Tag: Shutdown

More readers share their stories:

Yup, I’m a federal employee who was furloughed.  And because of it, I can’t afford to keep paying my husband’s home health aid (he’s a 30-year paraplegic and 4-year stroke survivor).  Not only will I be home to tend him, but I won’t have the income to pay this good, hard-working young lady.  And because she has lost HER income, she will have to let go her child’s babysitter.

Update from a reader:

About the woman who “can’t afford to keep paying” her husband’s personal health aide.  It’s three days into the shutdown.  She will almost certainly be reimbursed.  Does she have no personal savings whatsoever?  If so, shame on her.  I find that those on the Democratic side often pay lip service to the idea of individual responsibility, but I wonder sometimes what they think it means.  A federal employee with full health benefits and a good federal savings plan really has no excuse for not having, at the very least, six months of living expenses saved up.  That is basic personal finance.  No doubt, some people are hurting from the sequester and the shutdown, but this knee-jerk helplessness is frankly annoying.

Update from another:

Excuse me? No excuse for not having six months of living expenses saved up? How about having a paraplegic spouse and all the costs that entails? Does this person realize how many people in this country are living paycheck to paycheck? Having six months of living expenses is a luxury to millions in this country.  To judge someone with a disabled spouse for struggling immediately from this shutdown, when the whole point of the shutdown is to stop a healthcare bill that will keep people from going bankrupt because of medical bills … just stunning.

Another reader:

I work at the National Science Foundation. As you can see from the photo, we shut down completely. So, I’ve been furloughed. I had hoped it’d be a day, perhaps two at most, but by the looks of it now, it might last into next week and beyond.

This is costing a fortune. Part of my work is planning and organizing very needed collaborative meetings between scientists. I have several coming up. If the shutdowncontinues another week, those will be postponed or canceled with the attending loss of monies that were sunk into flights, rentals, etc. In my event alone, dozens of scientists and educators will have to cancel flights and plans and NSF will have to eat the cost. Of course this doesn’t take into account the hundreds of man hours of preparation it took to get this meeting off the ground, which now will have been for naught.

And I’m not getting paid. I can handle a few days, but the further this goes on, the more likely it is this will turn into a hardship. I absolutely love my job. I believe it is a huge benefit to our nation and to people. I love it because I truly believe that. I go into every day of work with a purpose that benefits the nation and mankind, and I work with amazing people. What more could a man want?

And yet I am not even allowed to work with no pay during the shutdown. It’s actually against the law. I honestly wish I could.

Fiscal conservatives? Surely not.

Another:

I’m an attorney for nonprofits and small businesses.  Because of the shutdown, it’s impossible to get an Employer Identification Number (EIN), which in most cases is required in order to open a corporate bank account.  Without a bank account, my startup clients simply cannot begin operating.  (Before someone raises the idea, using a personal bank account can lead to personal liability – something we never recommend.) Talk about grinding business to a halt.  Any Republican who says the shutdown is just a “slimdown” clearly isn’t trying to start a business.

Another:

My 18-year-old daughter was supposed to start a year of community service in AmeriCorps on Oct. 7 in Denver, where one imagines they could use some young, barely paid idealists to help with the flood damage.  She was very excited to get started on this adventure, and deferred her college start date for a year in order to serve.  What message have we sent her and all those who work for lower pay and lower appreciation in public service?

While the Neo-Confederate toddlers stamp their feet and hold their breath, it is America that is turning blue.

Many more stories below:

First of all, I promise to [tinypass_offer text=”subscribe”].  I’ve just been too busy to pull out the credit card, but I will do so now after I send this note. Anyway, the view from my shutdown is this:

I am the Chair of the Board of a non-profit organization that does a great deal of work on a variety of science issues.  I would say that about a quarter of our effort is with federal partners.  We scheduled a small conference for this month about two years ago and the staff of the organization spent a considerable amount of time and money in putting it together.  It is looking more likely that we will cancel the event, since many of the participants cannot attend now.

In addition, we work with our federal partners on a number of science issues and all of this work is looking like it will be delayed  considerably and the staff of our organization is having to jump into other projects, only to likely jump back when the government becomes sane again.  Some of this work is rather time sensitive and will require starting experiments over.

As the chairman of the board of this organization, I am starting to strategize how we can better align our resources so we do not have to work with an increasingly erratic and anti-science federal government.  We also work with a number of state and local governments and they are very easy to work with and do not have these insane battles.  It is looking increasingly like state and local governments are the adults in the overall governance of our nation.

Another:

I’m a medical research scientist focused on developing therapy for ALS (aka Lou Gehrig’s disease). Half of my funding comes from private foundations such as the ALS Association; the other half from the National Institutes of Health. With the shutdown, we’ve been told that we are permitted to proceed using the funds already disbursed, but not to expect any further funding until the shutdown is over. We will be OK for a few weeks and then the programs will begin to rapidly degrade. The consequences of the shutdown will be amplified by the way NIH funding is a rolling system.

I also review grant applications to the NIH on ALS research. I’m not paid to do this; it’s a service many of us do out of scientific citizenship. About 1 in 11 of these grants get funded typically, but it will be awhile before any new grants are processed because the entire system is shut down. For every day this system is shut down, it will take 2-3 days to get through the backlog in addition to the new work.

Another:

I think that this is a very important thread because it brings to life the very real consequences created by a very small group of wack-jobs.  Next week I was planning to take my family on a vacation to see the Grand Canyon for the very first time.  We have been excitedly planning this trip for the past 8 months.  My daughters have been learning about the Grand Canyon and surrounding areas and we were excited to finally be able to see this amazing place with our own eyes.  I cancelled the trip this morning.

It’s unfortunate that we won’t be seeing the Canyon, but what’s more important is that a handful of restaurants, hotels, gas stations and gift shops will not be getting my money.  We had planned on around $2000 for the trip for hotels, food, gas gifts and sight seeing.  I know that this doesn’t sound like a lot but it adds up when hundreds if not thousands of others are being forced to do the very same thing.  The funniest part about this is that the congressman who represents Northern Arizona is one of the Republican wack-jobs responsible for this shutdown, so in a way I’m happy my money will not be supporting his district.

One more reader:

My best friend’s brother is a park ranger in Utah in charge of making sure no one enters a national park in Southern Utah, which is closed while the government is shutdown. Yesterday he spent the day being cursed at, cried to, and even spit at (seriously, people?) for having to turn visitors away at the gate. It’s unfortunate and not right, but it’s not the first time that people take out their anger and frustration on the messenger.

But similar reprehensible actions coming from a US Representative, in public, to a government worker? Unconscionable. Not much showcases the Beltway bubble more than seeing and hearing a congressman shaming a government worker for doing her job, whose current duties are a direct ramification of that very congressman’s neglect to do his own job. They’re so insulated within their echo chamber they’re completely divorced from reality. And these are the people threatening the entire world economy without even knowing their own demands.

The Tea Party propaganda outlets have not let up on one particular moniker over the years. Obamacare is, we are constantly told, “job-killing.” John Boehner has used that phrase so often even Frank Luntz’s eyeballs must be slipping backward toward his tenuous toupee. The trouble is: since Obamacare just effectively started, and since the GOP has managed to cut off its provisions from the working poor – and particularly the African-American working poor – it’s somewhat hard to judge the validity of these claims:

“The script is still being written,” said Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics. “I don’t see any evidence Obamacare is impacting the job market.” N. Gregory Mankiw, a Harvard economist who worked in President George W. Bush’s administration, agreed. Asked how much the Affordable Care Act had affected the economy so far, he said, “Probably not a whole lot.”

Compare that with the likely job-killing effects of a continued government shutdown and a federal default. There is no doubt about how many jobs they would kill. Economists are not saying things like “Probably not a whole lot.” They are saying the following:

Goldman estimates that a two-day shutdown would reduce growth in the fourth quarter by 0.1 percentage points at an annualized rate, while a week-long shutdown would cost 0.3 percentage points … Now consider the debt ceiling … Analysts at Bank of America Merrill Lynch argue that hitting the ceiling would require the US to balance its budget at once, cutting spending by about 20 per cent, or 4 per cent of GDP. That would push the US into another recession–even if there were no default. The consequences of an actual default, particularly one that lasted for some time, are beyond prediction….

And this, if the GOP gets the default it is now recklessly threatening:

Expect nothing less than near panic in the global financial order.

The former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, Simon Johnson, describes the repeated face-off over the debt ceiling and prospects for default as an act of “collective insanity,” noting that such irresponsibility in 2011, “put more pressure on European sovereign debt at an inopportune moment, pushing up yields across the troubled euro zone (including, but not limited to Greece).” Consequently, not just America’s recovery suffered. The risk substantially increased that Europe will now face a “lost decade” similar to that suffered by Japan with little or no economic growth.

The Republicans are not only threatening the mother of all job-killing recessions in America; they are threatening the rest of the developed world with a second Great Depression, the end of the dollar as a global reserve currency, a massive jump in interest rates and a sky-rocketing unemployment rate. In their fetid partisan brains, they may think this will hurt president Obama, and it surely would.

But it would also destroy countless lives, families, jobs, industries and American credibility. When will these people learn to love their country more than they hate their president?

Boehner reportedly wants “to craft a ‘grand bargain’ on fiscal issues as part of the debt-limit deliberations.” But any serious Grand Bargain would require serious revenue increases in return for lower and flatter rates – and the GOP has simply refused to countenance any whatsoever, and certainly doesn’t appear to be ready to do so now. It’s an obvious way, it seems to me, to try and salvage the situation by changing the subject and making the blackmail seem at least faintly related to fiscal matters … but I can see why Chait is dismissing the idea:

The thing to keep in mind is that there is essentially zero institutional support within the conservative movement for negotiating a budget deal with Obama. Even the “pragmatic” conservatives who pleaded against the shutdown, like Grover Norquist and The Wall Street Journal editorial page, adamantly oppose closing any tax loopholes, regardless of what spending cuts come along with it.

So: What happens when the defunders realize the budget deal is not going to destroy Obamacare, and the anti-defunders realize it is going to include higher taxes? The answer is that John Boehner gets run out of town on a rail. There’s nothing a deal like that could include — not even a provision impeaching Obama and deporting him to Kenya — that could make it acceptable to the right-wing base.

House votes to #opentheparks & museums. http://t.co/N2sUrvHqbk Why wouldn’t Senate Dems want to do that?

— Speaker John Boehner (@SpeakerBoehner) October 2, 2013

House backs measure to protect #NIH life-saving cancer research. http://t.co/N2sUrvHqbk Why wouldn’t Senate Dems want to do that?

— Speaker John Boehner (@SpeakerBoehner) October 2, 2013

The GOP House is passing bills that would undo the most visible consequences of the shutdown. Beutler explains why Democrats aren’t biting:

[Republicans] ran a version of this play after the sequestration order went out earlier this year. They pushed for special flexibility for the FAA, so that business travelers wouldn’t be inconvenienced by flight delays and Dems gave it to them. It was an error. In so doing, they placated a powerful lobby they could have marshaled to rescind all of the cuts. Poor people had no such recourse, and sequestration continues to harm the programs they rely on to this day.

Democrats aren’t falling for it this time. They passed a bill to secure military pay, but have so far rejected all other piecemeal shutdown fixes. Not because they’re craven or want the shutdown, and not even really because they care about the principle of equal treatment, though I suppose they do. Democrats aren’t letting Republicans make the shutdown they caused painless for themselves to endure. And that’s set off a massive fight for narrative control. Who’s really pro-shutdown, if Republicans are at least trying to open parts of it? Republicans want to enlist the press in its campaign to flip the script on Democrats, and have even had some success.

Scheiber imagines a possible endgame:

If the GOP can essentially fold on everything Obama insists they fold on, but come away with some deficit-related totem that gives the Tea Partiers the impression they won something—well, that wouldn’t look so much like a pure retreat. That’s where Boehner appears to be headed, even if he won’t admit it yet.

What would that totem look like? In essence, I think Obama can basically give Republicans a trumped-up, impressive-sounding version of what he’s already offered: You guys reopen the government and raise the debt limit, and then I will dispatch my vice president and my entire economic team to negotiate face-to-face with Paul Ryan over a long-term deficit deal every week for two months (or whatever), after which they will report back to me, and John Boehner and I will discuss what they’ve come up with. Obama would have essentially offered no concessions for the reopening of the government and the raising of the debt limit. He will have committed to no cuts and no deficit-reduction targets of any kind. But he will have given Boehner a fig leaf that he can show his rank and file to persuade them that this whole suicide mission wasn’t entirely futile.

A reader writes:

I thought I’d share my small frustration with the shutdown, though it absolutely pales in comparison to the full-time workers who are now going without a paycheck. I’m a full-time student and a drilling National Guard officer. What I don’t think is being widely reported yet is that in a bunch of states, Guard monthly drills and training assemblies are being cancelled, despite the stopgap bill that was pushed through funding the military through the shutdown.

My state has tentatively cancelled all regular training and drill until the shutdown is over, save for the folks already activated for named operations (Enduring Freedom, etc). All of the state’s National Guard technicians, full-time Guard soldiers who maintain our equipment and weapons, have been furloughed. That really messes with our readiness; we have vehicles in need of repair from training last month that won’t get fixed. Imagine if there was a real emergency like Sandy and a critical unit’s vehicles were inoperable.

It also screws with any full-time Guard technician airmen or soldiers out of a paycheck they may be depending on. So when it’s being reported that soldiers and airmen aren’t being affected by this shutdown, that’s just not true.

On a personal level too, I rely on the GI Bill and my monthly drill pay to pay my rent. The VA has said they have enough appropriations to pay out the check I’m due for September, but if the shutdown continues through October, I won’t get paid next time. Couple that with me missing out on that critical training we’re supposed to have been doing, and I may be in a little trouble come November 2nd. Luckily I have family to turn to.

I want to echo what your writer in Afghanistan said. And I would serve for free. But this isn’t fair to younger Guard/Reserve soldiers and airmen who don’t have the same amount of support that I do. A lot of my soldiers are young college kids who fully depend on drill pay and the GI Bill for 100% of their income while they’re in school. If this thing lasts long enough to get past one paycheck, it’s time for concern for those soldiers, because if they’re like me, they live paycheck-to-paycheck.

(My views and opinions are personal ones that should in no way be read as reflecting the views, official or otherwise, of the Army, the National Guard, or my unnamed state.)

Update from a reader:

From a current National Guardsman who is also trying to complete law school, missing drills for one month or two could make it difficult to get a “good year”. You need a certain number of drill points per year to make a year count toward retirement. As someone who only started a year ago, I struggled to make the minimum number while maintaining my schooling. Now, going into the next FY, if I am starting out four drills behind, I may miss out on a good year. Two months of shut-down could lead toward a full year later retirement for me should I choose to stay in.

Another:

I’m a DoD civilian working for a Major Command of the Air Force. I’ve just filed for unemployment. On Oct. 21, I’ll be undergoing a major operation which my federally subsidized health insurance will cover. The confluence of events and the timing for me are pretty bad. But I’ve had this job since 2009, when I graduated college. I’ve been furloughed eight days total this year, and been threatened with no less than three shutdowns since starting in 2009.

I believed then and believe now that I’m lucky to be working for the fed. I can’t name many people I went to high school or university with who have been putting away for retirement for four years. I can’t name many people who got jobs out of college who have kept them, and had the opportunity for advancement, pay raises and travel like I have.

When we were asked to sign our furlough notifications on Tuesday, my organization gathered all civilians together to answer questions and field concerns. The loudest people in the room were federal civilians with prior military service who will be receiving retirement checks during furlough from their previous careers as servicemembers. I don’t know how to feel about that, because they should be paid, in full, on time, for the time they served and protected us.

I’ve always been the type of citizen and voter happy to pay my taxes and enjoy the fruits of those taxes in the form of public transportation, safe streets and stop signs. I take medications which were almost all the result of NIH research or federal grants. I love the Smithsonians. If taking this one on the chin ensures that more people get more affordable healthcare through ACA, then I’ll live with it.

My overall conclusion is that this shutdown does, indeed, blow. I need it to end, because I want to keep believing that the downsides of federal employment are vastly outweighed by the upsides. If they keep this up, the federal workforce will lose its most experienced employees, and its youngest and most creative, who came into the job looking for a stability that no longer exists.

A final note: I’m glad I subscribed to The Dish for a full year back when I was getting full paychecks. Sound investment.

Read all of the testimonials in our “View From Your Shutdown” series here. And send us your own.