The Democrats and the mainstream media (but I repeat myself) have been carrying on as if a shutdown of the federal government would be a catastrophe for the country and the economy, perhaps even pitching us back into recession while little old ladies starve in their beds and children die of neglect.

That won’t happen. While it is embarrassing that the politics of the world’s most powerful country are in such disarray that a defunding of the government could happen, we’ve been similarly embarrassed before with few if any long-term consequences.

Non-essential government workers will be furloughed and not paid for the duration of the shutdown. Whether they will be paid for those days eventually is up to Congress. But air-traffic controllers, border and prison guards, and weather forecasters will all be on the job. As will the military.

Those parts of the federal government that are not funded by annual appropriations (which is, in fact, most of the government, at least as measured by cash flow if not personnel), such as Social Security and Medicare, will tick along as usual.

Non-essential workers make up about 825,000 workers out of 2 million. So it’s not a shutdown of the government, it’s a shutdown of 40 percent of it.  The National Labor Relations Board will furlough all but 11 of its 1611 employees, while the EPA will lay off about 97 percent of theirs. In both cases that strikes me as good news, not bad news.

Still, the average man in the street, unless he wants to apply for a passport or visit a national park or museum, will not notice much of a difference in his quotidian routine. Police, firemen, train conductors, etc. are all state or local employees. Even Amtrak will continue to chug along.

As Jonathan noted earlier, any shutdown will be blamed by the media 100 percent on the Republicans. If you’d like to see just how biased the MSM has become, read this AP “news” article (h/t Powerline) on the impending shutdown. Such AP copy is used by nearly every news organization that does not maintain its own Washington news bureau. So it will be presented in hundreds of newspapers and local TV news shows as simply news. But it’s not. It’s so slanted that were it to come in as a press release from the Democratic National Committee, is there an editor in the country that would doubt its authenticity as such?

Perhaps that’s why Obama, Harry Reid, etc., are being so intransigent and refusing to negotiate. They know they can’t lose the public opinion battle.