The Big Squeeze: Longest Shutdown Ever

Hey there, Overlappers, and welcome. It's just me, Joshua, at the microphone today. I'm going to be your solo guide through this particularly poor-lit, slightly damp, and frankly bad-smelling hellscape this week in America.

Oh my god.

Of our series around turning around failing civilizations. And obviously, what better time? It's hard to talk about historical failing civilizations when we're speedrunning our own. It feels a little, I don't know, on the nose. It's like trying to do a podcast about the structural integrity of the Titanic while you're standing in the boiler room and the water is around your knees, you know.

We will get back to that, though, I promise. Presumably, when our own civilization stops providing such distracting, overwhelmingly potent, real-time examples of how to fail.

So today, instead of looking back, we're going to look directly into the abyss of the present. Because we have to talk about the 2025 government shutdown.

Yeah, I know. I can hear you groan. But look, I'm not here to talk about the closed national parks or the delayed paperwork, the whole inconvenience aspect of being stuck at airports for hours.

This isn't a story about bureaucratic bumbling. We're talking about the weapon that government shutdowns have become.

This isn't a shutdown of incompetence. Well, I mean, I guess in a way. It's kind of a shutdown of intent.

It's a precision-engineered piece of policy, and its targets are the people who can least afford to be in the crosshairs.

So, what's the big holdup?

Why are 800,000 federal workers and countless contractors currently refreshing their bank accounts with a growing sense of existential dreaded?

It's not some grand philosophical debate on the future of the republic.

It is, as always, about who gets not to die from preventable illnesses.

The central conflict, the hill our leaders have chosen to die on, or rather let us die on, is the exclusion of the Affordable Care Act's enhanced premium subsidies.

So, let's translate that from D.C. speak into English.

These are subsidies passed back in 2021 that basically keep health insurance on the Affordable Care Act marketplace affordable.

And I'm using affordable in kind of the broad sense of the word.

These subsidies are the only thing that puts a cap on what a family has to pay at a certain percentage of their income.

So, they're the duct tape and bailing wire holding the entire marketplace together for millions of people.

The holdup is that a certain contingent in Congress wants them gone.

They want them to expire.

And they're willing to shut down the entire federal government to make that happen.

So, let's be clear about what this means.

This isn't a rounding error.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, if these subsidies expire, the average premium for millions of Americans will more than double.

We're talking about an average jump from around $880 a year to over $1,900.

Now, look, that probably doesn't sound like the end of the world to a senator who makes $175,000 a year.

Or a senator who has a stock portfolio of millions of dollars and taxpayer-funded health care, the kind of national health care that I would like to see the rest of the country have.

But for a family of four making $50,000 a year, that extra $1,000 isn't just lying around.

It's not in shoes or in, you know, somebody's mattress somewhere.

That's a car payment.

That's two months' worth of groceries.

And for many, it's the very difference between covered and canceled.

The CBO, Congressional Budget Office, basically our national CPA, the official oracle of how screwed we are, has said that about 4 million people will just stop having health insurance.

They'll be priced out.

What a wonderfully sterile, bloodless word.

Priced out.

It sounds like you couldn't get front row tickets to a concert.

It doesn't sound like what it actually is.

It means that you are one bad fall, one ugly diagnosis, one sick kid, one heart attack from total irreversible financial ruin.

It means you are, in the nicest terms possible, shit out of luck.

And the timing?

Oh, that's just the mwah.

When is this fight happening?

Mid-November.

Right in the middle of, guess what?

Open enrollment.

This isn't just a threat for next year.

This is happening right now.

People are, as we speak, trying to log on to a website to sign up for a 2026 health plan, and the government is intentionally obscuring the price.

It's chaos by design, like the rest of this administration.

It's like trying to buy a car while a dealership and the bank are in a screaming match in the parking lot about what your interest rate is.

Most people are just going to walk away, and that's the point.

You break the system by making it unusable.

That's kind of been the M.O. for Republicans' view on health care, education, and a slew of other things that we have come to take for granted.

This is the bargaining chip.

It's the leverage.

It's not a border wall.

It's not a tax cut for billionaires.

They already did that, right?

They already did that with the big, beautiful bill.

And I'm sure that there's other earmarks for billionaires stapled into the bill somewhere.

We've already found out that there's a total national ban on THC products that was placed into the bill at the very last minute.

But the leverage is, fund the government, or we'll make your grandma's health insurance disappear.

It's pretty simple.

I mean, almost elegant.

But it's ultimately a piece of political bastardry.

It's how nice health care you got there.

Shamed if something, I don't know, happened to it.

It's a hostage situation where the victim is.

Wait, let me see here.

Yeah, anyone who doesn't want to die.

But if you thought Congress was the only part of the government trying to make life impossible this week, hold my beer.

Because while the legislature is busy threatening your health,

the judiciary decided to get in on the action.

This week, the Supreme Court are nine wonderful, magical fairies in robes, draped in black, handing down wisdom from their beautiful little mountain.

And what was that wisdom?

Let them eat uncertainty?

CODIS, that's right, extended a pause on the lower court order.

And it wasn't complicated.

It just said, hey, you know the $4 billion in SNAP benefits, the food aid that's supposed to go to 42 million Americans?

You should probably release that.

People need to eat.

And those nine justices in their infinite wisdom said, eh, let's just wait and see.

This isn't just a pause.

This is state-level chaos.

Imagine you run a state's benefits program, right?

You have the money.

A federal judge has ordered you to send the money.

Then the highest court in the entire country hits a giant pause button.

What do you do?

What do you do?

Some states were ready to send the money.

Some had already sent partial payments, assuming the rest was coming.

Now, no one has any idea.

42 million people in the United States of only 340 million are in a bureaucratic limbo over food.

And the Supreme Court just looked at an entire country of people wondering how to pay for groceries during a shutdown and said, you know what?

This isn't stressful enough.

Let's add some suspense.

Let's turn it into a game.

And this is what I call the chokehold.

It's a brilliant strategy, really.

You can't win a war on one front.

So Congress comes at you from the legislative side.

They threaten your medications.

They threaten your health care.

They threaten your life.

They threaten your grandma's walker and wheelchair.

Then the Supreme Court comes at you from the judicial side and says, oh, yeah, also no food.

And the average person in our country today is just kind of stuck in the middle, getting squeezed.

Welcome to the Hunger Games legislative edition.

And what is all the rationale behind this?

The administration's argument for pausing this four billion dollars in food assistance is that they have to hold back funds in case of other emergencies.

Now, let that sink in.

It's it's it's it's a masterpiece of circular logic.

It's basically just a snake eating its own tail forever.

The aerobarous.

They're creating an emergency of mass hunger in order to save resources in case of an emergency.

That's like setting your house on fire and refusing to use a water hose because you might need to save water in case there's a fire.

It's insane.

And it is clinically divorced from reality.

But it is happening.

They are holding 42 million people's food budget hostage, claiming that they're doing it for their own good.

It's exhausting.

It's the kind of logic that gets you put in a very soft room, unless, of course, you're in the government, in which case you get called a shrewd negotiator.

Yeah.

And that's where I want to pivot just a little bit.

This is a real point.

Because every time we talk about SNAP, every time we talk about Medicaid or other American Affordable Care Act subsidies, the narrative immediately jumps to this like this lazy people mythology.

These takers, these people who don't want to work, people who get, quote, paid to sit on their ass.

That's a comforting story.

As a former conservative, I know the story well.

It makes the cruelty feel like tough love for poor decisions.

It's kind of the bedtime story that conservatives now tell themselves so they can sleep in what is intrinsically just a deeply sick society.

But it is a myth.

It's just a piece of political bullshit that we've all been fed for 50 years.

It's the idea of this welfare queen in a Cadillac.

A ghost story conjured up in a lab.

Not really.

Conjured up by Ronald Reagan.

To scare taxpayers into voting against their own interests.

But it is a lie.

A lie.

A demonstrable, statistical, pants on fire, slap your mother lie.

Let's look at the actual data.

So the Government Accountability Office, GAO, not exactly a bastion of radical thought, did a deep dive into this specific thing.

They looked at the people who were actually on these programs.

And what did they find?

They found that among people who earn a wage, adults on programs like SNAP and Medicaid, approximately 70% of them work full time.

Let me repeat that. 7-0-7-10, not 7%, 70% of these people are working at least 40 hours a week.

These people aren't sitting on a couch. They're not playing video games. They're not popping out

babies for the extra check. These people are making your coffee. They're stocking your grocery

shelves. They're the people checking you out at the hardware store. The people that care about

your grandparents in a nursing home, they're working 35, 40, 50 hours a week, and they still,

they can't afford food. They still can't afford medicine. This is not a failure of their work

ethic. It's a failure of our economic structure. So this isn't a snap problem. It isn't an

entitlement problem. It's a wage problem. This is 40 years of wage stagnation. This is the grand bargain

where productivity went up. CEO pay went up into the stratosphere like we've talked about on this show

before and your paycheck. And for some reason, for millions of Americans around the country now who are

being laid off because of AI, that plateau is coming to the other side. CEO pay just went something like

1400% up since the 1970s. 1400%! The market hasn't done that well. Corporate profits are at an all-time high in your paycheck.

That's been the same. Or maybe adjusted for inflation, if you're lucky. But not since Star Wars came out.

And this, this is the result. In the United States, a full-time job is no longer a guarantee of survival.

Which brings me to my next point. That snap benefit? That's not a handout to the worker. It's a corporate subsidy.

It's a taxpayer-funded gift. It's a wealth transfer, if that's what you want to call it, from you.

You, the person who actually works, who actually pays taxes, and it's ripped from you every two weeks when you get your paycheck.

And it transfers it to the shareholders of the nation's largest, most profitable employers.

It's the Walmart Profit Protection Plan.

It's the Amazon Prime subscription for poverty wages. It's the McDonald's Happy Meal that's subsidized by the public purse.

Because if these companies had to pay a living wage, a wage that a full-time worker could, say, buy food with, their profits would go down.

Their shareholders might have to settle for a 50-foot yacht instead of a 60-foot yacht.

So, they don't.

They pay starvation wages, and the government, you, we are the government, you pick up the difference.

It's the single greatest, most insidious corporate welfare program in American history.

We are paying with our taxes to keep their full-time workforce from starving to death.

And now, now, the government is threatening to stop even that.

Now, they're not going after the corporations.

They're not talking about raising minimum wage.

They're not talking about clawing back the record profits that these companies have made year over year, hand over fist.

No. No, no, no, no, no.

They're going to fix the budget by taking the food out of the workers' mouth.

It's not just cruel.

It's cowardly.

It's batshit crazy.

It's a profound cowardice.

These people are soulless.

So, let's recap this week.

Congress is holding your health care hostage.

Sorry about that.

The Supreme Court is holding your food hostage.

And the people caught in the middle are, by and large, working full-time.

Let's stop using the polite language.

I've done my best.

But what do you call it when you knowingly and systematically remove a person's access to food and medicine?

Let's back up for a second.

If you did it to a dog, you'd be arrested for animal cruelty, right?

If you did it to a child, you'd be in prison for criminal negligence at best.

But when you do it to 42 million people with a gavel and a bill, we have a whole different vocabulary for it.

We call it fiscal responsibility.

Legislative hardball.

We call it belt tightening.

We wrap it in the sterile, bloodless language of congressional budget office scores and legislative procedure.

It's a lapse in appropriations.

It's a subsidy cliff.

It's a judicial pause.

It's all just words.

Words designed to hide the consequences.

Words designed to sanitize the cruelty.

No.

Let's call it what it actually is.

It's violence.

It's a policy of calculated, sanitized, bureaucratic cruelty.

It's violence done with a spreadsheet instead of with a gun.

It's violence done with a gavel instead of a fist.

When you make the choice to let people starve and get sick knowing they're working, knowing they can't survive otherwise, you are making a choice that will kill people.

It is functionally akin to murder.

It's just quieter.

It's slower.

The bodies are farther away.

The cause of death will be listed as complications from diabetes or malnutrition.

Not a legislative rider.

But the choice is the same.

You're withholding the means of survival.

There is no word for that but cruel.

That's all the optimism I can muster for one day, right?

So hopefully we'll be back next week, hopefully with Will, when we will finish our series on failing civilizations and then we can all compare notes.

Stay informed.

Stay angry.

And good luck, I guess.

Look out for each other.

There's people out there that are trying to help.

There's organizations out there that are just getting spun up, that are doing their best.

Give them some love if you can.

If you've got some extra beans or something in the back of your cabinet that you hadn't used in a bit but are still good, throw it to maybe a neighborhood pantry.

Where I'm at, there's lots of little community pantries around the place that we can drop off things.

We drop off eggs there quite often and we drop off supplies as we can.

Remember that the only thing that's going to get us through this is us.

And obviously us is not the government right now and the government's not us or at least not looking out for us.

Take care, friends.

Stay true to each other.

See you next week.

Thank you.

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