It only took 16 days, but the government shutdown managed to sap $24 billion out of the economy, according to S&P.

That's $1.5 billion a day.

"The bottom line is the government shutdown has hurt the U.S. economy," the S&P wrote. "Since our forecast didn't hold, we now have to lower our fourth-quarter growth estimate to closer to 2%."

$24 billion is a lot of money to willfully drain from the economy.

So in order to make sure Washington doesn't let this happen again, we thought we'd give a roundup of what Congress could have purchased instead.