I Hate to be the Bearer of Bad News

... but the Federal Government did not shut down last night.  If you're a Fed.gov employee whose job has been rated “nonessential,” sorry, no paid vacation for you, and if you're considered essential, you already know you weren't getting that paid vacation.  Yes, I know that you don't get paid until the issue is settled so you need to live off savings for the few minutes or days that are shutdown. It never, never, hurts to have some savings you can use for times when things go pear-shaped - or however you like to describe it. 

As usual, talk about that mythical debt ceiling came up and that linked article (Business Insider) brings that up as something that was a problem. 

Republicans denied Trump's request to suspend or even eliminate the debt ceiling, which would have resolved a thorny political issue in advance of a likely GOP effort to extend Trump's 2017 tax law. According to Punchbowl News, Johnson said Republicans have agreed to address the nation's borrowing limit next year when the GOP will retake entire control over Washington.

I call the debt ceiling mythical because not once since it was made a law has the debt ceiling actually decreased or done anything to stop the debt from increasing.  The best it has done was to hold the measured debt constant for a short period while the things being shutdown stopped the debt increasing for a few days. Which has historically often meant the groups keeping track of spending and the debt were lying.  LCS - lie, cheat and steal - gets them through these times.  

Here's a chart I put together using a crude tool (Microsoft Paint) that tries to depict the life of the Debt Ceiling since its inception. There are no stops, no point where the ceiling goes continually down, nothing but constant increase. The place where they meet was labeled $6 trillion on both plots, but the vertical scale is a bit compressed on the right, so the situation is actually worse-looking.

Notice how this plot ends at about $28 trillion in 2022?  The current national debt, according the excellent US Debt Clock site is $36.25 trillion dollars. We have been adding another $1 trillion roughly every 100 days. That's pretty much 3 months or one quarter of the year. These fights and threats to shut the government down are show business of the worst time.  Not only is the outcome known in advance, they spend months writing these Continuing Resolutions or CRs to keep the government running and then drop 12 or 1500 page turds laws on the legislators with about two days to read it and approve it. Clearly proposing any changes is actively discouraged. I've run this cartoon since it first showed up because it sums up the story completely.  They set everything up so that they can look like heroes. It's all a show for people who understand nothing but headlines.

You might want to read the poem at this link: it's one of Rudyard Kipling's best.