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Comment by nopriorarrests | Hacker News Reader

>Damage that will take years to recover from if they ever do.

Can you please elaborate? From my limited knowledge, furloughed workers haven't got a paycheck (yet) for a one month. Is this kind of damage they will be recovering from for years?

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Well something like 50% of the country (I don't have the actual stats in front of me but I recall its more than half) lives paycheck to paycheck and has no savings. I remember what that was like before I got lucky enough to find a career in software development. Back then $100 was at TON of money (honestly I still think of it that way but I digress) and missing a paycheck would have been a disaster. One time my car broke down in the desert for instance and I had to leave it there for months so I could save up enough money to get it towed and repaired. It was an unexpected expense of a few hundred dollars but I remember breaking down in tears about it because I knew how much of a blow to my bottom line it was. I nearly lost my job because I had no way to get there, I had to pay parking fines for my stranded vehicle, I had to borrow money with no real way of paying it back. It was an unmitigated disaster that took me a long time to recover from. My point being, a lot of people live their days on a financial tight rope and an unexpected expense like missing a paycheck starts a cycle of debt that gets harder and harder to recover from. These furloughed workers deserve better.

In the 2013 Shutdown, a number of government experiments (ie: Flu Experiments) were destroyed due to neglect from the shutdown. Which ended up having the worst Flu Vaccination success rate in the last 10 years or something (like a stupid low 30%).

Etc. etc. Government projects are stopped during shutdowns. It literally takes years to recover from a shutdown (another year or two before Flu Vaccination experiments were back up and running at full potential)

OK, I get that some projects will have to restart from scratch, but this is not like furloughed workers have "some real damage inflicted upon them".

It's just work, and their lives are more or less unaffected (with the exception of a single - so far - paycheck being delayed).

A lot of people live paycheck to paycheck. To them, a single lost paycheck can mean not paying rent on time or not eating.

Acting like this is not causing real damage is highly disingenuous.

Our lab has been collecting an ecological time series every January for 35 years. Continuity is critical for monitoring change and the health of the population (under hunting, so there's an economic incentive). Now we have a permanent, unfillable gap. There are many such examples.

I think your hugely underestimating the impact of a single paycheck. Some huge percentage of American's live paycheck to paycheck (78% according to career builder http://press.careerbuilder.com/2017-08-24-Living-Paycheck-to...).

Missing that paycheck means potentially missing rent (which could get you evicted), having to decide between keeping the lights on or buying food. The more paychecks people miss the worse this is going to get for some people.

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