Republicans just got a big tax win but there could be trouble ahead
Republicans in Congress don’t have time to catch their breath after their tax-reform marathon. If they don’t pass a funding bill by midnight on Friday, the government could run headfirst into a shutdown.
Shutdowns are expensive. Their cost comes not only in money, such as the billions paid to employees who can't work, but in opportunity — such as ambitious tax legislation that will be hard to implement before the new year.
Here’s what we learned from the most recent shutdown, which took place over 16 days in October 2013, as congressional Republicans attempted to defund or delay the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare.
At the shutdown's peak about 850,000 workers per day — or about 40 percent of the federal workforce — were sent home, a 2013 report from the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) found. Together, those workers missed 6.6 million days of work. Employees aren’t paid during a shutdown, but once it ends Congress is virtually guaranteed to offer them back pay. Which, in this case, totaled about $2.5 billion, including benefits. Paid to people who were literally locked out of their offices and forbidden to do so much as check email from home.
But if you only count those who didn’t work, you miss much of the madness. Even many of those whose work was deemed necessary were sucked into the oddly circular tasks of shuttering systems and equipment across the government, from nuclear security to marine-mammal monitoring, only to spin it all back up when the shutdown ended.
And direct federal employees are only a fraction of those who ultimately depend on the government for their paycheck. It’s difficult to get numbers on the multitudes of private contractors working in service of various agencies, but it starts in the hundreds of thousands. In 2013, contractors working with the military were eventually paid, but others could not make up for lost work or wages. In the broader economy, economist Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics estimated in a 2013 report that “a couple hundred thousand private sector employees, many at defense contractors, could not work because of the shutdown.”
Meanwhile, the billions of dollars of contractor payments, refunds and other bills federal employees couldn’t pay while they were locked out of their offices had to be made good, with interest, upon their return. The money “saved” during the days the government was shut down still gets spent, it just gets spent far less efficiently.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/republicans-just-got-a-big-tax-win-but-there-could-be-trouble-ahead/ar-BBH50ml?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=edgsp
