Maybe, but I think it's ironic that this shutdown is over a Republican (well, Trumpist) initiative to spend more money, while it's the Democrats who want to hold the line on spending.
It's not really money. You'd need 3 or 4 significant figures to even tell the difference, depending on how you calculate it. With less, the wall completely disappears in the rounding.
Maybe that says something bad about the size of the rest of the budget. It's kind of disturbing that the wall cost is like loose change dropped down under a seat cushion and forgotten.
To put it another way, the wall cost is just half a day of the federal budget. Most likely, we've already blown far more than that on the cost of the shutdown.
Scaling things down to median American household sizes, it's like a couple getting a divorce because one person insists on spending $16.81 to $93.42 and the other person is flipping out over it.
Absolutely, this is not really over money. I think if you look at the past few decades, Democrats have been better at being fiscally conservative, for whatever reason, but this is a battle over principles, not money.
