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Sunday, January 13, 2019

The Human Toll Of The Government Shut Down

I am doing some careful thinking on the human cost of this record-breaking government shutdown. Some 800,000 Federal workers have been with pay for over three weeks. If we assume that each household has three people (domestic partners, wives, kids, and parents) we have over 2,400,000 people affected.

Next comes the government contractors as follows:

Mr. Light estimates there are 4.1 million federal contractors and grant recipients, not all of whom have been affected by the shutdown. The majority — about 2.8 million — are in service jobs, from health aides to computer programmers.

Let us assume the 25% are affected or roughly one million workers. They too have families and dependents. This brings this total to three million additional people.

It is hard to quantify and identify all the small businesses that provide services to the government employees affected by the shutdown. I would guess 300,000 workers. applying the same formula, we have 900,000 people in this category suffering without pay.

I come up with a total of 6,300,000 people suffering without checks.

Politicians doing battle, please think about all the suffering out there.

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