Most Recent Posts

As the government shutdown enters its fifth day, House Republicans and Senate Democrats continue to spar over who's being more unreasonable in this fight.

GOP members now find themselves on the defensive, as they face questions about forgoing pay and forgoing staff during the widespread furloughs.

Hundreds of thousands of federal workers were forced to figure out this week just how many paychecks they can afford to skip.

In a show of solidarity, at least 150 lawmakers now say they're going to give up their pay too. The ones who wouldn't, like Renee Ellmers, R-N.C., soon learned that they touched a nerve.

"I need my paycheck," Ellmers told WTVD in Raleigh early this week. "That's the bottom line. And I understand that maybe there are some other members who are deferring their paycheck, and I think that's admirable. I'm not in the position."

Ellmers had voted to defund the Affordable Care Act as a precondition for keeping the government running. Her comment drew furious reactions, but on Friday, she reversed course, deciding she'd surrender her pay after all.

As the shutdown persists, so will the question of how much of the burden members of Congress will individually bear. For example, how much of their own staff are they willing to furlough?

Unlike the executive branch, where specific rules designate who is essential and who is not, members of Congress can furlough at their discretion. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, R-Ga., says his office is operating at half-capacity now.

"I told everybody, 'Look, I don't want anybody here to think they're non-essential, but at the same time, we're going to have to share some of the pain,' " Westmoreland says.

To furlough or not to furlough — it's a touchy question on Capitol Hill. Many House members didn't respond to calls or emails asking how many of their staff members were showing up this week. One House member, Kerry Bentivolio, R-Mich., simply walked away when he was asked.

Republican Steve King of Iowa is not furloughing a single soul on his staff, and isn't hiding it. King's one of about 30 House Republicans who are determined to use the spending fight as a way to end Obamacare.

"We don't know how this is going to emerge," he says. "We don't know what kinds of demands we're going to have. And so I want to make sure we have people here to answer the phones, to respond to the needs that we have, to deal with any legislation that we might be able to work."

King is not concerned that it looks like he's insulating himself from the effects of the shutdown, to have his full staff around.

"This is a decision made to get this job done," he said. "We're in a battle here. So just imagine, you're in a battle. Would you say, 'I'm going to send you all home on leave?' I mean, I can do that. I could furlough all my employees. I could roll the phones over to recording, and I don't even have to walk into my office. I could just wait for somebody to make a decision, come in here and vote. That's the easy way out."

King says it's a good thing he kept his staff around – they're working harder than ever this week. Though from the looks of it, Congress isn't getting any closer to resolving its spending feud.

The House has spent the last few days passing smaller individual spending bills – to fund specific things like national parks, the NIH, veterans' programs and disaster recovery. But Senate Democrats keep rejecting each and every one of the bills, pointing out the original Senate proposal still awaiting a vote in the House would fund all programs, not just some.

"How can Speaker Boehner stop the Republican shutdown?" says Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. "Just vote. Because everybody knows, if he put the bill on the floor of the House, it would pass."

But as of Friday, Boehner was still demanding a chance to sit down and have a discussion about bringing fairness to Obamacare. Senate leaders and the White House continue to say there will be no such negotiations until the government reopens.

Thanks to the federal government's partial shutdown, the Bureau of Labor Statistics skipped its monthly Big Reveal at 8:30 a.m. Friday.

There was no September employment report.

Without access to the BLS numbers, data junkies were left to scrounge around for lesser reports. Maybe if they could suck in enough small hits of other statistics, they could feel that old familiar rush?

Nope. Nothing can replace that BLS high.

"You do miss it," said Harry Holzer, Georgetown professor and former chief economist for the Labor Department. "I watch it closely. It's the single best number to explain what's going on" in the U.S. labor market, he said.

The BLS report surveys both employers and households. Also, it comes out monthly, rather than quarterly. Holzer said that frequency provides enough snapshots of wages and hours to create a kind of flowing documentary about jobs.

So here we are — with no new picture to advance the story.

But instead of dwelling on what we don't have, let's think of this as "Faux Friday" — a day offering plenty of data, just not from the BLS. Simply lower your standards, pop open a near-beer and let's go over the almost-important data that we did get this week:

— ADP's payroll report showed a gain of 166,000 private sector jobs for September — in line with what employers had been adding all summer.

— Initial claims for unemployment benefits increased by 1,000 to a seasonally adjusted 308,000 last week. That number, based on state data, was somewhat better than the expected 314,000 new claims.

— PNC Financial Services Group Inc.'s Autumn Outlook survey of small and medium-size businesses showed 16 percent intend to add full-time employees during the next six months, while 8 percent plan to cut workers.

— The outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas said companies announced plans for 40,289 layoffs in September, down 20 percent from August.

— Glassdoor, an online site for jobs, released its quarterly Employment Confidence Survey, conducted online by Harris Interactive. That showed only 15 percent of employees are afraid of being laid off, the lowest percentage since the fourth quarter of 2008.

The Government Shutdown

Without Key Jobs Data, Markets And Economists Left Guessing

Britain's Conservative-led government delivered a one-two punch for more pillars of Britain's social benefits system this week. It announced more cuts to the country's social welfare programs — moving ever-closer to "workfare."

It started when George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, told the Conservative Party's annual conference that starting next April, some 200,000 people who have been unemployed for two years or more will be offered three choices: undertake unpaid community work; report to a job center every workday; or take part in a full-time intensive program to work on the personal issues that have kept them out of the workforce.

If they don't, they'll lose their benefits check.

"No one will be ignored or left without help. But no one will get something for nothing," Osborne told the Tory gathering. "Because a fair welfare system is fair to those who need it, and fair to those who pay for it, too."

Iain Duncan Smith, the country's work and pensions secretary, told the BBC that when similar requirements were enacted on a smaller scale to address the problem of "playing" the system, about 70 percent of recipients stopped claiming benefits.

Enlarge image i

The eye-popping new movie Gravity will make you very grateful you're planted on terra firma. It's a thriller directed by Alfonso Cuaron, in which shuttle astronauts on a spacewalk are stranded after a collision with a vast cloud of space debris.

And one of those astronauts — played by Sandra Bullock — is left on her own, hundreds of miles above Earth. She's running out of oxygen and tumbling untethered through the void of space.

Bullock tells NPR's Melissa Block that she spent much of the shoot by herself inside a cube, basically doing a kind of modern dance to help create the illusion of a zero-gravity environment.

"I likened it to Martha Graham," she says. "It was slow, modern, interpretive movements at 30-percent speed. And so my body would move as in weightlessness and contract the way your body would move in zero gravity."