I’ve been a bit disheartened about how quickly this has been kind of normalized by the media. Yeah, CNN has a stupid coundown (WITH SECONDS!) measuring the shutdown but this is a major disaster. Hundreds of thousands of employees are suddenly in that weird area of having a job but no income. They won’t be able to pay rent, which will not only hurt themselves, but landlords who depend on their rent for mortgages, etc. This is a national emergency and we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg.
Airport security screeners could quit en masse, grounding flights. The federal courts could stop hearing civil cases. City buses could stop running.
And 38 million Americans could stop getting food stamps.
Officials from Washington to Wall Street are pondering nightmare scenarios if the partial U.S. government shutdown that is already the longest on record extends into spring — or beyond.
“Shutdowns don’t get bad linearly; they get bad exponentially,” said Sam Berger, a senior adviser at the Center for American Progress, who worked at the Office of Management and Budget under President Barack Obama.