>>>It's happened.
>>
>>If you only just found out you're probably the last person in the western world to do so :-}
>>
>>Must admit, although things looked tougher than usual, I thought they would still scrape in under the wire......
>
>I think they'll fix this soon enough, or else the people would notice that they don't notice much difference between functional and non-functional government...
>
>Look at Italy - during the 2nd half of the XX century, they had an average of one month a year without a government. Nobody remembers those months as different from others.

Italy is not exactly known as a smooth operation.

The American late night host David Letterman had a good observation last night. He said if there are 800,000 non-essential government jobs maybe that's part of the problem.