pie. let me give you a chance to respond. standard & poor s did come out with the $24 billion cost. she could have joined us and opened the government sooner. we passed over two dozen bills, sent them to the senate. she voted against almost all of them. the senate voted on ze ro of them in the last 16 days. we could have got the government open sooner. not the government. piece by piece. well, loretta, that s the way the system always works. we vote on different appropriation bills. not the way the president wants to do it. he wants a single bill he controls and it passes that way. it s not the way it works. you know we vote on several different appropriations bills. this is being passed on to our children. it uh s unfair. good of you both to be here. thank you. we ll watch as the house votes tonight. after a fight the over federal spend ing why did the senate pass a bill that included $174,000 payment to the by widof
i was reading benjamin witts of the brookings institution and he said the current congress is a greater danger to national security than al qaeda. which is why we should be happy to see that photograph of john boehner getting on the airplane. i think they have earned a vacation and they should perhaps stay home a good long while. okay. professor dyson, last week we featured marlin stotzman who said we have to get something out of this, and i don t know what that even is. we can help answer that question. standard & poor s says the shutdown has taken at least $24 billion out of the economy, 800,000 federal workers didn t get paid, four million nursing mothers lost critical important nutritional assistance. that s what they got out of this, didn t they, they hurt the people and humiliated the nation. they hurt the people, humiliated the nation and did nothing to forward the notion that they were the true tea party patriots.
president so individuals aren t treated as second class citizens in comparison to their corporate brothers? your thoughts on that. i believe obama care is moving forward. i no in california a lot of people are exciteded to get there and buy insurance. we re going to let it play out. in a year people will see they are better off by having coverage they have theeded, by having gone to the doctor, et cetera. it s important. i want to go back to something my colleague said. quickly. this 16 days of shutdown cost us $24 billion that s estimated by standard & poor s in just 16 days to our national economy. we have to stop legislating this way and doing these fights. the republicans are always talking about growing the pie. what they did in these 16 days was to decrease the size of the
the potential for catastrophe and looking at an outcome that is obviously more benign. we ve been up five of the last six days. yesterday was the only down day so they re betting on a positive outcome. jared, brief us on what it means for fitch to come out and say we re on the precipice of a downgrade. back to where we were in 2011, where we were downgraded. that was through a different agency but what does it mean from fitch. that was from standard & poor s. it s an interesting question because if you actually look at the last time they took us down a notch, it really didn t have any impact on markets at all. they kind of shook it off. this time it s actually more serious. and if you read the fitch report, it s quite interesting. what they tell you is the underlying even the debt fundamentals, the debt and deficit in fitch s view in the u.s. economy are quite good. the deficit has been cut by half. if you look at least in the near term, our fiscal situation looks
as a legitimate tool of negotiation or extortion, really. yes. he felt very, very strongly about this. so this was bigger even than the issue of the health care law. it was bigger than the issue of his particular standing. the question now is what happens after. i would not, and i don t think he will, and i think the white house signaled that. this is not a time for spiking the ball in the end zone because all it did was open the possibility that in the next few months that there could be some rational budget discussions that will yield some solution. in answer to the question you asked the senator, though, i think everybody has stared over the abyss and they don t like what they sigh. standard & poor s said this was a $24 billion hit to the economy. would reduce the gdp by six tenths of a point. this is not a game.