In the event of government shutdown, members of congress and the president continue to receive their regular salary. In the case of the president this is about $400,000 per year. If we assume your average government employee to make around the mean salary in America (around $40,000), then temporarily deferring payment to the president is equivalent to the furlough of one hundred of these average employees. For members of congress, it's equivalent to about fifty average employee's salaries. Is it not logical to cut the large expenditures as well as the hundreds of thousands of comparatively small ones?



