Sure, we can somewhat verify that 800,000 federal workers are going without pay, with roughly half being furloughed from work and the other WORKING WITHOUT PAY. UGH. www.cnbc.com/… We all know how horrible these folks’ experiences must be, because we are capable of empathy and we use our beliefs and values to guide us on how to treat other human beings.
But that number tells a lie, and it’s a lie that the GOP and the mainstream media want us to help them spread. It’s the same lie that the Treasury Department used when woefully underestimating the economic impact of the shutdown when selling it to lawmakers and the public.
The lie is an assumption that there are only 800k workers being hurt. But the true number is undoubtedly far over 1 million. And we need to stop letting Donnie Long Nose and his cronies spread yet another deceit without being challenged. Sen. Sherrod Brown was just making this point on Rachel Maddow right now about all the service employees impacted. Thank you, Senator.
Besides those wonderful 800k public servants, there are 2 big buckets of workers being excluded from the discussion:
- Federal contractors — whose burdens may be even worse, because many won’t get back pay for time off
- Local services that support both the 800k federal workers and the contractors
How do we come up with a better number? I can only make guesses and come up with ranges based on tons of assumptions and a relative lack of economics experience. So hopefully someone more knowledgeable than I can do some number crunching.
That being said, what the hell?
The easiest estimate we could make is to double that 800k number, and get 1.6 million people impacted. Why? Well, in the Forbes article linked above, they say the economic impact was “more than double” the original government estimates. So, why not use that same 2x metric to ballpark the number of people whose salaries were impacted by doubling 800k and maybe cutting that 1.6 back to 1.5 million just to be conservative? How about that? One and a half million is a nice round number, easy to use, and “1.5 million people impacted” is definitely defensible as a low-ball estimate.
Can we do something a little better? We can try. Let’s handle bullet point #1, the federal contractors. The Washington Post discussed some numbers last year that might help us here. There are about 5.3 million contractors and other services that are dependent on government funding, as compared to 2.1 million federal government employees for a ratio of basically 60/40 contractors to government employees. If 800k is the numerator in the equation of how many contractors are impacted, the total work force would be 2 million employees’ salaries impacted, with 1.2 million contractors.
Now, add to that, the knock-on services for those 2 million employees + contractors. We can guesstimate based on a local multiplier effect that each skilled job creates 3.5 additional local service jobs to get 7 million. That number might be a high if there is overlap between the contractors and service vendors, but let’s stick with it. Gotta make some assumptions.
So, add it all up, 800k direct government employees, 1.2 million contractors and 7 million is a grand total of 9 million jobs potentially impacted. Now, I don’t I believe that number of people are seeing an immediate hit to their salaries in some tangible way. Most obviously, 7 million is the very high end of the range as those services will have different budgets, diverse portfolios of clients, rainy day funds, etc.
What’s a fair way to modify that 7 million number? I honestly haven’t a clue, so I’d go super conservative and say only 10% per month of the shutdown. We’re beyond the 1 month mark, so to assume 10% of the services that cater to 2 million federal employees and contractors would be impacted as well really isn’t much of a stretch, and maybe one would argue it could be closer to 50% because again we just don’t know much about them. So we’re talking about 700k impacted on the low end and maybe 3.5 million on the high end.
That takes our more complicated estimates into a range of jobs impacted to be somewhere between 2.7 million on the low end up to 5.5 on the high end. Again, I’m cool with being a little conservative, so let’s round down to say that somewhere between 2.5 and 5 million government employees, contractors and related service jobs are being directly impacted by this shutdown.
Can we stop pretending that it’s only 800,000 people being impacted? It’s probably more than 2.5 million in my opinion, many of whom won’t get back pay when this pathetic shutdown finally ends. Let’s not erase them anymore.