The GOP’s Shutdown Tab: One Billion Dollars and Counting
The GOP’s Shutdown Tab: One Billion Dollars and Counting
Richard Eskow
Forty million dollars an hour. A third of a billion every day. $1.6 billion every week. That’s a conservative estimate of the money Republicans are wasting by keeping the federal government closed down. And if pundits like Sean Hannity have their way, they’ll run up a much larger tab before this is all over.
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Why? ”We’re not going to be disrespected,” said one Republican House member. “We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”
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As Think Progress and others have noted, the human costs of the shutdown will be felt immediately. The Small Business Administration has stopped issuing loans, directly hurting the kinds of businesses that create jobs. The National Institutes of Health has stopped accepting patients for experimental treatment (including terminally ill children), while other health cuts are affecting hospital care and physicians in medical school. Disaster relief in Colorado has come to a halt.
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Re the numbers: Loss estimates are based on the income of furloughed Federal employees, which has been estimated at one “basis point” of the U.S. gross domestic product (one 100th of one percent) per week. Using 2012 numbers from the International Monetary Fund, that comes to $1,623,774,600.
That means the shutdown’s costing us $324,754,920 per day, based on a five-day work week. The cost per hour, based on an eight-hour work day, is therefore $40,954,365. A month’s losses are calculated by multiplying the weekly figure by 4.3, the number of weeks in an average month.
http://ourfuture.org/20131003/the-gops-shutdown-tab-one-billion-dollars-and-counting
