Then, in late June Marilyn blackmailed me into something I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to do. Well, maybe blackmail isn’t the proper term. Fraud doesn’t seem right, either. Coercion, that’s what it was, coercion! I was totally unprepared for her idea. My pants were on the floor, and Marilyn was giving me a blowjob, when, right at the point where I should have been happily sighing in bliss as she swallowed, she stopped and said, “Carling, I was thinking, maybe we could have another child…”
All contracts entered into when the parties aren’t wearing pants are to be considered null and void! All contracts entered into when the parties are exchanging bodily fluids are to be considered especially null and void! I couldn’t even argue about it at the time, since we were sixty-nining, and Marilyn was sitting on my face at the time she made this announcement. I was being smothered and sexually tormented at the same time. It’s just not fair!
This time I didn’t cave in completely. First I made her finish me off, then we discussed it reasonably and rationally. By that I mean that I agreed to it. Marilyn agreed that if she didn’t catch immediately, she was to give me blow jobs and let me fuck her ass when she was on the rag. Then we sealed the deal missionary style.
I’m not completely sure that any of this made for a valid contract. I seem to remember something from a business law class about the elements of a contract, and I don’t ever recall oral sex being part of the list.
Anyway, by the end of August, Marilyn had missed her latest period, which she enthusiastically told me about that night. Very enthusiastically, too, as in lock Dum-Dum out of the room and break out the handcuffs and lube enthusiastic. She was expecting our next child in May of 1989.
We decided to call the new book Paying the Bills: America’s Need For A Balanced Budget. While I am personally socially liberal, without a doubt I am a fiscal conservative. This new book gave a history of political economics in America, and showed the effects of entitlement growth, and the effect on government policy. I had almost no hope that anything would ever be done about the problem, because people just didn’t want to deal with the problem.
Much of it dated back to FDR, who simply cranked up the printing presses to pay for the New Deal. One of those programs of his was Social Security, which was considered by most, and sold to the public as, a government run annuity. You paid into the insurance fund, and then at the end, you retired and collected what you had paid in. The reality was that Social Security was actually a massive Ponzi scheme. It was never funded, and politicians routinely increased what was being paid out and routinely cut the taxes needed to fund it. There was never a requirement that you could only get out what you had paid in. It was a pyramid scheme that depended on ever increasing numbers of young workers to pay for older retirees.
That was just the start. The Great Society brought us medical insurance programs like Medicare and Medicaid, which did the same thing. Sold to the public as insurance programs, they were anything but, funded entirely out of current revenues and taxes. By the Eighties the numbers were becoming large enough to worry about. By the Nineties they became scary, and by the turn of the century they were totally out of control. By some calculations, the bulk of American taxes and borrowing were going to pay for mandated entitlement programs.
Paying the Bills detailed these issues. It wasn’t new stuff, but it was important stuff. The average politician wanted to do two things — lower taxes and raise spending. These were the things that got them re-elected. The American public didn’t want to hear the truth, that they couldn’t have their cake and eat it too. They wanted a steady diet of cake, cake, and more cake! A politician who promised them cake, and then told them it was good for them and non-fattening and, best of all, free, got elected. Very few presidents were able to balance the budget, and most of the time it was by accounting miracles and tricks. Some of these we exposed and some we simply recited the problems with.
Ultimately the problem was with the American public itself. They knew they were being lied to, but that was still better than facing the music and paying the piper. Every poll ever taken showed that the American public wanted these programs, along with every other government subsidy or handout available. They simply didn’t want to pay for them, definitely not at the level necessary. It would require a national sales tax or value added tax, and income tax levels would need to rise significantly, as in they would probably need to double or more.
So how was it all paid for? Simple! First, simply crank up the printing presses and print more dollar bills, but that caused inflation, and had the problem in that it added to the deficit. Second, and ultimately more corrosive, was to borrow the money. The U.S. had the world’s best credit rating, but eventually even America can only borrow so much money before people figure out it can’t pay it back. That was the ultimate problem and cause for the Great Recession. Economies are cyclical, and recessions and depressions happen with regularity, but it makes a whole lot of difference whether you have money in your pocket when it happens, or if you owe the bank a shitload of money. It’s no different for countries.
Paying the Bills came out just after Thanksgiving, and proved a sensation, though perhaps not in the way we had intended. It had been an election year, and George H.W. Bush had handily beaten Michael Dukakis, one of the most ineffectual candidates the Democrats had ever run. Within days of publication, it had made the New York Times Non-Fiction Best Seller List, and was the talk of the chattering classes across the country. Liberals condemned the book, saying it vastly overstated the costs of these wonderful programs, and that I wanted to throw the old, sick, and poor off the American gravy train. Conservatives, on the other hand, lauded these ideas, but said I had overstated the costs involved — we didn’t need to raise taxes, but lower them! Worst of all, newly elected President Bush had famously (and stupidly) made his ‘Read my lips! No new taxes!’ pledge, and here I was saying he was wrong.
Joe Throttlemeyer, my co-author, an economist at Penn State, couldn’t handle the nonsense and he dumped all the questions on me. For this book, my name had been listed first, and I thanked him ever so sweetly for giving out my number. Two weeks after the book came out, our agent at Simon and Schuster called me and told me that the Sunday talk shows wanted me. I had eschewed a book tour this time, but I couldn’t turn down This Week with David Brinkley. Saturday night I drove down to Washington and spent the night in the Hay-Adams again, but without Marilyn. We had stayed there when I received the award lo those many years ago from the Bahamian government. She was staying home with the kids and promised to tape the show.
Welcome to the big leagues! David Brinkley was not Oprah Winfrey! He was a smart interviewer and had been around the Washington news game since before I was born. He was not going to be a pushover and ask puff questions. Worse, I wasn’t his only guest that morning. He had me on along with ‘The Lion of the Senate’, Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy, perhaps the most liberal Democrat in the Senate. Kennedy had already been quoted disparaging the book. Nothing like a friendly audience to give you that warm and fuzzy feeling.