Shurrup – January 2019
You say: “Shut Down”
I say: “Shurrup”
Shurrup is slang for Shut Up. A nice shut up, as in “no way” or “you’re kidding, right”? It is a term to describe surprise or disbelief.
That is exactly how I feel about the current government shut down, Shurrup!
Shut Up, you have got to be kidding me. Did anyone actually think this through?
Look at this from the perspective of 800,000 workers who are not getting paid. It doesn’t matter that they will be paid at some point in the future. Right now , if I am one of those workers, my paycheck is being used as blackmail.
Many American workers regardless of their employer ( Federal Government or private sector) live paycheck to paycheck. Estimates vary from 50% to 70% of our working population.
There is no cushion of savings. The shutdown has crossed the 30-day mark. Going for a month without a paycheck can be devastating and destructive.
The rent is due, the mortgage is due, electricity bills are due, gas for the car, healthcare insurance premiums. All it takes is a month of unpaid bills to put workers in a precarious position.
Banks are unforgiving, landlords are unforgiving, no gas for the car? Good luck getting around to look for another job. Can’t pay for your healthcare? Stay healthy in January!
Live somewhere cold and can’t afford the heating bill? Layers.
There is an implicit contract between labor and management. When you work your employer agrees to pay you. Unless they are going out of business. Is the Federal Government going out of business? That’s a rhetorical question.
And why are workers forced to accept payment in the future? For a wall. A wall. Shurrup!
The economic impact of policies, if you can call a shutdown a policy, is that they take time to work. Economic policy decisions made today will appear in unforeseen ways.
I never thought about TSA workers calling in sick, jamming up already long security lines at airports.
I didn’t think about all the trash that is collecting in our national parks. Hey environmentalists do you have an army of volunteers we could use?
The total irony of the situation?
54,000 Customs and Border Protection agents are expected to continue to work without pay. Really ? Says who?
Don’t we need Customs and Border Agents at the border? Where the, you know, the wall is supposed to be?
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One of the insidious aspects of a shutdown is of course a decline in spending. Spending by consumers starts to fall when they are not paid.
Wages equal spending. No wages equal no spending. When spending slows, growth in the economy slows.
When growth in the economy slows it takes months, sometimes years to rev it up again.
The government has been shut down for over a month and we can start to see the impact in the data. It’s not good.
Who benefits? Who wins in this war over a wall?
If we do build a wall, who is going to build it?
The perfect example of great wall building is the Great Wall of China. I pulled this partial description of the purpose for the Great Wall from Wikipedia:
Apart from defense, other purposes of the Great Wall have included border controls, allowing the imposition of duties on goods transported along the Silk Road, regulation or encouragement of trade and the control of immigration and emigration. Furthermore, the defensive characteristics of the Great Wall were enhanced by the construction of watch towers, troop barracks, garrison stations, signaling capabilities through the means of smoke or fire, and the fact that the path of the Great Wall also served as a transportation corridor.* Wikipedia Great Wall of China
The Great Wall of China is 13,000 miles long. We only need 2,000 miles!
This is a great opportunity to shore up our relations with China. The Chinese economy is slowing. In China this means millions of people out of work. Some estimates of unemployment in China top 300 million. The population of the US is 450 million.
So here is the trade: We offer the Chinese government the opportunity to let their citizens come to the US to work. Open door policy.
That would help the Chinese government and it would help us. Of course, they are coming here to work on building the second Great Wall of China. They have thousands of years of experience. That is a fact.
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