe of months to years, and include things like political consequences in the next federal election.

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I think it's definitely a bad thing. I don't think it's acceptable for a small minority of politicians hold the country hostage while the economy suffers.

Personally, I'm not very affected, but things that I care about are, namely the NASA grants and national parks. Within FIRST, I know a lot of teams are supported by NASA grants, and without the government those don't happen. I'm also very into the outdoors, and having places like Yosemite and Mt. Rainier closed just isn't okay with me.

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Here's some food for thought. So we temporarily suspended non-essential workers. Why do we have non-essential workers? Shouldn't everyone's job be essential? If it isn't, why have it at all?

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It's almost a political question.... :cool:

It affects me a little bit, my wife is currently on furlough. She gets time off. She might get paid for the time off, or might not, we'll see what happens. At least she'll be able to help me with that movie robot tomorrow.

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They're non-essential as in they don't perform a function absolutely necessary to safety or security. They do, however, provide valuable services.

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Non-essential long term is very different than non-essential short term. Heck, they've furloughed everyone from civilian Coast Guard training personnel to FAA inspectors. Personally, I'd feel rather less safe if those folks weren't considered essential in the longer term.

I'm not in much of a position to be hurt directly, but it's hard to watch good employees like DoD civilians pack up. Best wishes to everyone.

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Here are a few twists for you to think about...
Here in Chicago a runaway commuter elevated train crashed early Monday morning injuring more than 30 people, the NTSB investigators are essential personnel while they are on site but revert to non-essential when they return home. The folks that make up the reports are nonessential so even though the investigators may have reached a conclusion in the crash, it can't be reported. The FBI is the official investigators on crash sites and will be paid sometime for their work, just not now. However, when they get paid is yet to be determined and may be months from now. They are required to work even without the pay for now.

The real irony is that congress gets paid through the whole debacle regardless!

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Dave Lavery is a non-essential worker. I'll let you two talk it out.
Better get your bike. :)

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I have always found the term "non-essential" lacking in terms of precision and valuation of the work people do. It causes a lot of contention during times like this, or during disasters and such. A much better set of terms would be "critical"/"non-critical". This puts more emphasis on the time sensitivity of the required work, rather than the worth.

I think the shutdown is a bad thing. The intransigence of many politicians has caused a failure of government. There is no direct impact on me, aside from the face-palms I engage in when thinking about this.

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I can't even pretend to know all that this impacts, but one of the biggest thoughts on my mind is how this looks to the world. The USA is relied on for so much around the world, and this makes it look like we can't get our act together, and that is just sad. I get that healthcare is a really controversial issue, but I've always hated the government's ability to tack things onto bills that have absolutely nothing to do with the bill itself. Who came up with that and why is it still allowed? Can't we just debate the issue itself like adults?

And will someone please change the 27th amendment so that when the government shuts down because Congress & the House are bickering, Congress & the House are forced to WORK without pay!! Several good representatives have recognized this and are donating their pay back to the treasury or at least to charity, but it seems dumb that they get paid during this...

Personally I feel bad for all of the people that have no idea when they will be able to return to work. Sure a week off here or there can usually be handled, but many already took paycuts over the summer where they had to take off every other friday, or more. I have a friend who's dream job had been to work for NASA, after 10 years, he finally got the job and started a month ago... and with a new child and a new house, he is now furloughed with no idea of when he will be allowed to return.

My company, as well as all that I have worked for are funded by government procurements and dollars, so while we get to keep our lights on for now, we do have a forced shutdown over the Dec-Jan holidays where we are required to take vacation time or take the time unpaid. If all of this government nonsense keeps up (I read that it was estimated that this shutdown would cost over $2 BILLION dollars), it will likely mean reduced funding for all defense contractors, and likely more cuts/furloughs for my company. We can hope to rely on international or commercial markets, but my group is entirely military/federal in nature. And while no, our products are "not essential" to day to day American lives, tell the families of the thousands of soldiers that have been saved by our robots, or to the families of the bomb squads who used our robots to disarm the remainder of the Boston Marathon bombs that their family members are "non-essential", and the cost of their lives was not worth the expenditure on our robots. Im fairly certain every one of them would have disagreed. The federal workers who manage our contracts and fight to get funding to buy our robots to protect our soldiers and police are currently in the "non-essential" category, thus, while we can still execute on our current contracts, no new ones can come in until they are allowed to return to work.

So while I am fortunate to not be directly impacted, I feel for those who are, and I am already feeling the indirect impacts, and hoping this doesn't create a further slip in our economy.

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I think that the real issue is that the politicians are forcing people out of work because they want something to happen. I'm sure that this sort of thing would't happen if their paycheck was on the line. Everything is fine when it doesn't affect them but it is a huge problem when it does.

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Which is a good point to make.

Somewhat related: California for YEARS had trouble getting a balanced budget (required by state constitution--dunno why the U.S. constitution can't be amended for that!) on time. Voters got fed up and passed an amendment to the state constitution saying that if the budget wasn't on time as well as balanced, the state legislators wouldn't get paid, not even retroactively. Couple years back, the budget was on time but not balanced. No pay for lawmakers--they complained, the folks that cut the checks stood firm...and a balanced budget passed shortly thereafter, I want to say about a week. Haven't had any issues like that since that I can recall. :D


But for the U.S. Congress, there's a couple of things that might help. For example, if your friendly local representative or senator were to receive letters from a large number of constituents that if they didn't do something, they would not be getting your vote next election, that might get them moving. Telling them which direction you wanted them to move to get your vote would help them in negotiations ("My constituents want X. That is why I am voting the way I am voting. Would you care to join me at the next town hall when I tell them why I had to vote for Y?").


So far, hasn't affected me. Admittedly, the government is a customer of the company I work for, but they are not the only customer by any means.

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Well, I'm biased since I'm furloughed right now, but hey, it gives me more time to work on robotics stuff. I've been trying to work on some team CAD standards, so this isn't all that bad. Hopefully they'll give us back pay.

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That's the burning question.
My wife is lucky to have been spared, while others in her office were not.
Somber day at work for sure.

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I was happy that they unanimously passed the bill to continue military pay.

Until Army National Guard units across the country cancelled/postponed drill weekends. I assume our normal training is non-essential. It's gonna be a tight month for me.

I'll refrain from going into details, but ultimately I'm extremely unhappy about the whole situation, even before I was directly affected.

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In the poll above, 3 people say it's good now, and 3 people say it will be good in the future. I don't think we've haven't heard from those 4 people¹—what's the upside of this situation?

¹ 4, not 6, because some selected both in a single poll option. (Incidentally, the poll has 16 cross-tabulated choices because a simpler multiple-choice poll would eliminate the ability to correlate present and future outlooks.)

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Shutdown is almost negligible, but DEFAULT (around 10/17) will be a disaster of historic proportions.

I am a conservative Republican, not a fan of budget deficits, nor of Obamacare, but those IDIOTS in Washington have me ready to donate to the Democrats. I hired them to do a job, and they're not doing it, so I think it's time for them to get fired.

:mad:

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I should hope that this causes the general public to be more diligent about voting for more than just the President and Mayor.

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This is the real issue at hand. Defaulting on our debts could send our country into another depression.

The thing about the 27th amendment is interesting. i feel like it would definitely help, but plenty of politicians have external sources of income, to the point where getting rid of congressional salary would have a negligible effect.

I hope that everyone comes to their senses, and realizes that it's just wrong to hold the government hostage when you don't get your way.

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Food for thought:

http://www.nationalreview.com/articl...-thomas-sowell

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Via Twitter --

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Oh, and to add insult to injury: Now they are saying "we'll pay everyone retroactively for the days they didn't get paid".

Translation: Here is some free vacation time. Have fun!

The Gov't is shut down, and we are not saving a single penny in salaries because of it. In fact, we're paying folks to do nothing!

OK, seriously: How can I get me a government job?

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(Even more seriously: I do feel blessed to live where I can write things like that without having to fear for my safety. That ain't so everywhere.)

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Get lucky ;-)

But seriously, why punish the people who have absolutely no control over this matter? Again, I'm biased, but we're all still people with families at home with mouths to feed, rent to pay and bills to pay. We're really no different from employees from other companies. In fact, I could have easily been employed by someone else, but the government was the first to say "you're hired" in a tough job market.

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Yeah, I can't say that getting (cheated) out of a few weeks' pay wouldn't hurt. But maybe if everyone was working instead of furloughed, I'd see it different.

But then it would look like any other day, losing the dramatic effect. (Until payday, at least).

I do not besmirch our government workers; aside from Congress they are generally honest and hard working.

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As long as they don't raise the debt ceiling again, the congress can afford to making interest-only payments on our debt.

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I'm not sure what you mean by this. Could you explain in more detail?

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On October 17, the "extraordinary measures" (desperate intra-government money shifting) that the Treasury's been taking will likely run out*, leaving around $30 billion plus the incoming tax revenue to pay the bills. There are of course a bunch of bills to pay after that (Social Security, military pay, Medicaid, etc), some of which may bounce if the debt ceiling isn't raised. The interest-only argument is that we could prioritize interest payments and still be able to pay them with incoming tax dollars, but even if so (which of course depends on interest rates), we wouldn't have enough money to pay everything else including mandatory and other -"bought" bills. This is why Speaker Boehner agreed that this isn't enough, instead pledging to raise the ceiling in order to avoid default. There's some debate on how bad default would be, its association with the 14th Amendment, and if it's avoidable other ways, e.g. unilateral Presidential action, but basically all of the outcomes range really bad-->worst. There are a few "so what's", but given that a lot of it depends on market confidence, and the IMF is warning it'd threaten the global economy...


*As alluded, the debt/default topic of this post is not the same as the government shutdown, though their chronological colocation has tied them together in some potentially dangerous ways.

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The problem is it's illegal for these employees to work, yet they're not fired so they can't get new jobs (putting aside that finding employment is far from trivial). Yeah, we're paying them to not to anything, but it's far better than forcing them into this weird job limbo, especially those living paycheck to paycheck. It's not fair to have them suffer.

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This whole shutdown is a joke. I'm often critical of both parties, but I don't see what the Democrats could do differently here. If they "compromise" (really, give in) here by gutting the ACA, the precedent set has long lasting consequences. The Republican tactic of "we'll be obstructionist crybabies who shut down the government until we force the majority party to do what we want" will be totally validated. And every two months this will happen again and again.

It's important to remember that the Republican proposal is to defund the ACA for a year in order to kick the budget can down the road two months. So they get this ridiculous leverage five more times a year? Keep in mind we're already in a sequester. Our budget is already a stone's throw away from Paul Ryan proposals. They have most of what they want in terms of spending cuts, already, before any of this happened.

Now throw in the fiscal cliff. Raising the debt ceiling lets us pay for stuff we're already spending money on. Keeping it the same does not magically make the US spend less money - we've already spent it. We would just be deciding not to pay our debts and default. The debt ceiling is a procedural artifact that's been handled dozens of times without incident. That this is even an issue is just horrible.

The important thing to take away from the crisis here is that this kind of poor representation, procedural power trips, and the radicalization of both party members (especially in the House) are all consequences of the way the government and US elections are set up right now. Congress has a poor approval rating, but if you ask Americans what they think of their representative, they are held in much higher esteem. These representatives have a vested interest in grandstanding, meaningless symbolic gestures, and policy radicalization, lest they lose a primary election. When the general election comes around, demographics decide the result more than anything - the biggest threat to individual representatives is in primaries. Combine this effect with the ever-increasing policy consistency of each party (remember when there were liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats?) and this kind of thing is just going to happen again and again.

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I'd best stop commenting.

Nonetheless, the big elephant is that we (our government) are spending more than we earn. Tke a look at your own situation: how long would you be able to do the same?

The deficit is 16 trillion or so. That's not the national debt - it's what we have spent beyond our income. It's untenable in the long run, and it'll get ugly when we have to fix it.

Is Canada accepting applications for citizenship? Maybe Global Warming will make it kinda nice up there...:p

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Don,
If nothing else you will get further away from the rising seas that will put New Jersey under water in a few years.
Today a new poll shows that congress has reached an approval rating of just 5%. I can't believe they continue to thumb their collective noses at the American people and the President. Is there no respect anymore? By the way, the congressional gym is considered essential and has not closed yet.

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A pox on both chambers of congress, as well as the administration. The ruling class needs thrown out, this is why we need term limits.

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A plague a' both your houses! (Romeo and Juliet--I forget who said it as he was dying.)

I think Shakespeare had it right, only a few centuries early.

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A quick comment on debt:
Often the analogy of Government debt is made towards "Credit Card" debt. My Money Blog gives the example I have been seeing trolling around:
http://www.mymoneyblog.com/us-budget...old-level.html

It basically comapres IRS revenue to a personal income of $20K, and the US national debt to a $142K credit card balance.

If instead, you look at the debt as structural, say a home loan (which is debt as well), suddenly you have a much better scale and understanding. $142K total debt would be similar to a $130K home loan, $10K car loan, and $2K of credit card debt.
Yes, spending $36k/year while only bringing in $20K/year is probably not a good thing, but if you are in a growth model (like young folks buying their first home), then taking on debt can be a reasonable course of action. This to again put it at a persoanl level, it would be akin to taking care of your expenses, plus taking out a home loan (say new roof or furnace or ...), plus a fair amount of non-essential spending (trip, dining out, or...). While this may not be the way many keep there budget, it is not a terribly uncommon early career lifestyle. The base assumption there is that you are in a growth phase of your income, which in general US GDP/Incomes are on the rise. Following this model though only works out in the long run if you have a plan for the long term (retirement and paying down debt).

Much like home & car loans were figured out to generally be a good thing for many, running some level of national debt was figured out by economists to boost economic growth. While the principle is fairly sound, the devil is in the details that are practiced. Taking on too much debt at too high a rate can cause run-away debt that will ultimately end in a bankruptcy (think taking out a high interest loan to pay minimums on credit cards). Taking on "smart debt" like a $10K home loan to ensure to stop a leaky roof that could turn your $200K home into a $50K home due to mold and water damage... On a more micro scale, it might be using a credit card to fill the tank of your car instead of abandoning it when the gas tank is empty (I have driven cars where filling the gas tank increased teh value of the car by about 30% and thus this may not have been a bad strategy :p ).

Back on topic:

In my analogy, the "US Gov" could be looked at as a young married couple that a while back agreed to buy a house and a couple of cars and has a baby on the way and is fighting about how to handle their debt. One spouse is arguing for austerity or bankruptcy, while the other is suggesting taking out a line of home equity credit to add on a nursery (and won't pay bills until there is an agreement)... There needs to be a real discussion, and there is quite a difference in opinion.
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As for the workers not working and the "lucky governement job", many of those took a 20% pay cut this summer due to sequestration. Some had to dig into their savings to help make up the deltas due to those "temprary cuts". Now they are not allowed to work. The back pay will help when it comes, but if this goes on too long, many could get a credit hit as they have already spent some of their emergency fund on the summers lower revenue.

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Both the example and your analogy ignore about 120 trillion in unfunded liabilities... Replace the 140k loan with a 1.2m loan and there is plenty to worry about.

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I am assume you are referencing a figure or "math" similar to this analysis:
http://nypost.com/2011/06/26/120-tri...-nations-debt/

Very interesting balance sheet the person chooses to keep. I think that using his "math", I am 1.2M in debt. of course a lot of those "debts" are taking my retirements costs into consideration which just happens to target around 1.2M in order to keep my current standard of living for the future...

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To place symmetrical blame when the actions are assymetrical is rather flawed, don't you think? Frustration with the system leads to apathy. Apathy, in turn, enables fringe powers to control a larger portion of those who are politically active (both in terms of voting and non-voting political action). You're playing right into the hand of the fringe powers at play here.

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It's just that easy. This outcome certainly won't have any devastating consequences at all, really, and it's a far better solution than behaving like reasonable adults and managing our spending in a professional, measured way.

I'm sold.

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To quote the article.
I'm not sold. I'm not even close to sold. He also eliminated any spending on the Affordable Care Act (aka, he gave in to the Tea Party faction). More so, the author doesn't even understand what the debt ceiling is. To once again quote the article.

Well, contrary to Mr. Dorfman, it is true. The debt limit does not authorize higher future debt, but rather allows the US to meet existing payment obligations. Dont' believe me, just look at the US Treasury website. Whether or not the US Treasury defaults on its debt payments, once the "extraordinary meansures" are exhausted, without any legal authorization to prioritize certain payments over others, the US Treasury would indeed have to delay payments. With each passing week, the US would come closer and closer to defaulting on payments and federal employees would once again find themselves in a situation where they're waiting on back pay.

The author completely ignores how reaching the debt ceiling would impact the financial markets (which have been characterized as as bad as the "Great Recession") and continuing damage to the United States' credit rating.

Beyond all this, his closing line about comparing the US Government to an American family's budget is one that's often trumpeted, but has little semblance to reality. It's a line that's really easy to sell, but the truth is far more complicated.
http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/family...rnment-budget/
http://desertbeacon.wordpress.com/20...-faulty-logic/

Let's call the push for a "balanced budget" what it really is. Austerity.

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I'm not sold either. I was being facetious. Honestly, I think it's a really stupid idea that is ridiculous on its face and I'm dumbfounded as to how anyone could propose it as a viable solution for the problem our government is currently facing.

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Not really, because you're assuming there exists some politician that doesn't share fault.

You can try to blame the "other side," but I can guarantee that about half of America will disagree with you.

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Forgive me. Read your post too quickly.

No, I'm stating that not all the politicians share the same amount of fault. There are certainly groups here who are more at fault than others, and to put a general blame on all of them does nothing to solve the problem.

It's not about blaming the "other side," so much as creating an educated viewpoint of the series of events that led up to this point. When a failure to pass a budget results in a government shutdown, the burden of proof should be clearly placed upon the obstructionist group to validate their actions.

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I'd wager the group you consider "more at fault" would be based on your ideology, the same way it would influence your interpretation of the events that led up to this point.

My point is that I'm upset that the House isn't working with the Senate, and I'm upset the administration is making the shutdown more painful than necessary. It's all politics, and I blame them for being political about this.

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I'm with ya there. There's plenty of blame to be spread around, to all parties involved (including the voters for electing the particular representatives involved). Who gets the most is an open question that might not be answered until 2014.

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That's a can of worms right there.

Yes, I'll take one well-informed nation of voters for $13-trillion, Alex.

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TO BE CLEAR

I was not defending our government's irresponsible actions at all, rather I was proposing that, while the shutdwon can and will be bad for America in the short run, this may be a wake up call for some people to start paying attention to what happens in our government and realize that it's important to know whats going on.

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Politicians are not sincere with the public and they always work for there personal interest.