but it is SO many more - probably you as well
This is the number of people, that this morning, were informed that certain member of Congress couldn’t be bothered to move past their ideology to do their jobs and fund the federal government. If it were me or you – we’d be fired. But it is not just these 800,000 people who were impacted today by these elected officials choices – it is SO many more.
First, if we make a general assumption that on average, these800,00 people have one additional person in their family that depends on their wages (some will have none, some might have 7 – I’m ball parking here), we are at 1.6 million people directly impacted by this. Add to this all of the contractors that also work directly from the government, who also didn’t come to work today. Add to all of the people who lost money today, whether it was through Veteran’s benefits, WIC, or whatever other programs they real on to survive. Additionally, all of the other contractors who build stuff, ship stuff, and think stuff up for the federal government whose contracts are not going to be processed today or tomorrow because of this.
Now you need to add to that all of the other people who will be “indirectly” impacted by this huge decline in incomes. You know the people like the grocery stores, the shopping mall employees, restaurants, and the rest of the support industries who just saw the amount of money people can afford to spend decline because all of those people above are not sure how they are going to pay the bills and just stopped spending. If this goes on for too long, some of those people are also going to lose jobs.
Additionally, there are also all of the people that are being impacted by the drop in the value of their 401K from the reaction of stock market. The people whose cases won’t be processed for them to start getting help. There are the kids who education will be impacted both because of the decline in funding (because this is also costing us BILLIONS of dollars in revenue) as well as their learning experiences from the shutdown of parks, learning centers, museums, etc. The food pantry who won’t get money to feed the people that depend on them because there was not money sent to buy food.
So it is SO many more than just those not going to work today…it is probably YOU as well.