In Lou Brancaccio’s Oct. 5 column “Of Madore, C-Tran & the Feds” on the shutdown, he comments that “so few of us feel it.” The people out of work feel it. People who rely on “non-essential” government services feel it. People whose retirement holdings lose value feel it.
Some of the pain will take time to manifest. Food poisoning (no inspections), corporate malfeasance, slower science take time to impact us. And then there’s the cost of retroactively paying for work not done during the shutdown.
Referencing the National Zoo’s “panda cam” as if that is typical of what the shutdown means is disingenuous and ignores the very real impacts to very real people. Some of them too poor to subscribe to a paper that writes off their pain so glibly. It also ignores the real impacts over time of things we have asked our government to do.
If you have specific government services you think we can eliminate, do the work to identify those, understand the impact, and be a bully pulpit to address them. But equating Head Start programs, enforcing laws, paying the cops who sprang into action during the scene in Washington, D.C., recently with a panda cam is irresponsible. Shame on you, Lou.
