No Word from Mount Olympus - 13 August 1999

Last Friday, that's to say August 6th, every newspaper, every television tube carried the story that appears once a year. Congress goes home - or as the good grey New York Times puts it - "Lawmakers Begin Recess". What you might simply call in England, summer holidays.

The detail that would cause long gone senators and congressmen to gasp with disbelief in their graves is the date - the 6th of August - two months, at least, later than it used to happen in their day. And why? The answer is that old devil or that new devil or blessing - air conditioning.

I talked, the other week, about the history of air conditioning, about the permanent changes it had wrought in the social life and the geographical distribution of industry and most of all in the transfer of the centre of power in the Republican Party from New York and the Middle West to the Sun Belt - the long hot rim of the South from Florida through Texas and Nevada to Southern California.

I did that talk partly because the story of the discovery of the basic principle of air conditioning is fascinating but mainly in response to a correspondent, writing, I suspect, for more people than himself.

He was complaining really about frequent mentions of air conditioning because he said it really was just a form of boasting - the way "just after the war - the Second World War - Americans used to go on so tiresomely about their automobiles."

I take the point as I well remember how often, when this series of talks was very young, how astonished I was at that complaint because for years I'd been living in and reporting on a country in which the motor car was about as unremarkable and necessary as a raincoat in Ireland.

That particular complaint from Britain dwindled and vanished 20 - 25 years later when, in Britain too, a motorcar was no longer a privilege of what used to be called the upper middle class.

Similarly let me put it this way. I frequently say I go shopping round my corner - which means I walk one block east to Madison Avenue and find that four blocks alone - east and west, two up two down - four blocks alone provide all the necessities of daily life except books. They're another block to the south.

There must be, in all, say 20 - 25 shop fronts including three small restaurants. There is nothing in this part of town that's very grand.

There are two lunch counters, one delicatessen, two laundries, two pharmacies, a dry cleaner, a newsagent run by an Indian of course, a fruit and vegetable store run, of course, by a Korean. A lunch counter run by Greeks, a cobbler - shoe repair shop - a hole in the wall hardware store - once known in Britain as an ironmonger.

Well any restaurant owner on those blocks, any shopkeeper however humble, who decided not to have an air conditioner would go broke in the first two weeks.

So back to the departing Congress and the fact of life which I still can't get used to - that Congress can now go on arguing and bargaining and speechifying and chunnering two months after the first 90 degree in June which would send them into midnight sessions and wrapping up the most unwrappable topics, cooling down the hottest issues and beating it back to the grass roots - to home in Oklahoma, Oregon or wherever.

There it might be and remain just as hot as Washington but every Congressman maintained that the Washington humidity was uniquely filthy and the heat at home was comparatively bearable if not loveable.

A Texan I knew claimed that a hundred degrees on the Texas plains was actually loveable "because, friend, it's so dry, so dry between the fingers."

To be truthful the 106th Congress did very little and the one big bill it did pass interests everybody, every taxpayer alive.

But it is certain to be vetoed by President Clinton. He promised to do it and he has the power to do it. So much so that the Republican leadership refused to send it to the White House before the recess. They didn't want him, in their absence, to put on a terrific show, make a thundering Democratic speech about the wickedness of giving a fat tax cut to the rich and how about our poor children and shabby broken down schools?

This big veto-bound bill is a $792bn tax cut bill. Full stop.

Where does all this money exist? It doesn't. But a majority of both parties predicted that by 2010 the United States Treasury will have a - wait for it - $3 trillion surplus.

Both parties agree that three quarters of it will go to secure social security and increase the medical care of the aged - which is doing pretty well already. The rest the Republicans want to give back to "the people" including 70% to the rich to invest in US productivity.

The Democrats with Mr Clinton want a far smaller tax cut and the rest spent on education and more social services.

Well we could leave it there because of the amazing naïveté of both parties in telling us they know what the economy will be like 10 years from now.

However, there's one quasi-government body in Washington - non-partisan, disinterested - that you can trust when it comes to estimating the money available or the money that can be spent on any projected bill. It is the GAO - the General Accounting Office.

And the moment any senator or congressman writes a bill that estimates what it will cost and who gets how much, the GAO goes over his and everybody else's figures and announces, always, that the bill's sponsor is calculating through rose-coloured glasses.

I'm not sure whether or not the GAO has deigned to examine the entrails of the American eagle and tell us what American life will be like in 2010 but as many distinguished economists and financiers have said, we don't know what the economy will be like next Christmas let alone by 2010.

And the unconfirmed word from the GA Office is, all predictions about 2010 are pure fantasy.

There's one more thing left to say - to Britons especially. One Democratic argument is this - "Look what happened in the UK in exactly this situation." It was spelled out this week in a letter to the New York Times.

I quote. "The British government was getting plenty of money from North Sea oil in the 1980s and more money still from privatising state-owned industries. This money could have been used to build and refurbish schools, hospital, railways. Instead the government gave huge tax breaks mostly to the rich."

And what did the lucky recipients do?

Quote - "They promptly invested some overseas, played the stock market with some and blew the rest on a spree - housing prices soared, domestic manufacturing industry was neglected, went into a decline, unemployment climbed and there were riots in the streets.

"By 1992 there was a huge hole in the public finances. All the money was gone and nothing to show for it."

If you don't recognise your country from this lurid account don't blame me. It's one of the arguments coming from the Democrats. Better, they say, let the government improve things for children and the poor than give the people a whacking present and watch them buy more luxuries and trigger inflation.

In response the Republicans keep hammering away at a slogan - "It's your money, you'll know better how to spend than a pack of bureaucrats."

And at first hearing that's a very pleasant argument - "Would you rather spend your own money or have Washington - ahem - borrow it without interest?"

Each side - each party - will tell you that the other's argument is crude and silly. Unfortunately in a huge democracy elections are won, not by a thoughtful weighing of the pros and cons on the part of 60 million families, but by just such crude and silly slogans.

Remember "Did you ever have it so good?", "Had enough?", "Time for a change", Ronald Reagan's "Let's get the government off our backs."

"Our" was a masterpiece. Poor Ronald Reagan, the government an albatross round is neck, just like all the millions listening.

Franklin Roosevelt, the patrician from an old Dutch family born to secure wealth on a spacious estate with a splendid view up the Hudson River, he could make himself as much a victim of the Republicans as the humblest farmer and unemployed mechanic in the land.

"You and I know," he would say, "what these malefactors of great wealth, these economic royalists will do to us if they have their way."

There's nobody around today as cunning at making the party in opposition appear to be the opponent of "this great nation which has endured and will endure" in spite of them.

You might think that the Republicans were not so shabby with their "Would you rather spend your own money or let the government spend it for you?"

But it doesn't seem to have struck a chord. Over 70% of the population says it's not very interested in a tax cut. It comes about 10th in the list of pressing things that ought to be done.

Not believe in a tax cut - that's enough to drive every Republican bonkers. They swear that by next year's presidential election they will have assured the American people a tax cut of gigantic, of Thatcherian, proportions.

Now I'm sure quite a few astute listeners are saying - yes but, how about the oracle, the most influential man not just in the US but in the world, Mr Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board who, anytime with a word or two, could make or break most of the global economy?

Mr Greenspan so often testifies before congressional committees and they pant to see if he's going to change interest rates. He talks a dense, highly organised, jargon which is a protective device. If ever he descends or rises to English he can be in great trouble.

One ill-chosen word and markets tumble across the world. One vivid word, implying a slight criticism - a year ago he thought the stock market was a touch "exuberant" - and it started to wobble alarmingly or behave with what is known as volatility.

So there's no word from Mount Olympus but people who know him believe that even he has no private line to 2010, no secret pact with God.

In which case we can all forget the whopping tax bill which is going to die by veto anyway and hope that in the autumn both parties will compromise on a modest tax cut which will give each of us one saturated fat-free, environment friendly, low cholesterol, un-gene manipulated, organic hamburger.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC. Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.