Schumper: Trump threatened to keep government shut down for 'years.'
The jobs numbers are amazing. What better time for former government employees to find work in the productive part of the economy instead? Congress might have to eventually compromise, but even if we could keep it going for six or eight months, a lot of people would be forced by the long furlough to go find a job in the private sector. But we've got two years to play with, minimum.
OK, there are problems with that -- especially an inability to pay people like soldiers and Border Patrol agents. The biggest problem is that we've classified as 'essential' or 'entitlement' all the things that are really dispensable, while things that are actually essential -- protecting the country from invasion, say -- are classified as dispensable. All the same, think about it. Maybe a long, long shutdown is just what we need to get some priorities straight.
6 comments:
The shutdown is certainly contributing to the identification of government facilities, government jobs and job-holders, contractors, and back-office personnel that are truly superfluous.
Eric Hines
Some, at least, of the Antarctic facilities, are considered essential. As in, people die, or $400M or more of stuff goes to ruin, if you don't keep it maintained.
One of those corner cases...
I'd kick into a private funding campaign for Antarctic facilities - and into one to keep border patrol and military paid. Maybe someone can start a GoFundMe type campaign and let us donate to the area(s) of government we're willing to support. It would be an interesting look at what government responsibilities we support when we can actually see the money coming from us directly to a government function instead of getting lost in the noise.
Certainly, some of the shutdown functions are unneeded in the short term but at least useful, some necessary, in the longer term. But far from all of them.
We already can donate to the US Treasury, as Warren Buffet and Bill Gates and another (Steyer?) famously refused to do when Buffet was calling for higher taxes on the rich. However, I don't know if donations to Treasury can be targeted to specific purposes.
Eric Hines
As far as I can tell from a brief Bing search and a little reading, it is possible to make a directed gift to the US Treasury for the purpose of reducing the public debt. Any other gifts are considered "an unconditional gift to the government" and presumably are as likely to be used for, say, Mueller's investigation as for paying the border patrol.
In thinking about an extended shutdown, I thought that perhaps it would help with the public debt. I'm pretty sure, though, that the essential/entitlement aspects of the government are so huge that some saving on salaries will be a drop in the bucket. Still, a journey of a thousand miles and all that.
I think the thing to do is to try to fix the important problems that come up with non-governmental solutions. Everything important can't require an act of Congress. It may be that it'll prove to be that nothing important does.
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