Whole Government ‘Non-Essential’ To Many

What if the government shuts down and no one notices?

That thought apparently occurred to quite a few Americans Wednesday during the second day of the partial shutdown in the nation’s capital.

“The media has built this up like it’s a hurricane on the way, but it has no impact on us,” said Dick Busby, owner of a construction company in Dayton, Texas. “I don’t even know anybody who has felt the impact.”

Reports of 800,000 “non-essential” government employees being sent home may not have prompted widespread fretting about a loss in services, but rather wonderment about why the government has so many unnecessary people on the payroll.

“About 90 percent of the callers want to talk about why we had all these ‘non-essential’ workers in the first place,” said Tom Isenberg, who hosts a radio talk show in Seattle.

“I hear this is a 40 percent shutdown (of the government), and that’s a good start,” said Candice Copas, a Durham, N.C., Libertarian party activist.