Y’all notice which shutdown stories are getting highlighted in the media?
Prison guards, coast guard, TSA.
All military or cop. Barely a word about anyone else. National Parks stories focus on overflowing bins, not struggling workers.
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So it’s SecDef Chomsky then? 
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I have only seen one article looking at what happens to people who rely on government services (which covers more things than people think) when this shit happens. That’s who suffers most under what I outlined above. When there aren’t enough people to handle the paperwork because they’re trying to run staffing processes and there aren’t enough people to run staffing processes due to all the paperwork required to deliver services, service delivery times get longer. Stressed out staff no longer have the time or energy to walk someone through the ins-and-outs of the system, even if they wanted to (and the bulk of people really do want to help, but they’re often constrained by rules or time-pressures). People don’t get their rental assistance or their business loan in time. They lose their home or their lease, they have to lay-off employees, etc.
“Leaner” government doesn’t run more efficiently. It just means some things don’t get done. Rarely are those things the ones that benefit the bureaucracy or big-money players. Good luck, though, if you aren’t one of those.
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You must be new here.
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Speaking of which:
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At the very least, someone who’s READ some Chomsky!
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I’ll take “Worst Ideas ever proposed” for $500, Alex.
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The federal government is always financially able to pay its employees and contractors. It is sometimes legally forbidden to pay employees and contractors, as is the case now, and when the debt ceiling is reached. It is literally like having a vault of infinite gold but you have to say “mother may I” to a capricious bunch of children in order to take it out.
I think my question stands regardless of the reason. The problem of not being able to pay their employees, according to every news source I’ve seen, was a problem with the legislature. If the legislature didn’t make a change, I don’t know what changed. And I wonder if what has changed is that people have just said, “Screw it” and started ignoring the law, just like the administration mostly ignores the president.
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Actually, it is more like a lock-out. With some workers locked in with no pay.
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Which is pretty much how I feel about our disastrous Brexit shenanigans. Very few people knew how much the UK and EU were intertwined after 40 years. Apparently our broken economy will have to (and be able to - according to the Maybot) pay a billion ot make our own GPS satellite network now that we are not a member of the EU and its GPS satellite programme. Just one of many, many things the Brexiteers will break.
Maybe one small slightly silver-plated lining of a long shut-down in USA is that a lot of people might get to realise that govt actualy does stuff, that it’s useful and important stuff, and that it costs money, which is well worth spending.
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Yeah, it’s the same phenomenon as the Trump administration as a whole - when institutions stop functioning (or threaten to stop functioning), you start becoming acutely aware of them.
The only problem is that most people aren’t paying attention and only become aware when the systems stop functioning entirely, such that it directly impacts them. So for most functions of the federal government, when the shutdown lasts long enough that workers stop showing up entirely and there’s total collapse of the systems the society depends on to get basic things done. Brexit promises a similar chaos - and, similarly, if it gets that far, it can’t be easily recovered from (or at all).
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This is the tragedy. Around 35-40% of my fellow citizens voted for it - a majority totally unaware of all the things that will break, and taken in by the lies about the wonderful things that would ensue (and woe betide the leading Brexiteers when the shit hits the fan post-Brexit) and a minority fully aware and not only totally not giving a shit but actively wanting to bring it on because they are pure disaster capitalists, and are totally insulated from any consequences.
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I’ve been reading about the “no deal” situation, and how apparently a quarter of the population thinks means, “staying in the EU.” That’s… not an encouraging sign. Also I keep reading about all the people who are really relaxed about a no deal Brexit. I’ve seen a number of people arguing that Y2K wasn’t a big deal, so this won’t be either. They argue that, either unaware of how much work was done to avoid catastrophe, or more bizarrely, think that the last two years have seen fevered work preparing for a no deal Brexit. But it seems to me that all the effort, inept though it was, went into the rejected deal. “No deal” represents the failure state, and it’s only now that any real work is being put into considering what it means, too late. I’m reading about proposals that either don’t have time to be put into practice (e.g. re: the Irish border), have actually already been rejected (again, the Irish border), utterly fail to address the situation (e.g. the food and drug import problem) or represent blatant profiteering (e.g. the whole ferry thing).
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Up to a point. What it means was clear to anyone paying attention to all the signs, one by one, along the way over the past 2-3 years. But nobody brought them all together, or else they focused on the wrong ones (the speculative ones, that became known as ‘project fear’ - i.e. lies and scare tactics by the remainers, rather than the mundane but critical to normality ones). None of the sensible press (few and far between) monitored or consolidated it all. They merely focused on reporting the lies and propaganda.
I’ve asked but still have not seen a single consolidated list of all the FACTUAL (not forecast) losses - the EU’s GPS satellite/space projects; the EU medicines review/approval agency now moved from UK to Netherlands at the cost of a few UK jobs and which means we will have to now invent our own medicines review and approval agency; the academic and educational agencies and projects; the air traffic control and airline certifications allowing UK/EU flights; and so on and on and on and on.
The real project fear was run by Brexiteers based on half a dozen new EU members looming, including Turkey, and what the unfettered immigration that would follow would do to UK public services, jobs, and so on.
But - no disrespect - if you’ve been reading about it only now, you can barely scratch the surface of how fucked up it all is now and how the fuckedupness has been openly building from the day Cameron decided to actually call a fucking referendum, while all those in any position of influence or power spent all their time and effort pursuing their own personal agendas.
I really need to stop making these posts. It is just too depressing.
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I was reading about it before the referendum to some degree, but got into more details after, so I’m not entirely clear how much the Remainers articulated about what it would all mean. (To some degree, it would have been impossible to consider and cover all the possible scenarios and their ramifications.) People seem to be caught off guard - I keep reading people saying, “No one ever talked about some of these things before, so I don’t believe it’s real.” I’m not clear what issues they don’t believe in, nor whether it’s because Remainer warnings didn’t cover that particular subject or if they were just dismissed as “project fear” (which didn’t get media coverage, or people have now forgotten about it). Certainly I saw that the Irish border issue was covered, as well as air traffic, food and drug imports, etc. One would think the issues brought up would be dire enough to convince people, but not if they were dismissed…
But mostly I was thinking about how the Tory-led government has failed to consider these issues until now that it’s too late. They just seem breathtakingly unprepared for what’s happening on every level. And from the start - when Cameron reportedly called the referendum believing it would be blocked by the Lib Dems, and thus was unprepared for what subsequently happened, it just seems like step after step that was ineptly handled and failed to consider the consequences.
I really wouldn’t want to even visit the UK around Brexit time… I can’t fully imagine the horror of having to live through it. And I say that having a president who is happy to shut down the government while totally unaware of what it does and what that means.
They did - some of them. But they were drowned out by the “it is all project fear” lies and by the “it will all be easy and fine, and by the way fear the EU” propaganda.
But it’s late here and I’ve no apppetite for reciting more about how/why we ended up here. The Tory govt (i.e. May) decided not to reach out, not to seek consensus, not to consider national interests, but to focus on triangulating how to preserve the Tory party - which was never going to work, seeing as half of them wanted a ‘no deal’ type of deal, and so … here we are.
G’night. 
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