Having been through the 2011 to 2013 mini-shutdowns as a gov’t employee (now retired)...I can vouch that tons of hours are spent on devising what is essential and non-essential. Even within the Pentagon structure....people think all of it is essential, but you’d be surprised how many pieces of it are in the non-essential category. National Park Service....the Obama administration considered it all non-essential, but tons of it is operated by private contractors and the public pays at the entry gate (didn’t matter, they were shut down as well). I think that 2013 episode with 16 days of shutdown worried a lot of folks in the DC region.
What I came to realize was that a lot of people living around DC....even those making $100k a year...had no savings and were up to huge debt with overpriced houses. By the time you added up the mortgage, two car payments, college debt...with both husband and wife working, thousands of these people had virtually nothing left to survive an entire month without pay. We had some idiot couple that was noted with a combined income of $260k (all gov’t generated income) and they came to admit in some interview that they could survive 30 days at best, and then they’d start to default.
In this case, when Trump talks shutdown....I think he has a period of 100-days in his mind, and they’ve never done something like that before. even that 16-day deal was considered fairly harsh but if they were to go 100 days, it’d freak those gov’t workers out.
I worked on the government contractor side of things. We were always the lowest bidder and had to deliver. My first two years were working 90 hour weeks. After that it was often overtime and many times unpaid in trying to get cost to meet schedule. I worked with many contractors that had been laid off 4 times when I worked with them. When I started working I decided I wanted to aim for being able to retire by age 45 if I wanted to. I worked with the retirement calculators and figured out the minimum I needed to save.
There were the stock market crashes. My company had two major layoffs that did not affect me. I did not make my goal at 45 yo, but reached it at 50 yo. But the old goal was one half of what the new goal is and I did not reach that until 55 yo. I retired at 59 yo and am still running a small home business so I do not need to withdraw anything from retirement funds. I am at 1.5X what I planned on for revised retirement savings. I do not have a pension and have not factored in Social Security.
What I am looking at is how I want to Spec a McLaren 600LT sports car.