2030_ The Real Story of What Happens to America - Albert Brooks [13]
Money makes the world go ’round and debt makes it stop in its tracks. Sure, a president could still fire weapons and was still commander in chief and the official spokesperson for the nation, but that wasn’t the fun part. The fun part was making real changes that could affect generations to come. But that took money. A lot of it. Money that was no longer there.
Bernstein longed for the days of FDR, or even Barack Obama, where it was still possible and Congress would go deep into debt to give a president trillions to try to make things happen. But now the rules were changed. After the national debt passed one hundred percent of the gross national product, stiff new regulations were imposed on the executive branch.
Congress had always had the last word. But in previous administrations, the president still had the power of persuasion. Now the majority of Congress was elected with the promise of taking that power back. Successfully blaming past administrations for continuing to run America into the red, people running for the House or Senate convinced their constituencies that the White House was too powerful. That that was the cause of the problem. It was all bullshit, of course, but it led to a new era in gridlock. It was as if every member of Congress ran for his or her own presidency. Candidates never aligned themselves with the White House anymore, or even with their own party. They ran as individuals, on the notion of returning America to the people. What it really did was introduce a new kind of motionless government. Nothing got done. Denying new spending provided the House and Senate with the illusion of expressing the people’s voice. But the people didn’t want their lives and the nation’s infrastructure to rust away. What they really wanted was somebody to make tough choices, really tough choices, which took a leader. And the one thing the legislative branch could never be was a leader. That was the president’s job, and that was why Matthew Bernstein ran. And even if it was getting impossible to change things, he still wanted to try.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The first time it happened, no one thought anything more about it than they did about the random acts of violence that always occurred. In January of 2026, someone boarded a bus on its way to an Indian casino near Palm Desert, California, and shot twelve people, killing nine and injuring three. The odd thing was that the bus had thirty people on board, and anyone who appeared to be under forty was left untouched.
The shooter was a young man, twenty-six years old, and he was killed by the driver, so no one could ever talk to him to find out what was in his mind. His family and friends were interviewed and they came out with the usual stuff: “He seemed so quiet.” “He was such a nice guy, a great neighbor.” The couple who owned the Korean bakery even said they thought of him like a son. But upon further questioning it became clear they meant he was the size of their son, they weren’t referring to how they felt about him.
Violence in 2026 was really the same as it had always been. There were gangs and murders and domestic disputes and robberies, all the stuff that never changes. The one group that did seem to grow in stature was the neo-Nazi gangs, the skinheads. These people hated everything America had become. And where blacks and Jews had always been number one and two on their list, the newly legalized Hispanics made them even more nuts. The “last of the true white people,” as they called themselves, they realized they were never going to get America back, and all they could hope for was to make it really unpleasant for everyone else to live there.
But the bus massacre had nothing to do with that group. The shooter was white, but not a skinhead. Educated, with at least two years of college, he’d never been in trouble before.