Federal workers.

An excerpt:

What information do you need/want to know from your agency?
“Just the basics: Will this affect our budget? Will people lose their jobs? If the answer to the last question is yes, then how will the remaining people fulfill the agency’s mandates? — National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the District

Welcome to the party, pal. Yes, how can us normal American ever live without NOAA? If there’s a shutdown, does that mean there won’t be a “Habitat of the Month” in September? Yes, NOAA does do a lot of work on hurricane forecasting and those forecasts have been so accurate in the past few years, I’m pretty sure my iPhone radar app can do as good as job, and that was free.

What Federal workers are living with today is what the vast majority of non-taxpayer funded workers live through on a daily basis. Did the company meet its earning numbers? Will the Obama drilling moratorium mean I have no work in a month? I’m a coal miner — what’s going to happen to me? Etc., etc. etc. I love the irony that many of these federal workers whose agencies are the source of such unease among the rest of us are now feeling the same anxiety.

And all this reminds me of the 2005 Christmas season transit strike in New York City. That strike ended right quick once people started framing the job of a transit worker as driving around in a circle for $80,000 a year. Ummmm, you can’t figure out a way to do that job for less? You can’t find a way to do that job better? The same thing is going to have to happen to the federal workforce, regardless of what happens over the next few days. Government can’t exist for the sole purpose of creating more government (at union wages), which is what’s happening in D.C. today.