Shutdown Countdown

A year from now would a GOP-controlled Congress threaten to shut down the government like it did at the end of 1995?  Brian Beutler plays out the scenario to show that the GOP would again alsmost certainly come out on the losing side.

The first, and most immediate effect of a shutdown is furloughs -- hundreds of thousands of workers sent home without pay. That has ripple effects across the country.

Shalala ran down the list of functions that would be stopped.

"Social Security checks, Medicare reimbursements...welfare checks to the state, Medicaid checks to the state."

"HHS was given a lot of money for implementing the new health care plan, and it would be hard to do without the money," she added. Together, that one appropriation accounts for a huge amount of the federal budget, acording to Shalala. "[we're talking] almost half of the budget of the federal government. That's like close down the government."

During the 1995-1996 shutdown, according to CRS, "[n]New patients were not accepted into clinical research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical Center; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ceased disease surveillance (information about the spread of diseases, such as AIDS and flu, were unavailable); hotline calls to NIH concerning diseases were not answered; and toxic waste clean-up work at 609 sites stopped, resulting in 2,400 "Superfund" workers being sent home."

To make matters worse, the economy today is in much worse shape than it was in 15 years ago. The impact of employees out of work, and beneficiaries without checks, will hit the country much harder in the next year than it did under President Clinton. "It would stop all new enrollees into the [Social Security] system," Shalala said.

"It bounces through: it's grocery stores, it's farms," she said -- and the list goes on. "It bounces through when people don't have money at that scale."

Why, the GOP would have to be completely crazy to allow this to happen, right?

...Oh, wait.

Hey, maybe there will be consequences of allowing the GOP back in charge in 2010.