The United States federal government has been “shut down” for almost two full days as I write this. Aside from an abundance of media attention, have you even noticed?
Approximately 800,000 “nonessential” government employees across the country have been furloughed, meaning they are not working or getting paid for an indefinite amount of time. For these people, the shutdown has had a major, noticeable impact on their lives. For the 99.8 percent of Americans not furloughed, the only real effect of the shutdown is that the government has racked up a lot less debt in their names.
Admittedly, I’m probably overexaggerating a little bit when I say there’s no “real effect.” Sure, the parks are shut down, and some federal departments have nearly ceased functioning (only 3 percent of NASA’s employees are working, Department of Housing is at 5 percent of regular staff, the EPA is at 6 percent and the Department of Commerce has a slightly higher but still drastically low 13 percent of their staff working) but has anyone’s life really been negatively affected by their absence?
Despite almost 35 percent of federal employees not working, our society has still functioned. There are no riots, there’s no looting, people aren’t dying in the streets and people aren’t being killed at any higher a rate. If your house catches fire, the firemen still come, and the police still protect us from dangerous criminals. Almost all of the things that people regularly think of when they think of “government” are still functioning as normal because they are considered “essential” functions of government and are, therefore, still receiving funding.
If we can get along just fine without 35 percent of what the government does, why exactly were we paying them to do these things to begin with? Sure, government-funded space trips are nice if your government has a bunch of extra money to burn, but ours simply doesn’t have that money.
Our nation is already almost $17 trillion in debt, and we get closer to passing that mark every day. When a person or a household or a company racks up a bunch of debt, they have no choice but to cut back and only spend money on essentials.
Our government has a little bit more leeway in the amount of debt it can rack up because it has a better credit rating than most individuals. However, it is ultimately bound by the same limits as every other economic entity: it can only borrow so much money before lenders stop lending and checks start to bounce. I think we can all agree that we’d rather have money for police and not for parks than not have money for either.
Ultimately, I think the government will go back and compensate the furloughed employees and all of them will return to work (just like what happened after the last shutdown in 1996, and in the dozens of shutdowns before then).