Maybe there were several hundred thousand federal workers with nothing to do this week, but Gretchen and I have been as busy as one-armed paper hangers. Apparently, there’s nothing like the economic repercussions of a government shutdown combined with the impending financial cataclysm of a US government default to increase the demand for nearly every kind of advice. All week I’ve been explaining our inscrutable Constitution and its eccentric legislative system to rich, worried foreigners and then coming up with various strategies for them to avoid going down the tubes along with Uncle Sam.
Even the Danes, who are the only other industrialized democracy to have a debt ceiling, are completely gobsmacked by what we do with ours here in America. They created theirs as a constitutional device to transfer responsibility for administration of Denmark’s governmental debts from their Ministry of Finance to their central bank. That would be as if we were to hand dealing with our national debt over to the Federal Reserve – a move that no doubt the merest suggestion of which would be virtually guaranteed to give ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundredths percent of Tea Party sympathizers an acute attack of apoplexy and thereby cause them to need some very expensive health care. Hmmmm… perhaps President Obama could propose it during the next round of debt ceiling negotiations with congressional Republicans.
Anyway, the Danes set their debt ceiling so high, a country that size could never reach it, no matter how much welfare, unemployment payments and free medical benefits the Danish government handed out to lazy, shiftless Scandinavian layabout moochers with pre-existing conditions who won’t pull the wagon like they should. The idea that members of the Danish parliament would use the Danish debt ceiling to blackmail the Danish government into repealing laws it had already passed seems like an idea straight from Mars, as far as they Danes are concerned. The same thing goes for shutting down the government to get what can’t be achieved through normal electoral and parliamentary processes, for that matter. In their quaint Nordic view, that kind of shenanigans simply isn’t proper, and besides, behaving like that would upset Queen Margrethe Alexandrine, which none of them could ever bring themselves to do, because she’s so nice. I guess moving to Denmark is one option – if they will let you in, of course.
Bottom line, it was another working Saturday for Gretchen and me, and I didn’t finish with my last client today until 7:45, after which, I don’t mind saying, I was craving a good, stiff cocktail of top-shelf liquor made by the skilled hands of the guys and gals behind the Round Robin Bar. And so it was, that I had gotten about half way through a velvet smooth Svedka vanilla vodka, Godiva chocolate liqueur and Kahlúa white Russian when Rodney plunked his ample African American frame down on the chair next to me. He’s the Special Assistant Administrative Administrator for Administrative Assistance in the District of Columbia government, and, as might be expected under the current circumstances, he was a complete nervous, emotional and psychological wreck.
“Buy me a drink, okay, Tom?” Rodney suggested as he slapped me on the back in a forced and falsely good-natured fashion while simultaneously surveying the available bottles of spirits.
“Sure,” I replied, “what’ll you have?”
“Hey, bartender,” he commanded, “One Macallan 25 scotch, one Martin Mills 24 bourbon and one Sam Adams Utopia beer! He’s paying!”
“Classic Rodney,” I opined. “You’ve always had the touch for the top.”
“The man with a touch for the top gets to knock the bottom out,” Rodney responded with a chuckle. “’Cause the ladies give their thing to the men what has the bling. And ain’t nothin’ gonna change that. Speakin’ of which,” he whispered, leaning closer, “I got some mighty fine Bolivian flake on tap tonight – right off the plane at Dulles – European diplomatic pouch, completely uncut, eighty-five percent pure, guaranteed; only one-seventy a gram – and I can do ya a eight-ball for five-fifty, a half ounce for a grand, or a ounce for eighteen hundred.”
“Given that most coke heads pay a hundred a gram for stuff that’s between fifteen to forty-five percent pure,” I conceded in a whisper of my own, “that’s an excellent deal, Rodney. But you know me – I only get good and drunk, like the Lord Almighty intended.”
“You don’t have to take it yourself,” Rodney prodded. “I mean, how ‘bout the women, huh? You must know some of them who’ll do… just about anything if you give them enough primo coke like this.”
“Actually,” I informed him, “the thought has never even crossed my mind.”
“Oh, [expletive], man,” Rodney beseeched, “look, dude, you can flush the [expletive] down the [expletive] toilet if you [expletive] want to, just [expletive] buy some, all right? I really need the [expletive] money!”
“Why don’t I just loan you some money instead?” I offered.
Rodney’s eyes narrowed suspiciously as the bartender delivered his drinks. “How much?”
“Two hundred?” I opened.
“A thousand,” he countered.
“Three fifty?” I asked.
“Eight hundred,” he proposed.
“Four hundred,” I stipulated.
“Seven,” he insisted.
“Four fifty,” I suggested.
“Five?” Rodney inquired with a hopeful tone.
As I have mentioned before in this Web log, I’m the kind of guy who always carries between five hundred and a thousand dollars in his wallet, and tonight I happened to have six hundred and thirty on me. So it was no problem for me to provide Rodney with five hundred dollars cash, and furthermore, I knew that, being a member of the District government, cash money is what he would prefer. “Okay, here you go,” I said as I handed it to him, “hope you don’t mind that it’s not all small bills.”
“Don’t mind a bit,” Rodney confirmed as he accepted the money and his face broke into a broad smile. “I mean, it’s not like you expect me to do nothin’ for it.”
“I certainly don’t,” I assured him. “I would never expect anybody who works for the DC government to do anything.”
“And you’d be damn right!” Rodney proclaimed as he stashed the cash in his Burberry overcoat. “Don’t matter how much money you give us, ain’t nobody in the DC government gonna do squat for it.”
“As everybody in DC – and the surrounding suburbs, for that matter – knows all too well,” I sighed as I watched Rodney rapidly kill his shots of whiskey and then slowly pour his beer into a glass. “But this is the first time you’ve asked me for a… um… loan.”
“I know,” he admitted as he began sipping his beer. “Usually I’m payin’ you for advice and [expletive] on how to run the District of Columbia. But this shutdown [expletive] done dried up all the money! [Expletive], man, we folks in the DC government, we’re hurtin’, know what I mean? And it’s all total bull [expletive], too, you know? ‘Cause only like twenty-eight percent of our money is federal grants, okay? Lots of other cities get more than that, don’t they? Plus, we get more than ten percent of our revenue from parking meters, parking enforcement, speeding cameras and red light cameras – nobody else gets that much, do they? And fifty-nine percent of rest is from local taxes the District collects by itself. [Expletive], man, that money’s ours, ain’t it? How come Congress thinks they can tell us how to spend our own [expletive] money, huh? Is that a big, stinkin’ mother-[expletive] pile of neo-colonialist [expletive] or what?”
“Well,” I conditionally agreed, “there’s no argument that the seventy-two percent you don’t get from the federal government is yours, anyway.”
“Man,” he huffed, “if they would only let us spend seventy-two [expletive] percent of our [expletive] money, even that would be okay with me! But the way they’re workin’ it now, we don’t get jack [expletive], and lemme tell ya, them hos, they won’t even say they love you unless you pay ‘em, even if you a regular! And what’s more, the rent’s due on my main squeeze’s apartment, not to mention what I got to pay for me and my wife’s house in Foxhall and my two kids to go to private school. And I got a completely tricked out Expedition that’s up for fifty thousand mile maintenance and I ain’t had a bottle of Cristal in days!”
“Coping with such incredible hardships,” I commiserated, “must be very trying indeed.”
“[Expletive], man,” he spat, “[expletive] tell me about it!”
“So it’s hardly surprising,” I observed, “that Mayor Gray confronted Senator Harry Reid on the steps of the Capitol earlier this week and demanded that he back the Republican bill to release funds for the District of Columbia.”
“[Expletive] yeah,” Rodney grumbled. “If DC wasn’t a [expletive] colony, if we had statehood, like we should – with a real representative in Congress and two senators of our own – then nobody’d be disrespectin’ us like this!”
“You’d get all the respect that Wyoming gets,” I observed. “They have one representative and two senators, as well.”
“[Expletive] yeah,” he nodded with satisfaction, obviously pleased with the thought. “We’d pass a commuter tax on those [expletive] from Maryland and Virginia – uh, no offense, of course – and take it right out of their paychecks!”
“I’m sure you would,” I acknowledged.
“And we’d pass state laws to make the federal government pay DC taxes on the National Zoo and all them fancy art galleries and museums and stuff down on the Mall – we’d even tax the White House and the Capitol! Make ‘em pay to be here in DC, that’s what we’d do! Then we’d have the kind of cash we deserve, yeah, man, and that would be some [expletive] decent money, too! I’d dump that Expedition and that Benz get me a Ferrari and a Lamborghini and a Hummer, and get me two or three [expletive] on the side with their own apartments and [expletive] me some of them super-fine five thousand dollar a night call girls and wear ten thousand dollar suits and [expletive] take baths in [expletive] Cristal!”
“In other words,” I pointed out, “you’d live like your boss does now, or, at least, how he did before the federal shutdown.”
“Uh… yeah,” Rodney grinned in a flash of realization as he finished his beer. “If DC was a state, I wouldn’t need no [expletive] promotion to have all that [expletive]. Uh… by the way… would you mind buyin’ me some more drinks?”