Slashdot Mirror
Shutdown Cost the US Economy $24 Billion
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Time Magazine reports that according to an estimate from Standard & Poor's, the government shutdown, which ended with a deal late Wednesday night after 16 days, took $24 billion out of the U.S. economy and reduced projected fourth-quarter GDP growth from 3 percent to 2.4 percent. The breakdown includes about $3.1 billion in lost government services, $152 million per day in lost travel spending, $76 million per day lost because of National Parks being shut down, and $217 million per day in lost federal and contractor wages in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area alone. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers bore the economic brunt of the shutdown but small businesses also suffered from frozen government contracts and stalled business loans. With the deal only guaranteeing government funding through January 15, the situation could grow worse. 'This is a real corrosion on the economy,' says Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody's Analytics. 'If we have to go down a similar road in the near future, the costs are going to continue to add up.'"
Because doubling spending will fix the ecomony.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Let me guess, all politicians all blame the "other side" and will let us know how much the "other side" cost us within the week.
How did all that money just leave the economy? Did someone give it away to another country?
How much will the Slashdot outage cost the economy?
If the GAO is correct, it will SAVE circa 4.8 billion per year thanks to outcome based payments
How much does ObamaCare cost the economy?
Way less than the last few wars.
How much does having your citizens not being able to afford medical care cost the economy?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
What I want to know is how much it would have cost the US economy for the government to keep running during that period of time.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
It cost 24 billion dollars? Based on.. any number of imaginary things they want to show it cost them right? We must keep spending money we don't have, and we must keep increasing the amount of debt we have or we are all going to die right?
I mean to say, we have to spend this for the Children, and the children just lost 24Billion dollars! If you deny their right to spend, you are a "conspiracy theorist" to boot, so shaddup!
How is it difficult to believe this number? Considering that we have to pay 800,000 people for time they didn't (couldn't) work, yet we lost 17 days of productivity from each one of them, that comes to $1764 in lost productivity per employee, not counting all kinds of other non-personnel costs. I find that number entirely reasonable, if not a bit low.
First off, I don't want ObamaCare. But the fact is it was passed 3 YEARS ago and then vetted by the supreme court (I disagree with that decision by the way). The fiscal conservatives have had plenty of time to make changes to, or eliminate ObamaCare and haven't been able to. While I agree with the conservative stance on ObamaCare I also think the Republicans were basically throwing a temper tantrum here. I think they need to get some work done on small changes that might really happen instead of these big impossible tasks to make headlines. The government has grown unwieldy over the last century. We're not going to shrink it to a proper size in one election cycle.
Look for a reason to smile you jaded #*^ *(%$
It helps the economy. Walmart and other businesses were forcing their under paid workers to go on public assistance to get medical. Now private companies won't have to pay.
Obama care( the 80/20) rule has forced insurance companies to give back 2 Billon dollars to the consumers in California. I received money back as well as some firends. who are self-insured.
Obamacare law has passed. Attempting now to defund a passed law was a failed exercise by the right-wing tea party. Moderate Republicans also called the tea party,"loony", "crazy".
The Tea Party almost undermined the US dollar and any idiot who thinks that is a good idea needs to jump in front of a train.
...that it cost 24 billion to put up a bunch of paper signs, orange cones, and flimsy barricades.
Hundreds of thousands of federal workers bore the economic brunt of the shutdown
This should read, 100's of thousands of federal workers, got an extra 16 day paid vacation this year.
Hardly what I would call "bearing the economic brunt" of anything.
Or, ya know, "hundreds of thousands of federal workers had to choose between predatory payday loans or defaulting on their mortgages while waiting to get paid and sitting at home every day waiting to find out if they can go back to work". Not quite the same thing as a vacation when you a.) didn't get your last paycheck, and b.) don't know when you have to go back to work.
That was the lowball estimate. The latest research I've seen is that Obamacare will cost the economy $500 trillion dollars over the next 5 years, will put about 467 million people out of work, and will require mandatory forced sterilizations of anyone who voted Republican or even *thought* about it.
How much does ObamaCare cost the economy?
Let's also include all the folks who go to the ER for "free" health care; which is ultimately passed on to insured patients.
Let's also consider the folks who have "pre-existing" conditions who can't get health care. They don't go off and just die. They get medical care - for free (there are quite a few docs who have a very BIG hearts and help folks who are TRULY in need as well as non-profit hospitals who must give SOME free care) .
Al those costs must be made up. So what do they do? Hire creative cost accountants who will bury it in other costs and bills. Perfectly compliant with FASB and IRS rules concerning non-profits and charities.
tl:dr: regardless of what you think or hear, we all pay one way or another for sick people - lost productivity, higher fees at the doc's office or hospital's, higher insurance fees, etc....
All "Obama Care" does is put more of it in our faces - and yes, hides some by taxing employers.
Whatever. I'm not going to argue this - and if you ask a 100 doctors, you'll get 60% of the opinions on either side (it's the joke).
We have to ask ourselves, do we want to be a culture of "Alpha Humans" and be stressed out about life's necessities or do we want to be "Beta Humans" and work together so that all of us have a decent life.
I'm all for letting the folks who nothing better to live for than striving to accumulate wealth for the sake of accumulating money, but let's not let their personality disorder affect us all.
In my country, 20% of my income goes to health care, and everyone finds it normal.
It's the Americans that are weird.
The shutdown was for nothing more than 'branding' of their party.
That's not governance in any way shape or form...
Any GOP congressman who voted for the shutdown should be arrested.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Actually you can blame Joe Boehner for following the "Hastert Rule" and not allowing the budget bill to come up for a vote even though there was enough support for it to pass in the first place.
Partisan politics aside, you can't rule your house in an undemocratic manner and expect people to take you seriously when you blame the other party for all the trouble.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Actually they have been paying way more than us, well at least the people who where paying their insurance/hospitalbills.
It's bullshit that this is a -1. This is a legitimate question. When people with no healthcare wait until they need emergency services and then can't pay it that cost is picked up by all of us. If those people can get healthcare before it gets so bad for expensive ER visits it saves EVERYONE money.
If the American position is truly "let them die and get it over with", then America as a society is pretty much fucked and deserves what they get.
But don't go around the world pretending like you're the defenders of human rights and liberties. The rest of the world doesn't buy into your myths about yourselves.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Free market health care is NOT the most economically efficient.
A free market only functions when both parties have approximately equal negotiating power, are fully informed and not under threat.
By its nature, healthcare decisions are almost always made under threat of a cost to ones health or life, and since the alternative is to die, the victim...patient has no negotiating power.
Only the emergency part, no ongoing care. Nothing preventative ... just enough to say you occasionally provide some medical care.
Or, you know, you invest in preventative medicine so it doesn't come down to "sorry, you're terminal, we don't care". So instead of waiting to force people to go for meager emergency care, actually work to have a healthy population like the rest of the civilized world tries to do. Because then those people might actually be working and contributing to your economy instead of waiting to die.
No, this is why I'm glad I don't live in America, where if you're rich you can have anything you want, and if you're poor you're 'surplus population'.
The rest of the world looks at the US stance on this and shakes their heads. But, hey, if America wants to be known as heartless bastards where life is cheap, that's your choice.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I've got some friends who work for the Fed and they loved the shutdown because they a) didn't have to go to work, b) weren't using up vacation days and c) were guaranteed backpay for the days the gov't was shutdown.
Nothing like a paid vacation.
How much does ObamaCare cost the economy?
An extra $24B now, thanks to those incompetent assholes in Washington.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
In my country, 20% of my income goes to health care, and everyone finds it normal.
It's the Americans that are weird.
17.9% of American GDP goes on health care, or an average $7,960 per person per year
Compare to Canada, which is 11.4% and $4,314 per person per year
Lost productivity? Those are non essential people, there was no productivity lost in reality. Are you going to make up something about how they were spinning gold or some such to claim that "no really they are very productive people"? Don't get me wrong, I'm sure every one of those people do the best they can at their jobs, so I don't mean that as a personal insult to them. My claim is that those people are non essential people. They are not required for defending our borders from a massive invasion, they are not required to judge legal matters, they are not required to mitigate our laughable trade imbalance, and they are not required for other members of society to perform their daily activities.
There is of course a red herring where you could claim that a service industry that relies on that many Government workers suffered. It's a false argument of course, because if we took away those non-essential jobs and returned the tax money to those of us that pay, that service industry would make the same amount of money.
Now to the other point you made in "Considering that we have to pay 800,000 people for time they didn't (couldn't) work", this is another line of crap from politicians. We don't "have" to pay them! This was a politician's decision to GIVE them money. Many of them are going to get Unemployment in addition to getting PTO. We didn't have to give them anything, but a politician chose to give them YOUR TAX MONEY! Makes you feel good don't it?
I don't think you understand the difference between non-essential and non-productive. For instance, the FDA was considered non-essential because the country could still function for a while without food inspection (or so they thought, a few thousand people who recently got salmonella might disagree if they could get away from the toilet long enough to post). Systems might need to be upgraded -- anyone working on improvements to existing infrastructure would be considered non-essential. As for the "paid time off" argument.. Well, they didn't exactly ask for this time off, did they? If you were working at a private employer and they said "we can't pay you, and you can go home, but we promise to pay you back at some indeterminate time in the future", would you consider that a paid vacation? I wouldn't. I would consider that time to look for a better employer. I was a federal employee for 3 years, but I left 6 months ago for the private sector because the benefits, pay, and stability of a federal job were terrible. I'll say that again, the benefits, pay, and stability of a federal job is significantly worse than in the private sector.
Complain all you want about government employees, but at the end of the day most of them bust their ass for people like yourself who demand that they all be fired.
Many Americans pay a comparable amount, but don't realize it because the full costs of health insurance are hidden. Employers pay a big portion of the health-insurance premium. If you combine the premiums, the portion of premiums that employers pay (~80% in my case), out-of-pocket costs like deductibles, plus the Medicare tax, it adds up to more than 20% of my gross income.
I personally think it is crazy to have employers responsible for their employees' health plans, but that's the way we do things here and no one is seriously talking about changing it.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
You have a very odd definition of "minor". Caring for injured veterans for the rest of their lives will cost most of a trillion dollars.
FY2003 Supplemental: Operation Iraqi Freedom: Passed April 2003; Total $78.5 billion, $54.4 billion Iraq War
FY2004 Supplemental: Iraq and Afghanistan Ongoing Operations/Reconstruction: Passed November 2003; Total $87.5 billion, $70.6 billion Iraq War
FY2004 DoD Budget Amendment: $25 billion Emergency Reserve Fund (Iraq Freedom Fund): Passed July 2004, Total $25 billion, $21.5 billion (estimated) Iraq War
FY2005 Emergency Supplemental: Operations in the War on Terror; Activities in Afghanistan; Tsunami Relief: Passed April 2005, Total $82 billion, $58 billion (estimated) Iraq War
FY2006 Emergency Supplemental: Operations Global War on Terror; Activities in Iraq & Afghanistan: Passed February 2006, Total $72.4 billion, $60 billion (estimated) Iraq War
FY2007 Emergency Supplemental (proposed) $100 billion
FY2008 Bush administration has proposed around $190 billion for the Iraq War and Afghanistan[6]
FY2009 Obama administration has proposed around $130 billion in additional funding for the Iraq War and Afghanistan.[7]
FY2010 Obama administration proposes around $159.3 billion for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.[8]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War
Society is a socialist idea. Nomads or go home.
UPS only dropped coverage on employee spouses who had insurance through their own employer. Any who didn't are still covered by UPS. What is wrong with that?
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
A great and historic statement and still true, in your mom's basement or your SoCal estate, you don't live on your own.
Evidence from countries with a functioning public health care shows that compared to the present US system costs can be dramatically reduced.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
And I am not sure that finding out you have high blood pressure, really does much in the long run except maybe prevent you from dying of a heart attack earlier.
Clearly that's something nobody should care about, I mean what... death? Peh! Hardly an inconvenience.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I'll compare apples to apples.
http://www.cbo.gov/latest/National-Security/Iraq-and-Afghanistan
http://www.cbo.gov/publication/44176
It should be noted that the cost for the wars contain 12 years of appropriations and are actual, while the costs for the ACA contain 10 years of projections.
UPS dropping spouses from coverage due to the ACA: http://www.businessinsider.com/ups-dropping-spouses-health-coverage-2013-8 [businessinsider.com] (to name just one of many such outcomes).
"UPS has decided, as a result of increased costs and provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), to stop covering employee's spouses who can get coverage from their own employer..."
Why do you see that as a problem? It only makes to me that they would want to quit carrying burdens that other employers should be shouldering.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Raising and educating people costs a lot of money. It's a loss to the economy and country as a whole if someone drops dead at age 50 from a preventable illness. That's at least 15 years of lost tax revenue and use of the education, not to mention possible passing on of that expertise to future generations.
IMHO Life Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness is a lot harder without healthcare. The well-being of citizens should be one of the primary goals of governance, and as such shouldn't be profited upon by corporations.
Somehow Americans have been led to believe that they're the caretakers of world and that they represent democracy and all that is just worldwide, but the truth is, everywhere their army goes, it's rejected and is doing more harm than anything else, because people do fine on their own with their own way of living.
All the world has been asking is for the US to leave the rest of the world on its own.
Had a bone marrow transplant last year. I'm still being treated for same. So far, insurance has paid everything without a quibble, and my total out-of-pocket has been a few thousand dollars.
Note that this followed several bouts of chemotherapy that were also paid without a quibble.
No, my insurance is not a "cadillac plan", it's the middle-of-the-road plan offered by my employer.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
funny I was making $33k a year and health care was costing me $6k annually. with a pretty much guaranteed 10% increase annually.
I don't know why anti ACA (Obamcare branding is a product of the conservative media) people think the health care industry is okay when they boost rate 10% annually and have done so for at least 15 years. (the lowest increase I have received was 7%, the highest was 15%)
And that was crappy health insurance with a $2000 deductible before it would cover ANYTHING.
50 million people in the USA couldn't afford any healthcare period. how is the "greatest nation" fail to take care of it's own.
I don't even like the ACA. I personally think most employers should get out of the health care and retirement system altogether. My boss doesn't have to sponsor my Auto insurance. Why do they have to sponsor my health insurance?
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
The fact that you have the opportunity to succeed beyond your wildest dreams or crash and burn because you can't compete.
You're so right. There are no entrepreneurs in Canada, Britain, Germany, Japan or France. Heck, look at Korea - Samsung, Daewoo and LG are definitely run by socialist pussies.
Because they have a vested interest in you staying healthy. That is not infecting other workers and being as productive as possible. It makes financial sense to sponsor better and faster access to health care because losses from having worker not have health care of have access to health care gated by long queues would cause more losses.
Many EU countries have similar system, where you have a state system, and employer can sponsor their workers to get into private clinic that specializes in work place related sickness only as opposed to general practitioner who handles everything (including everything else for said worker).
Those people you call parasitic thrash are trying to do the best they can do in their situation. The same YOU would be doing if you were ever to wind up in their situation.
The problem is not the fairly small amount of economic refugees taking bits off of the bottom of the economy, it's the established upper 1% that are milking the sheeple for all they have that are the problem. They're the parasites; the economic refugees usually take on the jobs you probably feel above doing.
Looks like they've done a good job convincing you that the problem is caused by the 'parasitic thrash'. You would have been a great asset to the NSDAP some 70 years ago. Now pick up that can citizen, get in line and show me your papers.
Nihil in publicum sputa.
My boss doesn't have to sponsor my Auto insurance. Why do they have to sponsor my health insurance?
Because wages were frozen during WWII so companies added insurance in place of higher wages. And then later, the conservatives used the widespread existence of employer-provided health care as an excuse for why we didn't need a national program, when the rest of the world was getting modernized enough to have national programs. It was touted as a better, more American way to do it. Years later where we get less care for the same money, with hugely increased paperwork and overhead, we can simply measure if it was better or not.
It was never an "American way," though, it was just an American accident of history that we got stuck with because of partisan BS.