What is the big deal of a government shutdown?
A few things.
1. It's ALWAYS going to end up costing the government more than it saves. Why? First, because you are still having essential services, it's not like you're actually fully shutting down a lot of offices. So much of the operating costs for the various buildings just keep right along chugging. What's more, the longer the shutdown goes, the more backlog of work that needs to be done once it starts back up. Working on backlog work pushes other work off, often either requiring overtime, more hiring, or simply inefficient work. For example, cutting essential employees paychecks is not "essential" work, but it's something that absolutely DOES have to happen once the government opens again. There are a plethora of duties like this that have to then be taken care of. Additionally, dealing with the reality that it's almost unheard of for a shutdown to occur and backpay not end up being given, it's not even like you're saving significant money for those that aren't working but instead have actually basically paid people NOT to work.
2. Those essential employees? They're basically working for free for...who knows how long. The last shutdown was for an entire pay period and bleeded into another, meaning that those essential employees went a month without pay. Now for some people, that may not be a huge deal. However, I know had I still bee employeed in my first job up here in the Northern Virginia area, a month without pay would've meant that I would've been unable to pay pretty much any of my bills. This suddenly starts adding up as not only do you have late bills, but then late payment charges, and other such issues. So even though they may still be "working", they're not getting paid for it.
3. Similarly, those non-essential employees? The difference between a "vacation" and a shutdown is the fact that, as above, you're not getting any kind of paycheck. If you're someone who's been in a good enough financial place to put aside a few months of savings, you're fine. But many people are not like that, and for those individuals a pay period or two or three without pay could be disastrous and hardly like a "vacation".
Even with backpay, that backpay isn't going to magically fix the hits to your credit if you're late on your mortgage, or student loans, or credit card payments, etc.
One has to wonder why non-essential personnel are working for the government to begin with?
One has to wonder why someone so grandly ignorant of what non-essential personnel do has the audacity to speak to it.
Tell me, do you think government employees should be paid? Because the people who process those payments? They're non-essential employees, doing a non-essential duty. Clearly, why in the world would we have the government actually bothering paying it's employees since it's "non-essential". How about Human Capital and Business Management related things such as hiring, or dealing with the agencies budget, or dealing with employee benefits, or organizing the job related training for employees. All of those things tend to be considered "non-essential" in major agencies during a shutdown; are you suggesting that we should be "wondering" why the government has people working for them doing those things in the first place.
Grrrr! Stupid old government, they should be more like private industry. Because you know, private industry doesn't bother with payroll, budgets, hiring, or training.
And while it may not seem like a major impact to you, understand everything doesn't function within your little budget. Within the DC / Maryland / Virginia metro area, a shutdown causes strain across every sector of the economy as suddenly the spending of money dries up significantly for a portion of time due to the number of families that have, in some way, a connection to government employment in the area.
Now does that mean a government shutdown is the end of the world? No. I had a similar reaming out of someone who ignorantly, years ago, declared that a shutdown was going to make the country significantly less safe from national security threats; something that, barring an extremely long term shutdown, was preposterous. A shutdown is not going to destroy things, but it's also not a ho hum vacation of sunshines and lollipops with no real negative side effects either. If you're going to downplay what it is and how it's going to happen I suggest you at least make yourself less ignorant of what actually occurs and what it actually impacts.
