Feral Gov't Shutdown ... is that a threat, or a promise?


Posted On: Friday - December 28th 2018 7:57PM MST
In Topics: 
  Humor  Liberty/Libertarianism  US Feral Government

What do we want, Government Shutdown!
When do we want it? We want it now,
and we'll get back to you later on the restart!


Imagine a permanent shutdown. It's easy if you try ♪♫♬ ...



It's nice to be in a position not to even care or hear about it, such as the Peak Stupidity blog finds itself, so we just learned about this latest US Feral Gov't shutdown. The Libertarian in all of us would indeed wish this were permanent, or at least a crash of the whole deal with a chance to do a complete re-boot. Could we just start with the same Constitution with the quick Amendment to the bill of rights - 10-A: We mean it this time?

I note, as I just dug up our "Wheww, Feral Gov't shutdown narrowly averted" post from about a year back, that it's the same crap with the most visible, touristy parts of the immense Feral Gov't being threatened as closed to the public vs. the other 99.9% of the budget (indeed, the National Park Service is allocated about 3 1/2 billion bucks, just under 1/1000th of the budget).



The Congresscritters threaten those living off of the other taxpayers, or just collecting their "due" in the SS Scam (see also Part 1) with not getting their transfer payments on time. Now that is a big chunk of the budget, but it it doesn't take much work on the gov't's part to actually send money from the taxpayers' account to a bunch of individuals. Nope, that's not what the Beltway Bandits are themselves worried about. They want to make sure they can keep their power to dole out the money to potential voters, such as those below, who've taken personal time off of their taxpayer-supported activities for their heartfelt requests, as seen here:



A friend had a good point a coupla' days back when he informed me of this latest shutdown promise, errr, I mean threat. The talk is all about the suspension of work by the non-essential US Gov't employees. Wait a minute, if they're non-essential, by definition, we don't need them, so

a) what's the problem?

and

b) they should all be terminated on the basis of non-essentiality.

How much can 800,000 pink slips cost? The returns will be phenomenal!



Let's see, that's 1,600 reams of hot pink light-weight paper ... with our government discount .... Really, let's just round this up to a million, for ease of back-of-envelope calculations, pick a number of $100,000 each average in salary, overhead, and bennies (when you count pension obligations, well, oh shit... let's not and say we did), and get $100,000,000,000 (one hundred billion bucks) to keep these people employed. It really doesn't sound like much compared to the $4,000,000,000,000 total expenditures - it's 2.5%. However, the transfer payments and the military (with it's own tremendous waste) are a much bigger chunk. Look here for the breakout by the green-eyeshade boys. You'll also notice that EVEN WITH the low, low interest rates being paid on Treasury bonds, interest alone is 6% of the budget, more than 2 X the support of a million employees!

It's not just the money in paying these people, it's the harm that they do to us all in doing their jobs. For the non-Affirmative-Action folks among us, I've always found that people DO want to feel that they are getting something useful done in their jobs. Therefore, there are lots of people at the lower levels that want to be productive in their work, even if that means screwing us harder. There are also the mid-level managers who want something to be proud of and will create programs that screw us not harder but in new creative ways.

What I'd suggested long ago, is that we find a way to let the US Gov't employees, first, as that old Hippocrates suggested, do no harm. We need to develop a program to take these 800,000 people out of the offices and into the pool halls. Can you tell that I thought of this pretty long ago? OK, it could be Mario Cart now for you youngsters ... OK, OK, Minecraft, but just something to keep these people busy for 8 hours a day. Sure, we'd have to spend extra on rolls of quarters, or power cards for Dave & Buster's, but the tremendous savings from being able to live freer lives would pay off immediately, just in reductions in pharmaceutical needs alone!

If only good ole' Silent Cal had implemented
the Peak Stupidity "Offices-to-Pool-Hall-Pipeline" plan back in his day!



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