If you aren’t feeling the impact of the government shutdown, consider yourself lucky. You may be lucky enough to still be able to get up and go to work everyday, send your children to school or daycare and go about your life as you normally would. Many Americans aren’t that lucky and the shutdown has caused many problem in their lives.
Those who want to vacation and camp are unable to do so because the national parks have all been closed. Even if you had hoped to travel out of the country you may not be able to get your passport. Most passports will not be processed during the shutdown, unless they were expedited and already in the system. You also might want to think twice about flying because although air traffic controller are still on the job, federal inspectors have been furloughed.
If you were hoping to buy a home, start a small business or obtain a personal load, you will have to wait until the shutdown is over. At the start of the shutdown, Obama announced, “Federal loans for rural communities, small business owners, families buying a home will be frozen.”
Some of the people who are most effected by the government shutdown are federal employees. J. David Cox, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, has estimated furloughs will affect between 800,000 and 1 million employees.
If you still think you aren’t being impacted by the shutdown, consider this, although the The Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are still able to recall certain foods and drugs, many of the inspectors have been furloughed. That means there aren’t very many people inspecting the food, drinks and drugs you will be ingesting, making it much more likely for contaminated food to hit the market and disease outbreaks to occur. Many people will also go without their much needed medications during the shutdown.
After receiving letters from thousands of people who are having trouble during the shutdown, Obama read a few of them during his weekly radio address. After reading them he said, “These are just a few of the many heartbreaking letters I’ve gotten from them in the past couple weeks – including more than 30,000 over the past few days,” he said. “I know that Republicans in the House of Representatives are hearing the same kinds of stories.”
Even the president himself has had to cancel his planned trip to Asia next week so he can stay and deal with the standoff and ongoing crisis.
Image from Wikimedia Commons.