While tens of thousands of federal employees have been called back to work without pay in order to process tax returns in the hopes of blunting the shutdown’s economic impact, experts say the longer Trump digs his heels in, the worse things will get. As Sam Berger, a senior adviser at the Center for American Progress, told Bloomberg, “Shutdowns don’t get bad linearly; they get bad exponentially.” In a research note issued on Tuesday, Bernard Baumohl, the chief global economist for the Economic Outlook Group, wrote that the shutdown “is threatening to derail this economic expansion,” and that its effect on federal workers’ spending plans is particularly worrisome for the housing and automotive markets, which were “already showing signs of trouble before the shutdown.”

Hassett, who, as a reminder, suggested five days ago that furloughed workers should be thanking Trump for the free time off, said on Tuesday that one of his furloughed staffers has started driving for Uber to make ends meet, and that the shutdown could permanently hurt economic growth expectations even after the government reopens—whenever that may be!—if markets and businesses suspect the president will pull this stunt again. At which point, we can probably expect the C.E.A. chairman and author of the book Dow 36,000 to claim shutdowns actually make the economy stronger.

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