If you read a little deeper, you will find that the government will not actually shut down. What will happen is that non-essential federal employees will be sent home.
According to this article from Reuters, these employees are not to do any work from home. They are not to use government-owned Blackberries, laptops, or any other such equipment.
You probably know where this is going, so go there I will. If these employees are so non-essential that they can go home and not work, and the government will run without them, then why do we need them?
The Reuters article pegs at 800,000 the number of non-essential employees who would be sent home as a result of the so-called government shutdown.
I am not a math whiz, but I took that number and multiplied it by $81,258. That represents the average salary of a federal employee that I found cited at Factcheck.org.
The resulting dollar amount is $65,006,400,000. If that many numerals confuse you, we are talking just over $65 billion. It is a rather small amount in the Age of Obama, where our latest annual deficit is $1.65 trillion, but keep in mind that once upon a time, way back during the G.W. Bush presidency, $65 billion represented about one-half to one-third of one of his budget deficits. I figure $65 billion would be as good place as any to start cutting our deficits and slash spending. Let these non-essential employees find a job out there where they would be found to be essential.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free... it expects what never was, and never will be." -Thomas Jefferson
1 comment:
Really? You're talking about postal workers, and clerks and other such people. Where are these people suppose to go get jobs? The private sector does not and will not ever have enough jobs for everyone.
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