Utah has something like 3.2% unemployment. It’s pretty much exactly like “you snap your fingers and find another job in a week or 2”. Not really any luck required, and not even all that much effort, if you have any marketable skills at all.
I am doing productive work. If you wish to live in a country that does not celebrate and preserve its own heritage that is more an indictment of you . I currently work at two National Parks. One celebrates the First Amendment - you Conservatives do support the Constitution, don’t you? The other celebrates the beginning of the American Industrial Revolution - you Conservatives do like American Industry, don’t you?
I guess they could probably find some low paying job like retail . So that could cover part of the bills. But even with low unemployment rate if you have professional job you won’t find an equivalent job that fast.
I’ve seen quotes from knowledgeable people who say that the shutdown won’t end until a catastrophe occurs. :eek: Either a strike shutting down all air travel nationwide, or a major plane crash directly attributable to lack of federal personnel.
Good. Bad farmers will go out of business and free up land and capital for good farmers, thereby increasing output. A momentary disturbance at worst.
If TSA people all walked off the job that would end it for certain. Not very likely to happen though. For a plane crash it might not be obvious right away what the cause is.
If Twitter shut itself down for the duration, how short would the duration be?
One thing to remember is it’s only like a 25% shutdown, and about half of the 25% that is shutdown have recalled workers to do their jobs, so the shutdown is kind of the “shutdown that wasn’t.” This means it will have more limited effects, I think it’s estimated it is negatively impacting the economy to the tune of about a $1bn a week, but in the scale of our economy that isn’t as much as it sounds like. That’s not the kind of impact that will be broadly felt.
SNAP benefits might be broadly felt, but some things to remember is they moved stuff around so the payment that went out in January is actually their benefit through March, so it will be a good while before people are really feeling the pain. Also, SNAP isn’t the same for everyone. People receive varying amounts of SNAP benefits based on income and family size, some people who receive it, it’s a nice cushion, but no one is starving without it. Even the people who are the bigger recipients likely still have money to buy food without SNAP, albeit their food security will be impacted. Don’t get me wrong–this is a genuinely bad thing and a shameful thing for the world’s richest country to have such a dysfunctional government and such a stupid President, but mass starvation probably is not on deck in any sort of real sense.
If I had to estimate where broad effects will be felt:
- TSA workers are middling paid, I $30-40k/yr. Lot of them are hired out of High School. Unlike the six-figure NoVa Federal Govt professionals these people probably live closer to paycheck to paycheck. They won’t want to give up their pension and benefits, but if they go long enough without pay simple economic reality will require them to just leave TSA and seek employment elsewhere. People in this income bracket cannot work if they can’t afford gas or etc. There’s probably a lot of variability in how much emergency savings the typical TSA checker has, but I doubt it’s more than a month or so of expenses saved.
What happens when they permanently leave TSA is air travel gets worse and worse as more and more security lanes get shut down, and wait times for getting processed skyrocket. It will still be months before you start to see this in a serious way, though. Again–TSA agents have decent jobs for people with minimal education, and leaving means losing your pension/health benefits. It will start to happen though as these people are in an income bracket where they eventually won’t actually be able to work (due to not being able to afford gas) without pay. While I personally find TSA wasteful and little more than security theater, the reality is Federal law/regulation requires TSA screening, so we can’t just let flights go without it. So that would mean as availability of agents drops the only outcome is much slower security lines and angry travelers. This is the sort of annoyance that tends to get people riled up, it’s akin to not properly plowing the roads on snowy days, something that often is the downfall of big city mayors.
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BoP prison guards are actually in a similar situation to many TSA agents, and many BoP prisons are in remote, rural locations that require significant commutes to reach. As their savings drive up they will lose the actual ability to attend work, and deeply understaffed prisons will lead to a lot of bad publicity.
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800,000 people are not being paid anymore who used to be paid. If the economy lost 800,000 jobs that would be bad, and that’s basically what happened here. Because they’ve only missed one paycheck, and many Federal employees are well paid, and have savings, the impacts of this aren’t really meaningful yet, but they will become meaningful over time. Is it going to lead to the collapse of the economy? No. But in terms of economic impact it would, for example, be worse than GM and Ford closing their doors. Something to remember is there is no “upside” to not paying them, even for the “starve the beast” style of imbecilic libertarian. Mainly because the shutdown hasn’t changed tax rates or tax collections, we’re still collecting the money for these jobs, so it’s not like government has “shrank.” We’re still taking the money out of the economy via taxes, but we’re not putting it back in the economy via wages, so it’s like a true loss to the economy. Again, not going to lead to the collapse of America, but shave points off GDP growth if it goes on for months? Yes, basic economics says this is so.
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Right now the shutdown has had minimal impact on the stock market due to a robust economy, investors expecting it will end soon enough and etc. While the government is still mostly muddling along, as you slowly lose workers from the Federal workforce permanently, and as the effects of worse government services start to pile up, it will have run on effects that will eventually be reflected in stock indices, politicians generally hate to be saddled with blame for bad market numbers.
The big question is, March 1st the debt ceiling goes back into effect, and is set at whatever level the debt is at on that day (the ceiling was formally suspended in early 2018, with a stipulation it goes back into effect on 3/1/2019 at whatever level debt is at on that day), is Trump going to extend the shutdown battle into not signing off on an increase in the debt ceiling? If that happens the couple months of shut down will be small potatoes to what happens if we start defaulting on debt payments because of the Trump Tantrum.
Procedural question triggered by final paragraph above: if the president declares that the debt ceiling won’t be met, and thus default, is there anybody else in the government that can gainsay him, no matter how difficult or unlikely it is? I asked a similar question in a past thread (https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=805443), but didn’t quite get answers.
So now gun owners are Trump’s brownshirts…
:smack:
Well maybe you wouldn’t be afraid of that if the Democrats hadn’t so perennially made gun control a founding plank of their platform that gun owners were left with no practical choice but to vote Republican (Libertarian not being a viable option). If the Democratic Party hadn’t made Donald Fucking Trump the lesser of two evils.
Wat makes you think all of us gun owners are automatically Republican? That we all refuse to countenance any and all regulation of our lethal weapons? I’m in Massachusetts, I have three guns, and I think our state regulatory scheme for guns actually needs some tightening.
Meanwhile, the federal judiciary inches ever closer to running out of money; they have about another week’s worth to pay their employees, then our national justice system will grind to a near-halt.
I appreciate that you responded not to what I said but what you inferred.
Are Americans who own guns Trump’s brownshirts? No.
Are the Gun Owners of America & the National Rifle Association Trump’s brownshirts? Probably not, no.
Is right-wing media and especially social media literally trying to tell NRA, GOA, and indeed Americans who own guns that the Democratic Party are demons to be destroyed? Oh, yeah, that, that thing is happening. It sucks.
It’s the lesser of two evils only in the imagination of frail white men.
Sadly, it was not just “frail white men” who voted for Trump. I even know WOMEN who voted for a man who grabs women by the pussy. I can’t explain it but I know it happened.
Personally I am getting more scared.
It’s looking more and more like we are at a point where of “events move things.” Something bad is going to happen because of inadequate and overstretched staffing, a plane crash, a food poisoning outbreak, something, and that will be what catalyzes getting unstuck.
I am afraid people are going to die as a result, as the price, of a Trump Tantrum.
As my sister is fond of pointing out, 52% of white women voted for the Pussy-Grabber-in-Chief. It’s…bizarre.
It isn’t bizarre if you understand that some of the most intense, vicious misogyny comes from women who detest another female stepping outside her “proper” role. I recall when the first female jockey began riding at Suffolk Downs, and a woman in a class I was taking was dismissively sniping about how could she ever do well, she’d be too worried about breaking her nails, among other such stereotyped nasty things.
Is it jealousy? Fear of being pushed out of their own comfortable rut? Brainwashed so thoroughly in gender stereotypes they can’t accept a woman who steps outside of all that? I don’t know, but it’s a real thing. Pile that on top of the relentless campaign of demonization against Hillary Clinton, and there’s a goodly chunk of that 52 percent.
Some of it is also that a lot of women respect and enjoy traditional family gender roles, and feel like liberals are attacking that by promoting concepts that suggest all gender is just a social construct, that there’s no differences between men and women, that women who stay at home and raise children are not living their best lives etc.
Yes, Limbaugh and Fox News and co have been successful in portraying this mostly false narrative to conservative old folks.
I believe another reason white women still vote repub is because they enjoy their position as ‘powerful adjacent’ sitting next to their white husbands.