There’s a fair amount of collateral damage taking place outside that trap, of course. I forget which agency or department suggested that furloughed feds could offer to do odd jobs for their landlords in lieu of rent, but I suspect that few owners of residential rentals will be found who will (or even, from the standpoints of their own cash flow, could) consent to this. It’s even harder to see how one negotiates such an arrangement with a mortgage lender.

The invaluable Roy Edroso points to one “Tyler Cowan”—economics prof at George Mason University!—who gloats that

I guess you can believe both “the shutdown causes temporary hardships for govt. employees,” and “payday lending is bad,” but it ain't easy.

Haw-haw-haw! Checkmate, libs!

It’s difficult to see this ending well. However, and particularly in the light of recent reports that the short-fingered vulgarian has, on the evidence of multiple sources, suborned perjury, I permit myself a guarded optimism that we are seeing “the end of the beginning” here. That Dolt 45 is susceptible to the temptation to go full-on extraconstitutional despot, that several people in his immediate orbit would be pleased for him to do so, that his notional political party is supine before his mad whims, that probably at least half the people who voted for him* in 2016 would welcome him as Trumpenfeuhrer—all this seems more likely than not, but I think he missed the sweet spot, and that his advantages, such as they are, will steadily erode from here on out. Put another way, if this gang was going to pull a Reichstag fire, they ought to have done it before the end of last year. Not that this doesn’t mean they won’t be stupid enough to try…

In the meanwhile, every passing month during which these criminal clowns are not displaced will see damage accruing to the polity that will ultimately require much longer to ameliorate.

Well, shoot, I’ve talked myself down again.

cordially,

*So yeah, “half the people who voted for him” works out to fewer than a quarter of 2016 voters, but as someone observed elsewhere, if the three of you in the office are deciding where to go for lunch, and two of you say “pizza” and the third says “actually, I’d rather kill and eat the two of you,” you’ll still have pizza, but you’ve got a real problem going on back there at the office.