If I understand it correctly, essential services are uninterrupted, Social Security and Medicare payments continue to gush, the Treasury is borrowing and jawboning as usual, and DoD has over a million people stationed all over the world eating three squares. FBI, DEA, BATF, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons are staffed 100%, and there's no question that Capitol Police and Secret Service are being paid. The Federal Government is the world's largest consumer of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel, paying up to $100 a gallon to deliver it to Afghanistan. All of our MRAPs, F-16s, and ships at sea are still in business, every tank truck, barge, and escort.
It's hard to grasp how big the government is. Nine hundred thousand structures around the world, 3.4 billion square feet, 122 square miles under roof, with over two million vehicles and aircraft parked outside. Estimates of Federal employees and contractors are between thirty and fifty million, depending on how you count teachers, college professors, coaches, doctors, bankers and brokers worldwide who skim a six-figure income from Treasury debt, mortgage scalpers underwritten by Fannie, Freddie, Ginnie, FHA, and Section 8 largesse.
It's dead certain that Boeing, Lockheed, GE, and Raytheon would collapse without fat DoD contracts, but their national defense cash flow is contractual, immune from shutdown. If I had to wager, I'd bet that Congressional staff and travel junkets are immune, too.
I trust you know that the U.S. Government annually spends over $1 trillion more than it takes in from taxes and an infinity of fees including tariffs, asset seizures, and fines. The Feds are roughly $22 trillion in debt, unless you count unfunded entitlements of $200+ trillion. So, the obvious question is -- why not make this 25% "shutdown" permanent? It won't balance the budget or nick the ever-expanding entitlement gravy train, but it's a nice down payment.
Oooo, scary. People out of work!
I don't see why not. Every dollar the government spends on itself is a dollar taken from the private free enterprise economy, engine of all innovation and profit, minus the burden of regulatory compliance and shipping and handling by tax accountants and molasses slow bureaucrats who can't be fired or compelled to show up for work.
Returning medical practice to the doctors would be nice. When I was a young man, we paid doctors in cash like plumbers and grocers. All private hospitals did charity cases, no charge. I know it's hard to believe, but drugs were cheap. Not in some distant prehistoric time, but in the 1960s, before affordable Blue Cross was hijacked by a tidal wave of suddenly sacrosanct welfare payola, illegal aliens, and anchor babies.
I'd like to see Congress undertake a new mission, no new laws, only repeals, but I'll take a 25% shutdown gladly. Let it run a few months. Kick the tires on smaller government. Make it easier to hire people in the private sector by cutting regulations -- or furlough enforcement staff, turn off a few light bulbs and computer screens, have a garage sale and sell off some of the quarter million GSA vehicles that regulators toodle around in. It'll be difficult to retrain former government employees to do anything efficiently and cheerfully, but newspapers say that there are more jobs available than those unemployed, so a big chunk of the 800,000 out of work at Federal agencies will be snapped up in a hurry by private employers. Who knows? They might enjoy working for a living, instead of snoozing at the Bureau of Paperwork.
I'm told by NPR that vital Homeland Security operations like TSA are working without being paid. First off, pull the plug on NPR, thanks. TSA should be funded by airlines and airports and ordered to keep their hands off frequent flyers, cute chicks, grannies, and children.
Above all, bring the troops home. Not just a handful from Syria. An orderly retreat from bases in Korea, Okinawa, Guam, Bahrain, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Germany, and Saudi Arabia would go a long way toward enhancing national security, concentrating on defense of North America, patrolling our shores and borders. International trade is a stupid justification for imperialism, and there's no sane purpose in policing the Islamic world as badly as we police Chicago.
Whether private citizens want to subsidize Israel or cancer research is up to them. Voluntary associations are the whole meaning of a free society. Let freedom ring and put government on a Weightwatchers diet, shed some of those bloated trillion dollar deficits.
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