U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar urged her colleagues to put aside political games and pass a bill to stop the shutdown.

“The American people are sick and tired of the gridlock and political brinkmanship in Washington,” Klobuchar said. “Instead of lurching from crisis to crisis, we need to focus on real solutions that move our country forward. The Senate has passed a straightforward bill that would keep the government open so we can work on a long-term, balanced plan for deficit reduction. The House of Representatives has only passed bills that the President has said he would veto.  This gamesmanship needs to end so we can stop this shutdown and get the government back to work.”

According to Mark Zandi, Chief Economist at Moody’s Analytics, a government shutdown lasting 3 or 4 days would cost the economy approximately 0.2 percentage points of annualized GDP growth in the fourth quarter of 2013. Shutting down the government for 3 or 4 weeks would reduce real GDP by 1.4 percentage points in the fourth quarter and a shutdown longer than two months could precipitate a recession.

Klobuchar, the Senate Chair of the Joint Economic Committee (JEC), also recently released a report outlining the economic consequences of debt ceiling brinkmanship. The report notes that brinkmanship over the debt ceiling in 2011 resulted in a downgrade of the U.S. credit rating, a 2,000 point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and an added $1.3 billion in taxpayer-funded borrowing costs for the U.S. Treasury. Bringing the country to brink of default in 2013 could have similar, if not worse, consequences for the economy.