The Effects Of The Shutdown Could Become More Evident Following Christmas
The government shutdown will continue this week, with no end in sight and neither side suggesting they have a solution to the matter.
The initial days of the partial government shutdown have been relatively calm. As the shutdown continues without a perceivable end, however, how it will affect Americans will be felt more as time goes on.
Wednesday marks the first real business day of the government shutdown, according to reporting from ABC News, which was started due to an impasse between Congress and President Donald Trump, who couldn’t come to a consensus on border wall funding. Trump is digging his heels in the ground over the matter, stating that he won’t budge until he gets money for the wall project between the border of the United States and Mexico.
“I can’t tell you when the government’s going to be open,” Trump said on the issue. “I can tell you it’s not going to be open until we have a wall or fence, whatever they’d like to call it.”
Much of the effects of the shutdown have been tamed by the fact that it started over the weekend and lasted over Christmas. Most government workers were given days off anyway on those dates, as Christmas is a recognized federal holiday.
Shutdown to cut office overseeing federal food stamps by 95% https://t.co/rNWUJzYrFR pic.twitter.com/vBDy0DOzsk
— CNN (@CNN) December 26, 2018
But now that it’s business as usual (at least, it would be if the funding crisis didn’t exist), and with the holiday over, the shutdown’s real effects will go into place, hurting more than 800,000 federal workers, many who will either be furloughed or forced to work and not receive government pay. That means, for those hundreds of thousands of workers, income that could have gone into the private sector of the economy — purchases or goods and services in their home communities — won’t be made.
Still, according to reporting from the New York Times, in general, the shutdown won’t have a direct impact on the economy. Standard & Poor’s estimates that the loss in gross domestic product each week will be about $1.2 billion, which isn’t small but isn’t drastically enormous, either.
Still, a negative impact on the economy may be felt in a less direct, though still problematic, way, due to how investors feel about it and how they’ll react to a longer shutdown. Indeed, Wall Street has already reacted negatively, in part because of the shutdown that’s presently happening, with the Dow Jones, for example, posting the worst week of results last week over the past 10 years, according to reporting from CNBC.
