Render: Shutdowns impact citizens most

Congress voted to continue funding the government on Wednesday by approving a stopgap spending bill and thus kicked the can down the road till Dec. 11 for the next impending government shutdown.

Of course these shutdowns don’t really shut down government and only impact federal employees who are deemed “nonessential.” No one likes to find themselves in the “nonessential” category because eventually it dawns on them that nonessential implies not required and that means in an actual shutdown they could be fired.

link Rube Render

As an experiment in economic reality, visit any local small business and ask the proprietor how many nonessential workers he has on the job at that particular moment.

Then ask him, “If you had to shut down operations, how many workers would remain on the job?”

In 2013, during the last shutdown, the federal government employed about 2.9 million civilian workers and around 818,000 workers were furloughed. Any pay they lost was returned to them when the shutdown ran its course with the end result being that the nonessential personnel were forced to endure an unforeseen paid vacation.

Around 2 million workers remained on the job. Some shutdown.

Workers who remained on the job while their nonessential comrades were forced to take a paid vacation realized they were being short changed and immediately sued for extra back pay.

Government knows it can’t shut down all services, so it chooses high visibility nonessential services that will have a maximize impact on the citizenry. A perennial favorite of the administration is the National Park System.

Closure of the Washington Monument or the Smithsonian Institute is sure to bring a protest heard throughout the country.

In 2013 the feds closed the World War II Monument by placing temporary barriers and yellow tape around it. The “greatest generation” used their wheel chairs and walkers to plow through these obstacles to visit the memorial designed and built for them.

In its report after the 2013 closure, government noted a number of examples of economic disruption caused by the shutdown. Among these was the fact that the Bureau of Land Management was unable to process drilling permits for energy development on federal lands. This was particularly egregious in that the oil and gas industry had been complaining for several years that the BLM was purposely delaying the issuance of permits.

The above scenario is one reason why Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina are surging in the polls.

Rube Render is the Curry County Republican chairman. Contact him at:

[email protected]