The first government shutdown in 15 years made news a few days ago by not happening. Still, it’s worth reviewing what it would have been like if up to 800,000 government workers had had to leave their desks until further notice.
And it’s worth noting that there’s one group which, under current law, wouldn’t be hurting financially in the event of a shutdown, and that’s the very crew that causes the shutdown: Congress.
Would mail have been delivered? (Yes.) Would Social Security checks have gone out? (Yes.) Would national parks and institutions like the Smithsonian have been open? (No. In fact, the shutdown threat was particularly dismaying because it came just at the time when thousands of children were headed to Washington on school trips.) Would our combat troops have been paid? (Probably, but possibly not on time.)
Would there have been someone to process the documents of sixty-somethings who might have lost jobs and needed Social Security benefits? (No.) Someone to handle applications for passports—or for visas for foreign tourists, whose expected arrival at this season boosts local economies from the Empire State Building to the Golden Gate Bridge? (No.)
Bankruptcy courts would have remained open, but there would have been disruptions in the operations of other federal courts if the shutdown had lasted more than two weeks.
But members of Congress would have collected their paychecks whether Uncle Sam’s storefronts were open for business or locked and shuttered. When Congresspeople want to bring government operations to a grinding halt, they can do it at no cost to themselves. These days that’s just one more example of the way lawmakers whose actions make or break the rest of us are insulated from the effects of what they do (as they are in the case of their taxpayer-funded healthcare, to mention another irritant of the same kind).
Speaking of irritants, it’s an exasperating paradox of late years that the very people to whom “socialism” conjures up visions of downtrodden workers on collective farms and people being spirited off to Siberia don’t seem to understand the more matter-of-fact, everyday ways in which countries like the Soviet Union affronted the values of democracy and equality. One of those ways was the two-tiered system that gave government workers privileges denied ordinary working people: vacation homes, special shops inaccessible except to the nomenklatura, esoteric privileges such as travel abroad, and unpublicized input into the nation’s decision-making processes.
Year by year, as our income gap widens while a cadre of politicians and the rich cements its own power and security, we come closer to a two-tiered society in the U.S. Why don’t those of us who rail against socialism condemn the moneyed interests and so-called leaders who are already acting like the old apparatchiks?
What makes a two-tiered society dangerous whether it’s capitalist or communist is that leaders too far removed from the situation of ordinary people don’t govern well. That’s why the fact that Congresspeople can paralyze the government and feel no pain themselves is more than a mere annoyance. In February, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) filed a bill to keep Congresspeople from being paid during a shutdown that unanimously passed the Senate. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said he agreed with Boxer, but at press time the House bill hadn’t moved. Before the next time the country is held hostage to party politics, that law needs to pass, and begin to throw Congress out of its metaphorical gated community.
