So it’s pretty apparent there’s going to be a government shutdown. But how bad will it be? Not really so bad. I’ve been through a few of these in my life, most of which were as the son of a career Federal worker, but the last one happened while I was a government contractor.
During those previous shutdowns my Dad got a few days off of work and then got a paycheck for it after the fact. and no, he was NOT charged for vacation time — basically in the past a government shutdown has meant extra days of paid leave for affected workers. I wouldn’t mind the government not retroactively paying them this time, but that’s unlikely to happen and I’m not sure what the political fallout would be if it did.
When I was a government contractor and the shutdown happened, we just went to a building off-site for a few days because our site at the Federal Center was closed up. No loss in pay, though there was quite a loss in productivity, as in the new building we never even had time to get completely setup before we had to move back.
Don’t get me wrong, a shutdown is a bad thing all the way around, but we’ll survive it.
In Wisconsin we have an issue where one side will NOT accept that they lost an election and that serving democracy means accepting that they may not win every vote, not running away to another state to avoid the vote.
In D.C., it’s a little different. The two sides have irreconcilable differences, with one party in control of each house, and at some point they’re going to HAVE to compromise. But that means the Democrats have to compromise as well as the Republicans. So they’ll have to accept some spending cuts, we’ll have to accept we can’t kill every stupid program they’ve promoted over the years.
Interesting to see what happens. I like seeing politicians stand up for what they believe in but at the same time … they’ve got to be pragmatic enough to keep the government moving. As much as I want spending cut, we conservatives failed to capture the senate (though we took a hell of a lot of seats back) and that’s the fact.
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