The panel discussion started with Utley letting Norquist talk for a few minutes about the wonderful things that would happen once we cut taxes and forced the government to live on a reduced diet. He used the ‘starving the beast’ line twice. Then Utley turned to me. “Doctor Buckman, in your book Paying the Bills, you argue that taxes need to be maintained at current levels, or actually be raised, to meet budgetary demands. That’s pretty unusual talk for a Republican, isn’t it?”
“That’s not really what we said in the book. What we said was that the current budget scheme is not working. Revenues don’t match our outlays. We need to do one of two things, either increase revenues, or decrease outlays. If you don’t decrease what we spend, and it is wholly unrealistic to think that Congress or the President plan to do that, then revenues must be raised to a level sufficient to pay for the outlays.”
Norquist immediately piped up. “But that just makes the problem worse. We can’t keep feeding money to Washington in the vague hope that the problem will be fixed. We have to turn off the spigot, and the sooner the better!”
Russert, who was one of NBC’s rising stars, turned to me for a response. “So why won’t reducing revenues, ‘turning off the spigot’ as Mr. Norquist says, work?”
It turned my head to face him. “Because it is simplistic and unrealistic. Imagine the following scene. Tomorrow morning you get called to a meeting with your bosses here at NBC, and they have the following words for you. ‘Tim, you know how the camera adds ten pounds? Well, we saw you on the show yesterday morning and you were looking a little chubby! So we have a solution for you. We are cutting your pay ten percent, and that way you won’t be able to buy as much food, so you’ll eat less!’ Think that will work?”
The reporters on the other side of the table exploded in laughter, although Norquist wasn’t amused. After a moment, Russert said, “Please, God, don’t give them any ideas!” through a huge smile. Then he looked at the camera and said, “Maureen, it’s not true! Don’t divorce me yet!”
I continued, “You can see, though, it won’t work. Your income is now cut by ten percent, but you still have mortgage payments and car payments and saving to put your kids through school, and now you have to pay a divorce lawyer because your wife thinks you’re chubby, too! So, what do you do? Well, if you’re like most of us, you start putting stuff on your credit card.”
Norquist popped up. “No, what will happen is that you’d have to adjust, by lowering your expenses! Outlays will have to be cut to match lower revenues!”
“Never going to happen! What will happen is that you start paying for things with the credit card. Now, for you and me, and presumably Tim over there, sooner or later we are going to max out our credit cards and the credit card company will cut us off and we’ll go bankrupt. The United States is the same way. Right now we are paying with Treasury bills and bonds, borrowing against the full faith and credit of the government, but what happens when budget deficits go from the billions into the trillions? What happens when the rest of the world realizes we can’t pay back the money they have loaned us?”
There was nothing I was mentioning here that was unusual, at least to me. It was the history of political economics circa 2020. By 2010 the Chinese, who were the big buyers of American debt, were running a foreign policy not to our liking and holding us hostage to their plans. By 2020 they were buying American companies for pennies on the dollar, and paying for them with American debt. That’s how GE ended up a Chinese company, and Maggie ended up in Canada.
Norquist kept arguing that this wouldn’t happen, that this would force politicians to reduce costs and eliminate programs. I just countered, saying, “Again, it sounds great, but it won’t happen. Politicians spend money! It’s what they do. Fish swim, birds fly, politicians spend. They can either tax and spend, or borrow and spend, but they all spend. There is no legal or constitutional requirement for them not to spend. The only way to get them to balance the budget is by requiring that every new program must contain the provisions necessary to fund it, in full, from Day One.”
We went around like that for another couple of minutes before Utley brought it to a close. Afterwards I watched the rest of the show from off stage, although Norquist stormed from the studio. Utley, Russert, and No-Name talked about the discussion, and there was considerable amusement at Russert’s expense, with mention of ‘Chubby’s’ new diet plan and how his wife was dumping him.
When the show broke and Utley was left on stage to do the finish, Russert came back and found me watching. He laughed as soon as he saw me. “I’ll never hear the end of this! It’s all your fault!”
I simply had to laugh back. “You’ll just have to start on that diet then. It’s either that or the bosses are going to give you a haircut!”
He laughed some more. “I don’t think Grover likes you all that much.”
I shrugged. “He’s fixated on taxes as the be all and end all of fiscal policy. It’s a simple approach, and that allows him to sell it to people who want a simple approach. It fits in a sound bite. It’s not important if it’s right.”
“So, when are you going to run for office?” he asked, turning reporter on me.
“Never going to happen! I couldn’t afford the pay cut,” I said, laughing.
“Well, it was good to meet you, even if I do have to go home and rescue my marriage now,” he said, sticking out his hand to shake mine.
I laughed and took it, shaking it in response. “Listen, if you’re ever in Baltimore, call me. We’ll get a babysitter and I can bring my wife and you can bring yours, and all of you can yell at me. I’m sure I’m going to hear about this one from Marilyn!”
“I’ll do that.”
I drove home, and Marilyn teased me about getting poor Tim Russert a pay cut and a divorce in just ten minutes. It got me to thinking, though. Tim was going to eventually die at the age of 58 of a massive heart attack caused by a coronary thrombosis. A fat plaque was going to block one of the arteries in his heart and drop him like a stone. What if I could somehow get him taking better care of himself, lose a pound or two? Would that make him live longer? It was working with Marilyn, who was in much better shape now than in our first life. Tim Russert was too good a journalist and too good a man to let die so young.
I knew so much of what was going to happen in the world, the bad things. It was so tempting to get up on my high horse and yell, “The Marine barracks in Lebanon will be bombed!” or “Pan Am Flight 103 is going to be blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland!” and it wouldn’t have meant a damn thing. As soon as somebody asked how I knew that, what was I going to say? “I’m a time traveler from 2022 who has travelled to an alternate space-time reality.” That buys me a one way ticket to a room at Sheppard Pratt. Maybe Mom and I could get a group rate.
We did end up having dinner in Baltimore later that summer, although without our wives. He drove up to see me after an article came out in April in The Economist. I had enough material left over after we wrote Paying the Bills, that I could write a lengthy piece on public unionization. I showed it to Simon and Schuster, and though they turned it down, they passed it along to The Economist, who ran it as a cover piece. This had surprised me, and Eat the Strike! made a stir among the chattering classes in Washington.
My premise had been that while unionization had been an overall plus in the private workforce, as far as the public workforce was concerned it had been a disaster. Politicians had no incentive to control a public union’s demands. In the private sector, if Ford, for example, gave too much pay and benefits to their unions, sooner or later their costs would be too high and they would lose money to their smarter and cheaper brethren at GM and Chrysler. In the public sector there was usually no other alternative (if you let the police go out on strike, who are you going to call when there’s a robbery?) and the politicians who cave in to exorbitant demands, especially in pensions and long term health care, probably won’t be around to clean up the mess anyway.