Running With The Big Dogs: Sybil Norcroft Book Six (2 page)

Chapter Two

White House Conference Center [an annex building of the White House], 726 Jackson Place in Washington, D.C., October 28, 2019, 0800 hrs
-Present: POTUS; VPOTUS; Surgeon General Sybil Norcroft; Attorney General; Speaker of the House; Senate Majority Leader; Secretaries of State, HHS, Treasury; Chairman CEA [Council of Economic Advisors]; Chairman, Federal Reserve Board; Chairperson, Council of Economic Advisers for the Congressional Joint Economic Committee.
Re: Impending failure to meet the year’s end interest payment on the national debt.

P
resident Parker Conrad Willets had one more year to go before his second term came to an end. Already, the 2020 election season was underway with more than the usual intensity, and there was still more than a year to go before the general election. The Democrats had seized on the latest recession as the main issue they needed to push to put them back in power in the White House, and hopefully in both houses of Congress. As usual, the causes of the recession were multi-factorial and complicated; but the collective memories of the American public were very short and poorly informed. The sitting president was at fault; one had only to become aware of two of President Willets’ predecessors—George W. Bush, and Barack Obama—and their dismal popularity ratings in their second terms when they, too, were the presidents of record when a major recession gripped the country.

He greeted his serious audience in the large conference room of the annex building across the road from the White House.

“Thank you for coming. I think we have a perfect attendance today, and that bespeaks the importance of what we must discuss here. It is late in the day to mince words: we are in trouble, probably more than ever before in our history since the War of 1812. Even the grim specter of sequestration has not forced us to compromise and to cut our addiction to spending. Richard Pennyweight from Treasury, Jimmy Ropelarve from the Federal Reserve, Dwayne Fitzsimmons, from the Council of Economic Advisors, and Margaret Thampcross from the Council of Economic Advisers for the Congressional Joint Economic Committee, are here to give us the worst quarterly report in the history of the country since before the 2008 Great Recession. They will give us full reason to get our house in order. I will turn the time over to Secretary Pennyweight who will head-up the panel of expert economists. All of the fine people who will speak to us this morning are unanimous—I repeat that; unanimous—in their conclusion about what is wrong and what must be done to fix it. Secretary Pennyweight…”

Secretary Pennyweight was overweight but carried his bulk well under a perfectly custom tailored suit by Freeman Sportsman Club in Brooklyn, his ties made by TieCrafters in Chelsea, and his shoes from John Lobbs on Madison Avenue—for the past forty years. He was quite literally a belt and suspenders man; they were made for him at Trafalgars in Manhattan. His belts were classic Newington alligators; his braces classic 100% pure woven silk. Pennyweight’s most important nod to vanity and his least obvious were his human hair wigs from Lugos on Dyckman Street. He hated the male pattern baldness that left him with a monk’s tonsure look that aged him ten years. He was 62 but looked 48 after his face lift and with his perfectly coifed light-brown toupee.

“My fellow Americans,” he began, “I address you this way because we have an American problem—not a Republican or Democrat, or urban or rural, or rich or poor, problem. The directors of the federal government councils of economic advisors, the best minds at treasury and the Fed, and a host of objective university economists, are for the first time in my memory, unanimous in our findings and opinions. Our economy—as we now know it—will not serve us five years from now if we do not get it under control. In fact, if we default on our loans from the Chinese, that change will be upon us for all practical matters in January of 2021. We will take the blame for the consequences, whether we are truly responsible or not. Capitalism and market economic practices have failed us. Greed has not been good. Keynesian economics has failed us; our episodic coziness with socialistic economic experiments has failed us. We have learned beyond doubt that we cannot spend our way into prosperity.

“After prolonged studies of the American democracy, either Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835 or Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee, in 1790, expressed their evidencebased criticism of the economic stability of democracies. In essence, what they said was, ‘a democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy. They went on to point out that the average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years… always to be followed by a dictatorship.’

P. J. O’Rourke put it more succinctly and pithily, ‘A government with the policy to rob Peter to pay Paul can be assured of the support of Paul, and giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.’ The PRC [Peoples Republic of China]—which owns more than 60% of our debt—stands fully ready to solve our problem for us.

“One does not have to be an historian to see the truth which de Tocquefulle and Tytler said. You hardly have to look back ten years. Our government bodies cannot agree on policies critical to the survival of our nation. Republicans spend us into penury on military gadgetry and support of fat cats. Democrats have created entitlements for their constituents who are the poor, the needy, the handicapped, the unionists, the pensioners, the illegal immigrants, and on and on. Until the past year, each succeeding presidential administration and change in Congress has solved the problem in two ways: kick the stone on down the road for a few years and borrow. We have not been able to pay anything on the principle of our indebtedness for two decades. And now, my fellow Americans, we may not be able to pay even the quarterly interest we owe.

“Mark my words, we will make drastic changes in the next two months, or the tide of history will wash over us, and the America we know will be irretrievably altered. We are not going to like any solution we come up with here, but we will hate the results of failure to act responsibly. I will open the session to the other experts now with the question: irrespective of political reverberations, what can we do? Or more to the point, what must we do?”

The Chairman CEA [Council of Economic Advisors], William Sizemore, spoke next in answer to Secretary Pennyweight’s query: “I’ll quote Tytler again. He wrote a profound treatise on the causes of the downfall of the Athenian democracy. He said, ‘Nor were the superior classes in the actual enjoyment of a rational liberty and independence. They were perpetually divided into factions, which servilely ranked themselves under the banners of the contending demagogues; and these maintained their influence over their partisans by the most shameful corruption and bribery, of which the means were supplied alone by the plunder of the public money.’ That’s us in a nutshell. So, the first thing we must do as officials united in the effort to stave off this impending disaster, is to effect a radical change in how our government functions—down with greed and the incessant electioneering, and up with the sweaty and unpopular work of cutting pork and adding to the austerity program with an increase in taxes—not just the ‘tax the rich’ concept that has become the Republican mantra, but raise taxes across the board. Everyone is going to have to hurt.”

The Speaker of the House, Sanjay Sengupta took his turn, “I want to be re-elected as much as the next person, but we can no longer keep on having one or the other party constantly attacking the other at the expense of the American people. I have reluctantly come to the personal conclusion that I am not significant enough that I must be re-elected to my current post or to be elected president, and it is high time that the rest of the elected officials agree with that sentiment. Tomorrow, we need to get term limits, ethics, and seniority preferences limitations, legislation under way. We have to stop our eleventh hour brinkmanship, earmarks, and other non-budgetary gimmicks. Regrettably, the by-product of this budget gamesmanship is a dramatic reduction in genuine tax policy consideration; and we can no longer afford to do that.

“We on the Democrat side of the aisle of the House are as concerned as the loyal opposition on the right. Acting in my role as Speaker of the House, I will introduce an omnibus bill that will make earmarks illegal, among other things. Earmarks reflect a broken budget process and reward frank dishonesty. Almost always earmarks reward parochial interests at the expense of national needs. The earmarking process also often subverts established merit-based, competitive, or formula-driven budget processes without debate. Ultimately earmarks may fund projects many people consider worthy enterprises for the public to pursue, but the earmark process does not guarantee these are the
most
beneficial and worthwhile projects for the nation or the project that warrants priority. I have a bipartisan group of blue dog Democrats who are forming a caucus with moderately centric Republicans to get ethics legislation before the Congress which will include serious efforts to adopt term limits. These changes are so sweeping that we will probably have to get a constitutional amendment through—maybe more than one.”

Vice-President Tanner L. Oldroyd spoke next, “Secretary of State Thompson Kennedy and I have had a secret meeting with PRC Chairman Liew Bao-Zhi in Beijing two weeks ago. He and the Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China have agreed in principle to give us an extension of the deadline for payment of the interest owed them for one year on condition…”

“What conditions?!” demanded Margaret Thampcross, the most fiscally liberal of all the members of the Congressional and Executive economic advisors.

“Unpalatable ones, I regret to say; but nothing more than we should be ready to do ourselves. They are brief: First, the next budget of the United States will have a no-new-debts provision; and we must enact legislation that guarantees a balanced budget in two years. Second, beginning with the budget of 2022, a provision must be placed in every succeeding budget that a 10% payment of our national debt principal is included until the entire debt is cleared. Third, we will cease any governmental rhetoric critical of the PRC.”

Secretary Kennedy said, “I know it seems almost impossible to meet the demand that we no longer exercise our constitutional right to freedom of speech when it comes to the Chinese, but that requirement was a good deal less onerous that the alternative they initially presented. Chairman Liew told us right up front that if we failed in any part of those three requirements that the PRC would call due the principle of our debt—all of it. That debt now totals just over $18 trillion of which 60 plus percent is owed the Chinese. $18 trillion is equal to the GDP of the communist Chinese nation. Richard Pennyweight from Treasury, Jimmy Ropelarve from the Federal Reserve, Dwayne Fitzsimmons, from the Council of Economic Advisors, and Margaret Thampcross from the Council of Economic Advisers for the Congressional Joint Economic Committee or just about any university professor of economics or most well-informed persons on the street can tell you without hesitating that we don’t have anything like that kind of money.”

“And, we will be bankrupt the next day,” Ropelarve said in his usual dour manner.

“There will be a firestorm in the country, widespread unemployment, failed businesses, and bread lines,” Margaret Thampcross added morosely, “but as bad as that will undoubtedly be, nothing compares to the specter of U.S. bankruptcy and the greatest and longest depression that the world will ever see, if we don’t do what we know we must and do it starting tomorrow.”

Sybil Norcroft, M.D., Ph.D., F.A.C.S., the Surgeon General, added another grim reality, “The days of business-as-usual in medical care delivery are over. The best and the brightest people in academic medicine and in the world of major health care delivery have come up with lists of what they call ‘impossible problems’ for which they believe there are solutions that would take time, but which they believe will work. Consider just a few: for all its good intentions, the PPACA [Patient Portability and Affordable Care Act] or ‘Obamacare’ as it is known pejoratively, has failed. I could talk all day about why. Equally, and lamentably, capitalism or ‘the market-place’—as the Tea-Partiers like to term it—has also failed and that failure worsens daily. We do not deliver the best medical care in the world or even good care for our lower socioeconomic strata. This year alone, one-third of all of the patients in our so-called healthcare system—which incidentally does not provide care to 45 million people at all and is not a system by any definition in the world—harmed one-third of the patients who came asking for care. We spend nearly $30 trillion a year, and even conservative estimates indicate that more than $800 billion were wasted. Mind you, ladies and gentlemen, that figure starts with a ‘B’. It is obvious that just eliminating duplication, waste, and fraud, would go a significant ways to pay off our onerous debt. I have a proposal that is as terrible as any yet tendered here today and as necessary.”

President Willets looked at Sybil earnestly.

“Dr. Norcroft, we need to hear your proposal, but the hour is getting late. Let us all think on this and meet again tomorrow morning. Can you have the necessary information ready for us by then?”

“HHS Secretary Margoles and I have already prepared a white paper with all of the data to support our proposal. We can give a presentation tomorrow; but, be warned, Mr. President, it will take a couple of hours; and it will be technical. It should also be extremely persuasive.”

“I would expect nothing less from you, Dr. Norcroft. I’ll try and get a good rest tonight to be able to listen to numbers.”