The House and Senate might not be able to agree to terms to fund the federal government by the Sept. 30 deadline, and that’s OK to an influential bloc of hard-line House conservatives who are playing an outsize role in both the spending process and the fate of Kevin McCarthy’s speakership.
The coin was related to the debt ceiling. This is very different than the debt ceiling. The US will continue to pay its debts, and it’s probably not going to kick off the second Great Depression.
This is about agreeing on a federal budget, not about paying debt obligations to the world. It will stop a lot of government employees and contractors from getting paid, and it will gum up a lot of government systems.
This isn’t “upended global economics as we know it” bad. It’s just your normal “republicans can’t run basic government infrastructure and like to fuck over the poor” bad.
A small correction. Contractors continue to get paid because the government has already spent the money to pay them. Almost everyone working directly for the government does not get paid. The ones that do get paid are the ones that are in “critically important positions”. The military members go to work but don’t get paid (they have always gotten back pay) and civilians don’t go to work (they typically get back paid).
I’ll add that shutting down the government is expensive and doesn’t happen in an hour. The money spent to shut it down starts getting spent in the week/weeks before a possible shutdown as agencies close shop for an unknown amount of time. The theater of waiting until the last minute costs millions even if the bill eventually gets passed.