Shutdown with No Clear End Poses New Economic Threat

Unfriendly reminder, both Republicans and Democrats can stop this at any point.

Republicans have 50+ votes in the senate and already passed a bill in the house. All they would need to do is consider re-opening the government as important as appointing a supreme court justice and modify filibuster rules (which only require 50+ votes and they did change for supreme court [1]).

Democrats obviously can just vote for the Republican bill.

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Although personally, I'm fine with Democrats refusing to vote for a bill they had no input on.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_option#2017:_Cloture_o...

DOGE should have laid off whole Congress. They are clearly not capable of doing their jobs on time.

Something I haven't seen talked about is the potential threat to government recruiting the layoffs and shutdown represent.

My historical impression was that government jobs didn't pay the best and came with a lot of red tape, but also came with a pension and a lot of stability.

From the outside, the stability looks like it's gone. I've got a buddy that works as a firefighter for the army and he's coming up on a second missed paycheck (shutdown hit right before checks went out). He's lucky to have inherited a house and to not have kids, but I don't know what the folks with a mortgage and several kids are doing to make ends meet. Allegedly they won't even get backpay right when the government opens, it'll come during their next pay period so even if they opened up right now he still wouldn't have any money coming in for a couple weeks or more.

Trump was elected with a mandate to destroy the government, and that's what the Republicans are [finally] doing. Anybody who voted for Trump 2024 expecting something other than anarcho-capitalism and destruction of what we consider the USA was deluding themselves - the detailed agenda was telegraphed well ahead of time.

Two decades ago, having just digested the Cypherpunk's Manifesto, I might have been sanguine, or at least tepidly eager. Older me is horrified - I don't see the same anarcho-capitalism conquering China any time soon, and yet our "taxes" have even gone up for this new revenue stream based around shaking down international trade.

Saw this related post a bit ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45637049

usa-status.com was enough to make me laugh a bit at least

Fun side effect that I hadn’t considered- a coworker has his green card, by all rights he belongs here with his family - but he got kidnapped by ice, from work, and is now being deported because he can’t find his copy of the paperwork, and the government is shut down so there’s no one one the gov side to find it for him.

It’s such an obviously racist violation of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ and it’s really tearing me up that there’s nothing I can do to stop it.