Construction projects halt and nearly 4,000 workers furloughed in partial FAA shutdown

As anticipated, the Federal Aviation Administration's operating authority expired at midnight Friday and the agency partially shut down. While air traffic controllers are still on the job and air travel continues more or less normally, nearly 4,000 other FAA employees are currently furloughed without pay. Additionally, nearly 87,000 construction jobs are affected as FAA-funded airport construction projects are forced to shut down. This includes projects from $10,000 to tens of millions of dollars, scattered across the country.

All of which is probably fine with House Republicans, since the whole purpose of this exercise was to make things more difficult for workers, anyway. By trying to make union representation elections operate by undemocratic rules, they put people out of work instead—maybe that's a job well done in their eyes.

The FAA is also unable to collect taxes on airline tickets bought, depriving the government of $200 million a week in revenue. But the great little coda to this story is that consumers aren't seeing savings:

[I]nstead of passing along the savings, the airlines are pocketing the money while customers pay the same amount as before.

American, United, Continental, Delta, US Airways, Southwest, AirTran and JetBlue all raised fares, although details sometimes differed. Most of the increases were around 7.5 percent.

It's like the Republican dream: Not only is the government not collecting revenue, that same revenue is going straight to corporations, for no reason. Why would they ever agree to end this shutdown?