Yeah wait… If nobody is getting paid, what the fuck are my taxes doing? Give 'em back.
First everyone gets back pay, then people need to work a bunch of overtime after the shutdown to make up for work, so will actually cost even more money.
But even if that wasn’t true, employee salaries make up less than 5% of the budget so a 35 day shut down (the previous record) would make up less than half a percent of the budget
Congress still gets paid during a shutdown
How convenient.
I read that everybody will also get back pay.
Everyone falls in one of three categories: Exempt, Excepted, Non-Excepted.
Exempt people are expected to come to work normally and they are paid normally. They probably don’t really see a change.
Non-Excepted people are furloughed. They were sent home Wednesday morning and will wait it out doing whatever they’d like and they will get all wages that were missed when everything is over. They will be paid for doing nothing.
Excepted people have the worst of both worlds. They have to come to work because they’ve been deemed critical but won’t get paid for it until its over. I’m in this category. I’m doing my job but im taking my time to accomplish anything.
The law that governs this is the “Government Employee Fair Treatment Act” of 2019.
It’s fun that instead of figuring our shit out and funding the government together, we just developed regulations around shutdowns.
That’s because they turned “shutdowns” into a political weapon.
Random internet stranger, thank you. It’s fucking annoying, but thank you.
You also won’t get that jobs report that they are supposed to release the first Friday of every month which they recently fired someone over the numbers being bad and then quietly revised it from ~+30k or something to ~-5k
August, -3k.
Sept prelim, -32k.
Thank you.
This movie (John Q) is so fucking sad and could not happen in other countries. I always remember the wife yelling at John to “Do something!” when the hospital was sending their son home.
That movie came out in 2002. Crazy
You can change your tax withholding whenever you want.
Sadly, I looked into this years ago because I was wondering whats stopping me from just paying all my taxes at the end of the year and I found that if you let it drop to far from the amount you owe then you can be penalized…
https://www.irs.gov/payments/underpayment-of-estimated-tax-by-individuals-penalty
Yeah, ideally you want to stay within +/- $1000 range of what you owe
Yeah you can just not have any taxes taken from your check!
That’s called tax exempt status and all the folks I seen try it eventually got hit up for the money from the lrs.
Theoretically you can set that money aside in an account that gains interest and make a little money holding onto it until tax season where you pay it all at once.Generally it’s only really worth it if you’re fairly wealthyEdit: I don’t know what I’m talking about. You’ll be hit with a 7% underpayment for doing this. You can split your taxes quarterly if you really want.
And if you’re fairly wealthy, you’ll just spend enough to hire an accountant to move it offshore and then donate to a politician via a church and then the govt pays you taxes.
I thought you had to settle up quarterly?
Very common in the trades, or at least with everyone I worked with, we’d have periods where we had a shutdown usually lasting 2weeks but upto 3 months. We’d work 12-16 hour days 7 days a week (sometimes taking the 14th day off, sometimes not). A lot of my coworkers would go tax exempt during these shutdowns then switch back to normal afterwards.
John Q. Great film!
Also yes it should be true.
