Chapter 95: A Dinner Party

Whatever my desires are to stay quiet and out of the spotlight, I have an annoying tendency to open my fat yap every now and then and spout off about something. This manifested itself in my co-authoring the two books and getting into a high-profile pissing match with a U.S. senator. I promised Marilyn I would behave, and she just nodded and shook her finger at me, and then I turned around and accepted a speaking engagement in front of the American Conservative Union. I think at that point Marilyn gave up on making me behave, and just focused on making me be polite.

I continued talking, scheduling things when convenient. I was invited to appear on Meet the Press at the end of March, and Marilyn pushed me to go, simply to get me out of the house and out from underfoot while she recuperated. I drove down to Washington the night before and went through the same process as before and found myself in a panel discussion with three reporters on one side, and me and a fellow named Grover Norquist on the other side, discussing balancing the budget. Yes, that Grover Norquist, the fellow who singlehandedly introduced gridlock to Washington by getting Republicans to gut the federal tax system and destroy the federal budget process. In 1989 he simply seemed an interesting gadfly. The damage he managed to do didn’t become apparent until much later. I was chosen because Paying the Bills had recently been quoted by several Democrats as an example of what was wrong with the Republican Party. This had generated a reprint, and more media interest. We were considered the ‘new, young faces of the Republican Party.’

Garrick Utley was the host at that time, and he had Tim Russert and some other nobody with him as the reporters. Norquist’s position was that government was simply too big and ate up too much in the way of tax revenues. The only way to make government smaller was by cutting taxes. Starve the beast, and the beast will get smaller. This narrative, which he had been spouting since his college days in the late ‘70s (he was a year younger than me) fed directly into Ronald Reagan’s worldview - ”Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem!” In many ways, he was an interesting man, and unlike what some said, was not a radical bomb thrower. The problem was that the world was a lot more complicated than he made it out to be. There is a saying that for every serious problem there is a solution that is quick and simple - and wrong! This was just such a solution.

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 made me think, though. Tim was going to eventually die at the age of fifty-eight 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, eventually 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 into exorbitant demands, especially in pensions and long-term health care, probably won’t be around to clean up the mess anyway.

I ran some of the numbers and showed what would happen in the future, when the baby boomers currently employed began retiring after 2000. By 2010, some cities began mass layoffs of city workers to pay for pensions. This was seen in police and fire departments and teachers. The most pernicious effect was in accelerated pension vesting for hazardous duty. This was the concept where somebody in a dangerous job, a policeman for instance, would get credit for extra years when they retired. If they retired after twenty years, they might get credit for an extra five years, and get a pension based on twenty-five years. Otherwise, they could retire at fifteen years and get their full twenty-year pension. The theory was that since their jobs were so hazardous and so physically demanding, they were wearing their bodies down by an extra five years. What happened was that other unionized groups began demanding similar rights, even though they didn’t have the same excuse. So, police secretaries began getting extra credit because their jobs put them in police stations with criminals, even though they were never anywhere near them. The net effect was to massively increase pension and health care liabilities.

After the article came out, I was on both Meet the Press and This Week with David Brinkley again. Marilyn teased me by saying that I should get an apartment in Washington if I was going to spend so much time down there. I teased her right back, saying it would be a great place to stash my mistress, which got her hooting and hollering at me. Later that night I showed her all the sorts of things I had my mistress do for me. I also was featured on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, with me broadcasting from Maryland Public Television in Owings Mills, which I had also done during the hoopla after Paying the Bills came out. Louis Rukeyser had me on twice to do his show Wall $treet Week with Louis Rukeyser, which he ran from there.

Not every article was related to economics or politics. In the fall of ‘89Fortune was back on our doorstep, followed closely by Forbes. Back in 1986, following the publicity surrounding our initial successes with Microsoft, Autodesk, and Adobe, we had managed to snake the Staples deal out from under Mitt Romney and Bain Capital. Now that Staples had gone public, we had made another big killing. Even better, the Bain deal would have been done mostly with invested capital, and not with a whole lot of Bain money; our deal had been mostly our money, with some invested money on the side. Their deal had the lowest risk, but our upside was far higher. The best part, at least for the firm, was that I had little to do with the deal, being focused at the time on tech deals. This was totally Jake Junior’s and Melissa’s project.

Fortune was the first to piece it all together, tracing it with somebody inside Staples and a disgruntled junior VP at Bain who had lost his job when they lost the deal. Our team had kept their mouths shut, unsurprising since we had been the winners. Now that the deal was public and Staples’ stock was blowing through the roof, we could talk. I let Jake and Missy do most of the talking. Fortune focused on the deal; Forbes focused on me. Their piece focused on the growth of the Buckman Group and my rise in the standings of the Forbes 400. I found this massively distracting. Let them talk about Jake and Missy; they had earned it. The day of the IPO, I had a tub full of chilled champagne bottles brought to the office (along with limo service home!)

In late October, John invited Marilyn and me to a dinner party at his house. What I found curious, though, was when he mentioned I should wear a suit, which was a bit more formal than usual. “Yeah, okay. Marilyn to wear a dress, too? She can’t wear her bag lady sweat suit then?” I asked.

“I’m going to tell her you said that, and Helen, too, so they can both hit you.”

I laughed. “They probably hit like girls!” That got a laugh out of John.

And so, the third Friday in October, Marilyn and I drove over to the Steiners. When I was a kid, John had lived in Timonium, in a mid-sized Cape Cod style home off Timonium Road. Now, however, after his investment in the Buckman Group had paid off, they had bought a new home out in a development in Hunt Valley. Bigger house and bigger property and nice. Not a McMansion, but close. We got there at seven, which is when he said cocktails would start.

We weren’t the first there. Both of John and Helen’s kids, Allen and Rachel, had left the nest years ago, so I knew it wasn’t their cars in the driveway. We walked up the driveway and rang the bell, and Helen opened the door. She had a cordless telephone to her ear and looked terribly distracted. “Oh, good, you’re here! No, some people at the door...”, she then said into the phone. I smiled at Marilyn. Helen kept on with her two-way conversation until her husband came up to us and took the phone from her hands.

He spoke into it. “This is wonderful news, Pumpkin! You come home next week and visit, and your mother can plan the rest of your life for you. Bye!” He hit the END button.

Helen gushed, “Rachel just called! She’s engaged!”

“Congratulations! Now we know what you’re going to spend money on next year, John,” I said, grinning.

“Don’t laugh! You have two,” he replied.

I shrugged. “Maybe I’ll get lucky, and they’ll just live in sin.”

That earned me an elbow in the ribs from Marilyn. I turned to her, smiling, and found her wagging a finger at me. “My daughters are going to be married in a church!”

“Yes, but are they my daughters? How do I know you didn’t subcontract out the first half of the job? I only know I was there for the second half,” I responded. That earned laughter from the Steiners and spluttering from Marilyn. John led us through the foyer into their living room.

There were five other people in the room, a couple in their late fifties, another couple in their forties, and a young man a few years younger than Marilyn and I. John made the introductions. The older couple were Bob and Millie Destrier, and the younger couple were Rich and Renee Miller. The single guy was Brewster McRiley, otherwise known as ‘Brew.’ I didn’t recognize any of them from anything business related, so I wondered why I was meeting them like this.