(First publishd a week ago. Made temporarily irrelevant 25 January. To be reinstated 15 February.)
Let’s go straight to the math with no preliminaries :
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Number of government workers laid off because of the shutdown – 800,000
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Average wage losses per week per worker – $1,250. (This is based on estimates of the effects of the first three weeks. Bear in mind that this includes people who can probably afford to ignore a temporary interruption of their pay, which will in any case be retroactively reinstated. This leaves about a half a million workers whose lives will be severely affected for lack of any cushion to pay for their groceries, electricity, rent, tuition, and credit-card debt. This includes people whose regular government checks will not be coming because there are no people on the job to process them. Even if they can find a bank willing to lend to them — which many will be unable to do due to poor credit histories and lack of assets — the costs of borrowing are the kind that tend to snowball incrementally according to established banking practices and become insurmountable.)
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Total cost of support required to keep these half a million afloat until the Congress v. President impasse is settled, which could be as much as a year – $1,250 times 52 weeks times 500,000 people equals 32.5 billion. (Note that this is considerably less than the estimated 55 billion required to complete the Useless Wall.)
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Number of voters in the election of 2016, the one that got us into this mess in the first place – 137.5 million.
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Amount each registered voter would have to contribute to fend off catastrophe for those laid off for a whole year (unlikely, but possible unless Nancy Pelosi can “borrow” an airplane from George Soros to fly to Afghanistan) – 32.5 billion divided by 137.5 million equals $236. Think of this as $236 divided by 52, or $4.54 a week. Exempt the 800,000 furloughed workers from being counted as contributors (leaving 137.5 million minus 800 thousand, and you come up with $238, or $4.58 a week per person.
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Now what all that means is that if every voter dropped a $5 bill in the tip jar every Saturday instead of having that extra order of fries, there would be no difficulty in protecting the laid-off and furloughed workers from the schoolyard fight going on in Washington. It seems to me a small price to pay, especially considering that it is highly unlikely that this foolishness will actually continue for a year.
There. The math wasn’t that difficult once you got started, was it? Now comes the problem of execution, though. How do we get the money from the tip jars into the pockets of the aid-off? And where do we set up the tip jars?
The first thought is that the banks could do it. They already have the information about whose paychecks have been stopped, and they know who the affected workers are. They could do this as a public service and earn themselves not only the gratitude of those rescued workers but restore the shine that tarnished their reputations in 2008 when those same workers (wearing their taxpayer hats that time) had to bail them out of the hole they dug for themselves with their phony “enhanced investment vehicles” that turned out to be nothing but slick scams.
The second thought is that the banks would be the last place you could expect would offer an honest deal. Seeing that much money go across their counters without being able to get their hooks on it would be a great temptation to invent some more complicated “investment vehicles” to enable them to siphon off as much of it as possible as it went in and out of their control.
Who, then? I say let the churches handle it. Not any particular church; just any church that the IRS has certified. (I would love to exclude the so-called Church of Scientology and the one where ISIS keeps its funds, but Rudy Giuliani is already employed where he might well be involved in a conflict of interest, and I wouldn’t know how to do it without equally shysterly help.)
So let every church and temple and mosque mount (securely) a Help box by its front door where civic-minded citizens can deposit a fiver once a week. Let the media (especially the TV) publicize the deal, give it a catchy name, and stress that the donors can expect no return of their investment — it is to be done simply as a humanitarian gesture and only for the duration of the shutdown.
Let each church and mosque and temple figure out for itself how to distribute the money to those who need it. Such organizations are always glad for opportunities to form working groups to do good deeds. It solidifies their faith in the power of collective action in the name of a higher purpose than usury. They will find a way, and best of all they will do it with intimate knowledge of the local neighborhoods where the need is most felt.
Will there be cheating? Of course. The Help boxes will occasionally be looted. The recipients of funds will occasionally “forget” to pay back what they accepted once their salaries have been retroactively reinstated. Will it be any more prevalent than what the banks would do? Not likely. And there is no alternative that I can think of while the official government agencies formerly in charge of payments remain shut down. What do we have to lose? Maybe, on the contrary, an honor system that worked might help restore honor systems to respectability, which would be a welcome outcome.
And what about the repaid funds when the crisis is over? The donors have already decided to treat their contributions as bread upon the waters. They do not expect restitution. They have to a large extent expressed their charitable impulses by their choice of churches. Then let those churches and mosques and temples enjoy the inflow of repaid loans, and use them for more worthy purposes, according to their own lights.
And what will the lesson be for the pseudo-adult squabblers in Washington who have been put to shame by the relatively effortless efficiency of an ad hoc reaction to solve a problem rather than to determine “winners” and “losers”. There may be a blueprint here for the future.
Fish-mouth Ronald McDonald can go back to his golf game and Fancy Nancy can get an Air Force plane for her fact-finding visit to the troops and the rest of us can concentrate on the important things we used to worry about before Hillary let us down. Like the Super Bowl. Do you think Tom’s still got it?
Vance Weaver 