Government Shutdown Averted!

I didn't look at the news much this weekend. As I matter of fact, I pretty much ignored outside events from Thursday afternoon until Sunday night. So I jumped directly from headlines about an imminent government shutdown to headlines that the crisis had been temporarily averted. The Republicans and Democrats had come up with a compromise to keep the Federal government running, at least on a short term basis. My thought was "Crisis? What crisis?" In my average day, I don't interact with the Federal government. It could have been shut down over the weekend, and I would not even have noticed. It makes me wonder: how long could I have gone without the Federal government in operation before it impinged on my life? One way to answer that question is to hope that it would be a good long time before I noticed the lack. In the week of brinkmanship leading up to the final compromise, the media was full of stories about how bad it would be if the shutdown happened. In the television coverage I saw, the unanimous position was that a shutdown would be a Very Bad Thing. But when you really examine the stories, they mostly boil down to this: the National Parks would have to close down for the duration. Oh, the humanity! I went to Yosemite National Park last summer. It was terrific. Not going back this year, though. I don't want to argue that we don't need a central government, and we need to fund the operations of that government. But in determining the level of that funding, there is some instructional value in realizing that it would take awhile to miss it if it was gone.