[Discussion] Dealing with Shutdown Anxiety

Support those affected by the shutdown, and share your shutdown stories. There should be no scapegoating of Federal employees.

H.P. Lovesauce wrote:

What's a TRACON? I feel like a dummy.

Sorry, I forget pretty much no one has any reason to know the term. Like so much else in aviation it's an acronym. Sort of. It stands for Terminal Radar Approach CONtroll. In the US there are three types of air traffic facilities, Towers, TRACONs, and Centers. Towers get you on and off the ground (And to and from the runway), TRACONs sequence the people coming in for Tower and the people going out for Center (And deal with through traffic), and the Centers handle the high altitude traffic that's on it's way to it's destination (If you're above 18000 feet you're talking to a Center).

Most TRACON's are attached to an airport, and controllers will often be certified to work both and rotate between them. Lower NY is one of them places that are either so busy, or have so many airports close to each other that we have one consolidated TRACON for all the airports in a separate building located nowhere near an airport.

My county is offering a workshop next week to turn us into substitute teachers. Not sure it's going to help unless this goes way long or they waive certain things for certification, but the gesture is nice. It'll be tight next month but my wife will get paid (DoD) and I should get my military retirement. So the mortgage gets paid and we will eat :). Honestly I'm not concerned for my family as I am those junior personnel who live in the city or new college graduates etc... who don't have a lot of cushion. I'm mostly concerned about the young Coast Guard enlisted personnel with families who may be deployed etc... It's going to take us months in certain sectors to repair the damage across the government.

Yonder wrote:

Keep social security checks moving, promise that your tax return will be ready for you, and then spin spin spin on everything else.

My understanding is that social security won't ever be directly affected by this because it gets its funding automatically, rather than needing annual appropriations. (Indirectly, it might get affects by all of the other stuff of course.)

The IRS, on the other hand, is being forced to work without pay, so that'll end well.

I'm not directly affected, but I know people who are affected by things like NSF funding, and the grant process has been significantly impacted by the shutdown.

I'm very curious which way this is going to fall. Could be "screw it, I'm not going to work hard for no pay" or could be "F*ck all y'all, you get a penny wrong and we're gonna audit your ass". Of course, much depends on whether they have the personnel and budget to do those audits even when they're fully operational.

qaraq wrote:

I'm very curious which way this is going to fall. Could be "screw it, I'm not going to work hard for no pay" or could be "F*ck all y'all, you get a penny wrong and we're gonna audit your ass". Of course, much depends on whether they have the personnel and budget to do those audits even when they're fully operational

Every Republican who doesn't vote to re-open the government gets aggressively audited. Then their family members, business associates, and major campaign donors get audited. Then anyone they're friends with on social media gets audited.

Has this been shared yet? If not, it's a pretty disturbing op-ed from a senior Trump official that the shutdown is being specifically designed to "smoke out" bad federal workers and gut the government.

Yes, I recognize it's the Daily Caller. But in this case I could actually see it being real since that's the sort of website the Trump administration would be candid with.

Never paying the federal workers again will certainly cause the best 15% to stay while the 80% that are useless leave to find other jobs. The fate of the other 5% is an exercise left to the reader.

Yonder wrote:

Never paying the federal workers again will certainly cause the best 15% to stay while the 80% that are useless leave to find other jobs. The fate of the other 5% is an exercise left to the reader.

That was sarcasm, right? The best, except for a small contingent of true patriots, always leave first in these scenarios.

qaraq wrote:

I'm very curious which way this is going to fall. Could be "screw it, I'm not going to work hard for no pay" or could be "F*ck all y'all, you get a penny wrong and we're gonna audit your ass". Of course, much depends on whether they have the personnel and budget to do those audits even when they're fully operational.

I think it's more likely to be the former than the latter, and if there are audits, they won't be coming right away. Congress has mandated that the IRS issue tax refunds by a particular day (I forget when, exactly) or pay interest. As a consequence, the IRS has to process more than a hundred million tax returns within weeks and push out refunds very quickly. They don't have the resources to do mass audits up front, so they have a process to check some basic information (Have you completed the tax return? Does your reported income and withholding match your W-2 and 1099s?). Almost uniformly, audits happen at the back end, although this rule could be different for some high-dollar tax returns.

Also, a lot of the workers who do the data processing work to process returns and issue refunds do not have the education or training of Revenue Agents (auditors), Revenue Officers (collection agents), or Special Agents (criminal investigators) -- not to disparage the data processing folk, but as a class they're not going to have the knowledge base to catch fraud. All of this actually makes the IRS pretty vulnerable to fraud during the tax filing season, and as long as the mandate is "get out the refunds and figure it out later," there's only so much that can be done to prevent it.

Yonder wrote:

Never paying the federal workers again will certainly cause the best 15% to stay while the 80% that are useless leave to find other jobs. The fate of the other 5% is an exercise left to the reader.

There's certainly dead weight in the government (as everywhere, I'm sure), but it's nowhere close to 80%. I hope this was sarcasm.

It was sarcasm, and those numbers were taken directly from the Op Ed that was seriously putting forward those ideas. The part about the 5% was a quip on the fact that the author's numbers didn't add up to 100%.

Ahh, got it. I didn't even click on the link.

Edit: I meant to put this in the other thread

LastSurprise wrote:
Yonder wrote:

Never paying the federal workers again will certainly cause the best 15% to stay while the 80% that are useless leave to find other jobs. The fate of the other 5% is an exercise left to the reader.

There's certainly dead weight in the government (as everywhere, I'm sure), but it's nowhere close to 80%. I hope this was sarcasm.

Oh this isn’t sarcasm. if the op-Ed is real, and I suspect it is, the Trump administration obviously views anyone who isn’t a loyalist as dead weight.

I admit I used to believe the government had a lot of dead weight due to what I saw in the military. It wasn’t till I got out that I realized the military is actually one of most bloated agencies.

Oh, I'm sure the Daily Caller article wasn't sarcasm. I meant I hoped it was sarcasm from Yonder. It was, and I shouldn't have doubted it, given Yonder's other posts in this thread. I think I'm just operating with a bit of barely-contained anger at this whole situation. Probably a good thing I didn't read the article.

No worries about the misread. The last couple years have basically seen the country repeatedly mining Poe's law to new depths, so it's not a surprise that you could think that. Some people obviously do, as the article showed. Sorry if the sarcasm upset you, know that you public servants have my heartfelt sympathy for the situation and respect for the work you do!

I feel for all of the government workers not being paid but the ones who are getting royally f*cked are contractors supporting the government. Fed employees will get paid retroactively. Contractors will not. Being furloughed as a contractor means you have to take vacation time or leave-without-pay.

LastSurprise wrote:
qaraq wrote:

I'm very curious which way this is going to fall. Could be "screw it, I'm not going to work hard for no pay" or could be "F*ck all y'all, you get a penny wrong and we're gonna audit your ass". Of course, much depends on whether they have the personnel and budget to do those audits even when they're fully operational.

I think it's more likely to be the former than the latter, and if there are audits, they won't be coming right away.

I was being facetious of course, but genuine thanks for the useful reply. I am bothered that the IRS's enforcement ability has been degraded year after year by Republican budgets. The same people who think it's only fair that disabled people prove they're working in order to get fifty bucks a week in groceries somehow find it tyrannical if the IRS questions whether you really donated a thousand bucks worth of used socks to Goodwill.

I am being a little bit too literal today!

And, you're welcome! This one was in my wheelhouse (I used to prosecute tax fraud, so it's a thing I know and care a lot about). And I definitely share your concerns about the IRS and Republican budgets.

LastSurprise wrote:

I am being a little bit too literal today!

And, you're welcome! This one was in my wheelhouse (I used to prosecute tax fraud, so it's a thing I know and care a lot about). And I definitely share your concerns about the IRS and Republican budgets.

I really wonder why people who are so, so concerned about wastefraudandabuse in every other program suddenly get so upset about making sure everyone pays their taxes correctly. You'd think people would be in favor of reducing their taxes by making sure that cheaters pay theirs.

Unless... could it be... just maybe... that they're a bunch of cheating weasels too? (Also, the fraud they're concerned about is, on reflection, theoretically committed by people who are, in a certain way, not reflective enough?)

A client was talking about the shutdown last night and he transitioned smoothly from criticizing Individual 1 to explaining how he hoped the shutdown lasts for months so that "those politicians know what it's like missing paychecks and being poor like the the rest of us." I don't know if it's a breakdown of media coverage or political education but he was shocked when I explained that it's mostly the working class federal employees who are being affected, and even if it affected politicians they're mostly all millionaires and could go all year without pay and barely notice.
The whole interaction made me depressed.

ruhk wrote:

I don't know if it's a breakdown of media coverage or political education but he was shocked when I explained that it's mostly the working class federal employees who are being affected, and even if it affected politicians they're mostly all millionaires and could go all year without pay and barely notice.

Yes and no. Does losing their salary substantially affect their income? Not really. Does losing some of their power to funnel federal money to their supporters affect their income? Absolutely. And perhaps more interestingly, it goes both ways - it's also possible that "taking a stand" could increase both political stature and income.

In other words, if you're a typical politician dedicated maintaining the flow of federal funds to your large individual and corporate supporters, a long shutdown is going to be bad for you. If you're someone who doesn't depend on that, it's probably going to be good for you - your supporters will value your moral stance.

I get to borrow $1500 from in laws next weekend. Feels great guys. Feels just f’In great.

I continue to remind myself and am attempting to truly believe it, that we are incredibly fortunate to have that and should just focus on that positive point until my wife is getting paid again.

I'm managing so far thanks to unemployment, but you did just remind me that my lender of last resort would usually be my father. The thing that got a laugh out of me is, him and my stepmother are both Air Traffic Controllers.

Everyone talks about the shutdown as being a panacea for libertarians and other fringe folk who hate welfare states but - as a welfare state, America is fundamentally rotten. It relies too much on private, corporate solutions to things that should be wholly the state’s purview. If the tea party radicals and kekistanis succeed in the plan that op-ed laid out, there’s a good chance a socialist government could actually fix things.

This is what I tell myself anyway.