SO THE SHUTDOWN DOES WHAT CONGRESS SHOULD DO?:

Here's a rough list:

1) More than 2 million federal workers will see their paychecks delayed -- and 800,000 of them might never get repaid. [...]

2) Millions of veterans may not receive benefits if the shutdown lasts more than two weeks. [...]

Note that these aren't the only consequences of the shutdown. There are plenty of others: Businesses won't be able to access E-Verify to check the immigration status of potential hires. The National Institutes of Health will stop accepting new patients for clinical trials. The Bureau of Land Management will stop issuing permits for oil and gas companies on public lands.

How painful the above impacts are depends on your perspective. Obviously the people affected will care a lot. But how big an outcry will there be from the broader public? Over at Business Insider, Joe Weisenthal suspects that "there's no obvious one thing [about a shutdown] that will be so annoying to the public that the two sides would quickly have to come to a deal." If that's true, a shutdown could last for quite some time.

It's also worth noting that we've already seen disruptive cuts this year after Congress allowed sequestration to hit -- and lawmakers haven't exactly rushed to reverse those haphazard budget cuts. Indeed, much of Washington appears to have made peace with sequestration.

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