Slashdot Mirror
90% of Nuclear Regulators Sent Home Due To Shutdown
An anonymous reader writes "More than 90% of nuclear regulators are being sent home due to the Federal Government shutdown, as the agency announced today that it was out of funds. Without Congressional appropriations, the nuclear watchdog closes its doors for what appears to be the first time in U.S. history. CNN reports that while a skeleton crew remains to monitor the nation's 100 nuclear reactors, regulatory efforts to prevent a Fukushima-like incident in the United States have ceased."
If the debt ceiling is not raised we will default. That puts it on the table. If a single bill goes unpaid we are defaulting. It doesn't matter if it's a bond or a social security check. The market will treat it the same and it's going to be catastrophic. We run the risk of a collapse of the entire world economy (which is predicated on the stability of the US bond market).
Treasury has no way (without rewriting their entire software that controls the payment system) to sort payments by type. They would have to sort manually and with millions of payments due every single day it would take thousands of people to sort them all and pay only one type.
People that are downplaying default don't know what the fuck they are talking about. You want an example of default, refer to Argentina. They defaulted almost a decade ago and they STILL can't borrow money. Every single thing they import must be paid for with hard currency extracted from products they sell to other nations. Much like Venezuela they have shortages, business can't get parts and a whole host of problems that would make living there hellish. The US has a import/export deficit of several hundred billion dollars a month. That means all that stops, nothing will be imported without a corresponding export of equal value. Do you have any idea how much that would impact the world economy let alone the US economy? It would lead to a recession that would be WORSE than 2008. In fact we probably wouldn't recover from it without a big fucking world war again.
Maybe I'm being paranoid but you are seriously playing down severe risks. If we default (meaning we don't pay a bill when required) we are looking at a severe recession with high double digit unemployment that will make the last few years of 12% unemployment look like a picnic.