Paul Krugman

But, you know, we start off, this is amazingly good.

I mean, all of us who do these macro economic stuff are just sort of rubbing our eyes at how good the situation looks right now.

Right.

Of course.

But we can never tell.

It's really hard to pin down.

We can talk about the impact on spending.

We can talk about laid off federal employees and the money they don't spend.

But nobody has ever really tried to quantify, as far as I know, the effects of air traffic control delays.

I mean, what we're learning is that actually we kind of need a functioning government to have a functioning economy.

This wasn't long enough to

really do a lot of damage, but it was enough to show us.

A six-month shutdown would have been really, really bad.

So it's significant.

It's bigger than the standard macroeconomic analyses would suggest.

Well, there's two things I would say.

First, the shutdown, at least the chosen issue, involved health insurance, involved the enhanced benefits, which are going away on the Affordable Care Act.

And Democrats caved on that.

So 22 million Americans who have subsidized Obamacare

insurance are about to see or in the process of seeing gigantic increases in their health insurance premiums, an average of 114%, according to Kaiser Family Foundation.