So, at last the US government shutdown is over. After 16 days of political deadlock between President Barrack Obama’s Democrats and the Republicans, during which most non-essential federal employees were laid off (‘furloughed’ in American English) a deal has been done which pretty much gets everyone back to where they started in the first place. And the whole thing may start up again in a couple of months. In fact, there have been 18 shutdowns over the last 30 years: the longest lasted 21 days under President Bill Clinton in 1995.
There’s a lot about the shutdown I don’t understand. I imagine the thing must have been planned by very right wing Tea Party Republicans in smoke-filled rooms (oh, sorry, I’d forgotten that almost all federal buildings are now non-smoking). But I can’t quite get the tactics. Did someone stand up and say “we are so angry about Obamacare and the federal budget that we’re going to hit this government where it hurts, we’re going to be absolutely ruthless, we’ll stop at nothing, we’ll, we’ll… we’ll, we’ll close down the national parks!”
This will clarify everything:
Because if you look at the anatomy of the shutdown, the parks were among the hardest hit. The private sector and the state administrations kept functioning normally. Essential federal staff were also kept working, while non-essential and administrative staff were sent home. A lot of cheques were not paid. That was a serious setback to the people involved and to the economy, but hardly a knock-out blow. One very rough estimate is that the shutdown cost the United States about US$1.5bn a day, and possibly US$70mn of that was due to the national park closures.
Can you hold a government to ransom by closing its national parks? Probably not, and that’s maybe why President Obama seems to have won at least this round of the boxing match. But if you think about it, the parks are actually very important. The National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), which takes care to point out it is non-partisan, says 401 national parks were closed, 21,000 employees were sent home, and up to 750,000 tourists were turned away every day. In fact, the situation was deemed so serious that before the end of the shutdown a number of states decided they’d find the money themselves to re-open these attractions. New York bankrolled the reopening of the Statue of Liberty, and state administrators also found money to reopen the Grand Canyon and Mount Rushmore sites. “When you close down the Statue of Liberty, you close down a good portion of the tourism that comes to New York City, and that has been untold millions of dollars in damage” New York Mayor Mario Cuomo said. “So the State of New York said to the federal government, ‘if you don’t want to open the Statue of Liberty, we will.’”
In fact, tourism is really important to the US for two very big reasons. First, in a world where ‘soft power’ is very important, it shapes our perceptions of the country, and second, it is a really big money earner. The shutdown has created a lot of disappointed visitors, particularly young Chinese. Why the Chinese? Well, because of an accident of timing. The shutdown started in the first week of October, which happens to be the anniversary of the Chinese revolution, now known as the ‘golden week’ holiday. Young Chinese students hit the road in golden week in a really big way: they now have significant purchasing power, they are global travellers, and they demand high standards. A tourist from Shanghai told Xinhua news agency that the US government should compensate travellers because of the closure of the famous monuments. Last year about 1.5mn Chinese visited the US, up by over one-third on the previous year.
The Talk Shows and the Shutdown:
Tourism money is important. The fact of the matter is that we- everyone who doesn’t live in the US – are more interested in going there, than US citizens are interested in coming over here. Daniel Gross, a US online journalist who writes for The Daily Beast, says this means that the US economy has a big tourism trade surplus (US$31.2bn in 2010). A foreign tourist spending money in the US counts as an export as he or she brings money in to the country: as Gross puts it “every time you see a Brazilian at the National Gallery, Swedish backpackers in Yosemite, or Korean tour groups at Kennedy airport, you are watching exports happening in front of your eyes”. US tourists who go overseas count as an import (a net outflow of currency), and there are fewer of them: Gross says “Americans are more insular”. In other words they like staying at home a lot more than we do. Gross insisted that travel is a very big business for the US, although as he was writing before the shutdown ended he couldn’t resist adding “I could tell you precisely how large a business it is, but the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s website is closed today”.
Further reading:
600 GB Pounds Buys The Following Amount Of US Dollars:
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