"Beer brewers are facing bottlenecks. Airline passengers are facing queues. Around 800,000 federal employees are not being paid. These are the casualties of America’s government shutdown, which began on December 21st and is now the longest on record. It shows few signs of ending; its costs are climbing.
Historically, such shutdowns seem barely to have budged the juggernaut that is the American economy. Economists at the Bureau of Economic Analysis (bea) estimated that the 16-day funding lapse in October 2013 lowered real gdp growth in that quarter by 0.3 percentage points. This time, as only around 40% of federal employees are affected, most estimates of the weekly impact are even smaller. Economists at Moody’s, a rating agency, reckon that for each week it continues, the dent to gdp growth will be 0.04 percentage points."
The Economist
The administration now calculates that the shutdown reduces quarterly economic growth by 0.13 percentage points for every week that it lasts — the cumulative effect of lost work from contractors and furloughed federal employees who are not getting paid and who are investing and spending less as a result. That means that the economy has already lost nearly half a percentage point of growth from the four-week shutdown. (Last year, economic growth for the first quarter totaled 2.2 percent.)
NYT