The impact of your tax dollars paid to Congress at non-work:
The number of federal workers forced to work shorter hours soared this summer — to 199,000 in July, from 55,000 a year earlier — in a sign of the problems that federal budget policy is causing for the economy.
The Labor Department reported on Friday that the economy continued to add jobs in July and that the unemployment rate fell to 7.4 percent, from 7.6 percent. But the pace of job growth slowed somewhat from the first half of the year and remains modest enough that the economy is years away from a full recovery.
Contributing to the hangover from the worst financial crisis in decades is a wave of cuts in domestic and military spending, known collectively as the sequester, which is causing government furloughs as well as job losses and curtailed hours among federal contractors.
Although the sequester became law on March 1, some of the effects, like the forced leaves, have begun to ramp up only recently. More job losses, rather than shorter workweeks, are predicted if the cuts remain in place into next year.
Congress left on Friday for a summer recess of more than a month, after a week in which Republicans’ divisions with one another and with President Obama suggested a new budget showdown may be coming in the fall. The disagreements leave no clear way to end the spending cuts that continue to slow the economy and could even lead to a more damaging government shutdown in October.
Corporate and academic economists say that Washington’s fiscal fights have produced budget policies that amount to a self-inflicted drag on the economy’s recovery.
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And there are few signs that it’s going to get better this year — particularly with House members in safe districts scrambling to show how tough they are in their policies and their unwillingess to “cave” (21st century word for that old outdated concept of compromise for the sake of a larger good than one’s own self-interest so both sides get a little and lose a little).
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.