Because if they REALLY shut down the government, it would have been a historic educational experience for the American people, an opportunity to understand at last what government actually does.
The thing is, when government works right, it is invisible. The services it provides are SO basic that we assume their existence and forget that they are provided by government. These services are like the ground beneath our feet. We don't wake up every day and say, "Oh, good, there's ground beneath our feet!" We assume it.
I think it might be very healthy for us to actually have a day, or week, without government--any government at all. I hesitate to say this in some ways, because if this really happened, a lot of people would die; in some ways I am proposing a human sacrifice on the altar of citizenship.
Let's start with the "essential" services, that were allowed to be maintained this time around. People continued to read the satellite data and weather balloon data, compute it, interpret it, and publish weather forecasts.
If they stopped producing weather forecasts, of course, unanticipated blizzards, tornadoes, hurricanes, and flash floods would kill people who have had no advance warning to seek shelter. Storms and downdrafts would take down aircraft.
Except, of course, the aircraft would not be flying, or would be flying blind, because the air traffic controllers would not be working. Nor would the Coast Guard, the dam operators or the lock operators.
Traffic on inland rivers would cease (costing millions of dollars), and the people in Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico who want so badly to be freed from government regulation, would get their wish--along with no water at all. Too bad.
And when the disasters came, nationally funded trauma centers, and emergency rooms funded by Medicaid money would not be working. No helicopter rescue units, no paramedics, no 24 hour surgeons and nurses to patch people up. The Federal Emergency Management Administration (which has functioned brilliantly during Clinton's presidency--and I speak to you from a town which was under the Mississippi River two years ago) would not swing into action to provide emergency shelter, food, clothing, first aid. The National Guard would not be available to maintain order and prevent looting.
The VA hospitals would all close down, of course. " Sorry about that liver transplant you were in the middle of, old man, but we're closing."
The guards and cooks at federal prisons would stop working, so we'd probably have some prison riots. Pity, because neither the National Guard or the military would be available to put the riots down. And the FBI wouldn't be available to chase down any of the violent prisoners who might escape.
Of course, if the military isn't working, nobody is monitoring that fancy radar setup to detect incoming missiles. Aren't we all glad the cold war is over?
And if there were no border guards at all, we could expect a whole lot of fresh immigrants. And with the FBI and Coast Guard off duty, we could count on large shipments of cocaine and heroin.
Of course, the government would not be mailing out checks, either. Do you have any idea how many people depend on checks from the government to survive? We're not just talking about social security checks for little old ladies, either. We're talking about contractors waiting to be paid, hospitals waiting for Medicare and Medicaid money. We're talking about student loans, and federal mortgage loans and grant money. (My university would lose its campus-wide information system, which is funded by a government grant.) Civil servants would get no paychecks, and federal retirees would get no pensions. And when people didn't get the money from the government, they couldn't pay their bills, so the effect would ripple throughout the economy.
And that's just basic health and public safety and economic infrastructure. There's also the basic information infrastructure. Nobody would be collecting or publishing the basic data we rely on for virtually all our decision-making. Those half-hour business programs on all the networks would have nothing to talk about, because there would be no reports on GDP, balance of trade, quarterly earnings, housing starts, consumer price index, consumer debt, and so on.
The information infrastructure also includes government research. All we know about trauma treatment, we learned from military field medicine. Almost everything we know about cancer and AIDS we learned from government-sponsored research. Much of what we know about civil engineering depended on government research.
Then there's the whole regulatory apparatus. Nobody would be there monitoring our water. The meat inspectors would have the day or week or month off. The FAA wouldn't be checking to make sure pilots have completed their required training. The NTSB wouldn't be available to figure out why an airplane crashed. The FDA wouldn't be available to notice that a new drug's side effects include seizures, coma, death, or deformed infants. The CDC wouldn't be available to notice epidemics in the making (from unmonitored water or meat?).
You see, even the "nonessential" personnel, whose absence might not be noticed for a day or two, are still performing, on a routine basis, all sorts of tasks which we don't know about or care about until they stop being done at all. At which point, uninspected, unrepaired bridges collapse, and uninspected, unsafe planes fall out of the sky.
So, yes, in the long run, it might be a healthy thing to REALLY shut down the government. (Including not paying the salaries of Newt and the gang.) Then maybe we could have the discussion some of us optimists thought we were going to get when these twits were elected--a discussion about what government does, and what it should continue to do.
And those that die in the process would have the comfort of knowing that it was for a good cause.
Previous Columns: Debut, Week 2, Hard Copy, Word Child, Every Other Inch A Lady, Naming of Books, Progress, maybe (sort of...), All Reasons Great & Small, On achieving perfect copy, OJ (On Justice), Waiting for Webster's, What Genes Have Wrought, Light Out, Staying on the Map, Don't just stand there..., Remotely Funny
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