What Shutdown? Federal Spending Per Day Is Down Only 7% Authored by Mark Brandly via The Mises Institute, In our Principles of Microeconomics courses, we sometimes consider whether a firm should shutdown some line of production. A firm shuts down when it ceases operations, when it closes down and stops its production. The firm stops spending money on everything except its fixed costs. A federal government “shutdown” has a completely different meaning. There has been much hand wringing over the current government shutdown that began on December 22 of last year. The Treasury department, with its Daily Treasury Statements, has provided us with details regarding federal spending through January 18. So we have the data on the first four weeks of the shutdown. Let’s try to determine the definition of a government shutdown. In order to have some baseline for comparison, consider the budget...