The Government Is Shut Down! Obamacare Has Started! The World Has Gone Higgledy-Piggledy!

The president signed a bill ensuring the military will be paid during the shutdown.

The New York Times reports that the government is shutting down for the first time in nearly 20 years: “The impasse meant that 800,000 federal workers were to be furloughed and more than a million others would be asked to work without pay. The Office of Management and Budget issued orders shortly before the midnight deadline that ‘agencies should now execute plans for an orderly shutdown due to the absence of appropriations’ because Congress had failed to act to keep the federal government financed.”

The shutdown comes, of course, because President Obama and Senate Democrats refused a move by House Republicans to delay today’s implementation of ObamaCare’s health care exchanges. If you’re going to start shopping for insurance today, you should check out PhillyMag’s Ultimate Guide to ObamaCare. 

So that part of government will be working. If we’re in a shutdown, what exactly is shutting down? AP has an overview of what’s being shut down—national parks, as everybody has pointed out—and says the ultimate ramification could be a slowdown in the economy. Which: Isn’t the economy already slow?

Anyway, AP says: “A shutdown that lasts two weeks or more would probably start to slow an already sluggish economy, analysts say. Closures of national parks would hurt hotels, restaurants and other tourism-related businesses. And federal workers who lost pay would spend less, thereby curbing economic growth. A three-week shutdown would slow the economy’s annual growth rate in the October-December quarter by up to 0.9 of a percentage point, Goldman Sachs has estimated.”

So there’s that. And then there’s this:

Tough news for lawmakers on the cover of today’s @NYDailyNews pic.twitter.com/vxw2VxXoL3

— Ed O’Keefe (@edatpost) October 1, 2013