And I don’t feel quite fine. The US government just shut itself down, due to the bickering of children in monkey suits because they couldn’t agree to whether government subsidized healthcare was important or not. I don’t know all the economic ramifications of the shutdown, but what I do know has my blood boiling.
For one thing: 800,000 government employees furloughed. Those are a lot of families unfed for what seems to be the foreseeable future. That’s at least 800,000 spending individuals hanging on to their cash. And if I learned anything in Econ101, it’s that if money doesn’t go back to the economy, the economy collapses.
In fact, people are saying that if the shutdown lasts for more than a month, then the US is headed into another recession. But then again, the deadline for the debt ceiling problem (not quite clear on that) is on the 17th. If the shutdown lasts until then, then we’re looking at a government that isn’t quite prepared to deal with a problem of that magnitude.
A friend also pointed out that it’s just as bad for investors, too. And one of the biggest investors in the US is (surprisingly) China. Those are roughly the two biggest economies in the world. And I don’t know how deep their connections are, but if one goes down, then the other one’s in for a rough time, no?
But what really gets my goat the most is the moral question of rank and file government employees not getting paid. This irks me the most. And then high-ranking politicians aren’t even keen on sharing the pain of their employees, if this story is credible enough.
To paraphrase an old saying: can’t the United States Congress just all get along?