The One Chart That Explains Why The Government Shutdown Is Economic Sabotage

The nation’s biggest employer has abruptly shut itself down.

It’s difficult to describe the ramifications of suddenly taking $300 million a day out of an economy where millions of Americans are already out of work. But this graph from Gallup shows the immediate effect the shutdown has had on consumer confidence, which is now 14 points lower than it was the week before the shutdown. This means consumers haven’t been this pessimistic since December of 2011.

In the mid-1990s — during the last government shutdown — the economy was far healthier, which may explain why Americans already view this shutdown as more serious than the last one.