Ed Elson (30:33)
Well, it's been a busy few weeks in the news Cycle. There's been a lot of talk about AI and the bubble concerns. We've had layoff concerns with AI. We've seen the rise of Mamdani. We've seen tariff drama. We've seen the China deal, the Epstein emails. A lot is happening. And if you were to just sort of go off of the headlines, I think you'd get the sense that this government shutdown that we've seen here is, yes, a big deal, but maybe not a huge deal. It's kind of important, but also just another news item. And that is the problem with the news cycle today, because actually, this shutdown is a huge deal. It is historic. And somehow everything else has distracted us away from its significance and also the impact it's had. And it's had a huge impact. Let's just go through the numbers. First off, the length. I mean, this shutdown lasted 43 days, the longest in the history of America by far. It was a full week longer than the previous record that was set in 2018, and two weeks longer than the one before that. And there have been very serious consequences. More than 700,000 federal employees went nearly 50 days without getting paid, without a paycheck. Another 700,000 were furloughed altogether. So that's almost one and a half million people who were directly affected by this. And that's just people who work for the government. You look at people outside of government who are directly affected, the number goes way up. It's tens of millions. 12% of Americans feed themselves through SNAP, the government's nutritional assistance program. So that's 40 million people who were likely struggling to feed themselves last month. By the way, 60% of those people are either elderly people or children. So these are the people that were affected by this. Then there's all the indirect consequences that we saw. The 6% of flights that were canceled because there just weren't enough air traffic controllers, all of the federal loan programs, the ones that finance small businesses and also finance mortgages, all of them went dark. All of the health data that tracks all of our most transmissible diseases, those got shut down, too. Multiple infrastructure projects, including ones that would help us close this energy gap we keep talking about with China, they were simply canceled. So most of us can't really see it. But the impacts of this event were actually enormous. And we can try to put a number on it. The current estimates say that the cost to the economy were nearly $100 billion. But even that is probably an understatement because the other problem we have here is we're not getting any proper data. We haven't seen the jobs report, we haven't seen the consumption data, we haven't seen the GDP data, we haven't seen any inflation data. Which, by the way, is why the White House is now publishing data from DoorDash, because they can't produce the data themselves. So quite frankly, we don't know the half of this. I mean, we know it was bad, but we don't know exactly how bad because we don't have the data to tell us. And that is why it is so important to just recognize the significance of this shutdown. Yes, lots of other stuff is happening, and yes, some of it is quite important, but for the most part, right now, the Zone is being flooded with shit. And it is all a distraction from what a disaster this really was. The least a nation should expect from its government, never mind the inefficiencies and the polarization, the corruption, never mind all that. The least we should expect is a government that is operational. And for 43 days, the longest period in history, this government couldn't even meet that standard. The world moves on. The economy continues to grind. The earth continues to turn. But let's be sure to remember this month of October for what it was, and that is it was one of the greatest government failures in history. And somehow the bar, which was already very low, that bar is now even lower. Okay, that's it for today. This episode was produced by Claire Miller, edited by Joel Patterson and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our associate producer is Alison Weiss. Our research team is Dan Shalon, Isabella Kinsel, Kristen o' Donoghue and Mia Silverio. And our technical director is Drew Burrows. Thanks for listening to Prof. G Markets from Prof. G Media. If you liked what you heard, give us a follow. I'm Ed Elson. Tune in tomorrow for our conversation with Professor Aswath de Modorin.