End of the fiscal year, 1990 - 12 October 1990

Those of us who live in New York City sometimes forget that of all the tourist spots of the country, from the Alaska glaciers to the Grand Canyon, from Yosemite to Disneyland, the one that most Americans want to visit, once in their lives, is this city.

Too many of them this year are, to the distress of the travel agencies, saying "and only once". This is due to the much-publicised increase in street crime, and the national reporting of the shooting of a young man who had journeyed here last month to see, in the flesh, his tennis heroes and heroines at the United States Open Championship tournament.

Popular belief to the contrary, New York City is by no means the leading culprit in the homicide statistics. Its crime rate is about the twelfth highest in the nation, being surpassed by such unlikely towns as Phoenix way off there in the Arizona desert. Detroit has the grisly honour of being top of the list, but nobody goes to Detroit as a tourist.

Last Monday, there were, paradoxically more tourists on hand than usual, to watch the parade up Fifth Avenue which at this time of the year, on a weekend day as close as possible to the actual date 12 October, celebrates the landing on the shores of the new world, of Christopher Columbus at a place he himself christened, San Salvador.

It’s always a tremendous occasion for Italian Americans who run the parade and dominate it with floats and bands and swirling banners and prints and emblazoned likenesses of the great Genoese himself. This year, it was enlivened by, not protestors exactly, but by sceptical or sulking groups from New York's swarming Latin American or as we call, say, Hispanic community.

All very placid and, often, comical. But promising some colourful friction in the years ahead, especially two years from now when the whole country, will celebrate the 500th anniversary of the great man’s arrival. We will go into the reason for this quite new argument, a little later.

For the moment, you may well wonder, in view of my depressing remarks at the beginning, why more tourists than ever should have lined the sidewalks for the Columbus Day parade. Because it was open to the public, unlike any famous tourist attraction run by the federal government.

The Statue of Liberty is easily the first place that tourists want to see, especially since the government has spruced up the rotted arrival buildings, and completed a splendid museum of immigration, but last Monday, no ferries ran to the island that houses it, and if you’d sailed or swam there you’d have found the gates locked and the sign "Closed during government emergency".

The same is true all across the country, with the national parks and monuments, in Washington DC locks on the entrance to the Smithsonian institution, even on the great library of Congress. Why? Very simple – the government had run out of money.

No need to be alarmed, the treasury was still open, though in another 24 hours it was likely that the people who printed the money wouldn’t be there. Simply, we had come to the end of the fiscal year, of the year covered by last year’s budget.

Now, it’s assumed in most countries – it's assumed here – that the lawmakers pass a new budget well before the day it begins to go into force. Not in America, every year the president submits his version of what the budget should be and sends it to both houses of Congress. And every year, both houses hold committee hearings and trim this and argue that, and then, put it up for a vote.

Every year, they set themselves a deadline. This year it was the first of October. The enormous tail-end of the budget provides the monies for the whole civil service – for the postal employees, the national guard, the national parks, the monuments, galleries, cooks and waiters and janitors at the Capitol, the servants, guards whatnots at the White House. Their pay stops promptly at midnight of the deadline, and they all stay home.

I had breakfast the other morning with a politician who has occupied the second most important responsible executive position in the United State, which is that of the mayor of New York City. It was 30 September. I said, "Well I suppose tomorrow morning Mr Bush is going to have to cook his own breakfast, and they will lock up the Statue of Liberty".

He shook his head and creased his face into a merry smile, "It won’t happen," he said. "It never happens, there is something in the American character that loves the deadline which will barely be met. We are emotionally programmed for deadlines. In all labour negotiations to announce a settlement a week before the deadline would be an admission of failure, throwing in the towel."

Well, he was right that time. At midnight, or close to it, on 30 September, and not by any means having agreed on the budget, Congress did what it always does – it passed an emergency resolution, what you might call a temporary allowance, voting enough money to keep government employees paid for a stated number of days.

They set a new deadline of midnight, Sunday 7 October, seven days away. The president approved it by signing the measure. All right so now, once again, the leaders of both parties and the key money men in the committees of Congress and now, the president’s budget director and his staff, all sat down to work out a new budget package as they call it.

By the evening of last Sunday they were far apart and the leaders of both parties berated each other, and blamed each other’s tactics, and all of them were shocked to the marrow that on a weekend when the republic was trembling on the verge of collapse, the president should have been spending a nice country weekend at his Maryland retreat.

Sunday midnight came, no budget. The president said this time he would sign no more emergency pay cheques. So Monday morning dawned, closed down the Lincoln Memorial, the library of Congress etc, etc, and – just to show he was into the spirit of the thing – the president saved fuel on his presidential helicopter and drove into town, and actually carried his own suitcase into the White House.

Justice Souter, the latest appointee to the Supreme Court was to be sworn in in a solemn ceremony, which is always accompanied by reception and dainty refreshments. Not on Monday. There was nobody in the White House to make the sandwiches and serve the drinks. Justice Souter, took the oath and went home.

Well, finally, in the early dawning, Congress did pass another emergency resolution, temporary pay cheque, to keep the government and its employees going, until a new deadline, the nineteenth, next Friday, by which they must have a budget. The president, again, reluctantly signed the emergency resolution.

The deficit, that is what the rage to disagree has been all about. I appreciate that other people's debts are sad to think about in passing, but nothing you’d want to devote your spare time to unravelling. Very briefly then, the argument breaks down ideologically, and roughly between liberals and conservatives of both parties.

The conservatives say some new taxes may be necessary, penalising cigarettes, alcohol, luxuries but with the Persian Gulf in mind, no more drastic cuts on defence, and some cuts must be made, across the board, of welfare and social services. Nobody dares cut social security, the separate thing which gobbles up the fat 40% of the budget.

The liberals say Reagan’s tax cuts and profligate spending are what put the country in its present plight. The rich got richer, and too few invested enough. Too many spent more, everybody saved less, so we are living beyond our means. And we trust the Japanese to pay the monthly interest on the debt. But, the liberals say there must be no cuts in social services.

There are unyielding conservatives who still say tax increases on big business will produce unemployment and high inflation. No party, and neither wing of either party, will look at the unanswerable reality that during the past 40, 50 years, and through the Johnson years and the Nixon years and the carter years, as well as the Reagan years, the country has got used to more services – including social, medical, educational, welfare – than ever before and everybody assumes the government will pay for all of them.

I suppose it’s the plight of most western countries, this government anyway, is paying for more services than it can afford, a truth beyond party and beyond ideology, and nobody knows a painless cure. Now, for those tourists and protesters groups watching in the Columbus Day parade, the protesters – the sulkers anyway – are Hispanics they resent the parade's being run exclusively by Italian Americans, and you know why, because Columbus was a Spaniard – Cristobal Colon.

Of course he wasn’t. It's established beyond question, that he was born in Genoa, probably, in Italy, certainly of Italian parents. True, his patrons who financed – should I say, funded – his voyage was Spanish, he spent ten years trampling around Europe for money to back him.

He was turned down by Portugal, France, England, three times he was turned down by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. Finally they recanted and even Spaniards who believe him to have been Italian, not many say that Spain was in this way responsible for the discovery of the new world, and so it was.

But now the bad-tempered arguments are spinning and could be heard on the fringes of Monday’s parade. He was Jewish, declared one animated man, of course not he was Spanish. No he wasn’t, he was Italian. In the next two years, these errant voices will become organised into true believers and indignant dissidents.

Meanwhile my favourite commentator on the topic is a man, an Italian American, who had come over from New Jersey to march in the parade. "Everybody," said this truck driver, "everybody wants to take credit for him. We should bring him back and ask him. He will probably turn out to be Armenian."

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.