The Cost of the Shutdown or “If I Had Five Billion Dollars”
In a report about the economic effects of the government shutdown, Andrew Taylor makes several misleading statements, underestimating the losses at “just $3 billion” and dismissing them as “slight.”
In case you missed my letter to the editor letter to the editor in The Capital Gazette, here it is:
In his deceiving article, “Shutdown projected to cause $3B permanent hit to economy,” Associated Press reporter Andrew Taylor cherry-picks data from Monday’s Congressional Budget Office report in an apparent attempt to downplay the damage from the longest government shutdown in history (The Capital, Jan. 29).
The CBO estimates that the shutdown cost the U.S. economy $11 billion. While $8 billion may eventually be recovered through faster economic growth, the CBO states that the negative effects are “much more significant on individual businesses and workers” and that some “will never recoup that lost income.”
Adding these losses to the additional $2 billion in decreased tax revenues in fiscal year 2019 amounts to a total loss of $5 billion. $5 billion could probably pay for most of a border wall.
Or, according to the National Priorities Project, it could provide Medicaid for 1.4 million people, increase federal spending on energy efficiency and renewable energy by more than twofold, expand federal aid to public schools by 30 percent, double funding for substance use and mental health, fund the National Endowment for the Arts through 2051, double heating assistance for low-income households, resettle 11 times more refugees than we did in 2018, or increase funding for the Environmental Protection Agency by 60 percent.
Considering these lost opportunities, the economic losses caused by the government shutdown are not nearly as insignificant as Mr. Taylor would like us to believe.
SHELBY BELL
Millersville