I.O.U.S.A - Addison Wiggin [9]
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The Mission 9
publications. For 18 months, we bounced our ideas off other fi lmmakers, writers, and producers.
Everywhere we went — to a fault, some would say — we asked the proverbial “ man on the street ” what he thought about our mission, the economy, his lot in life.
In the end, what we learned and, by extension, what you ’ ll read in this book, can be boiled down to one statement: No one agrees 100 percent on what the solutions are for the problems we face as a nation. But that we ’ ve lived beyond our means for too long is obvious to everyone. “ There is no free lunch, ” Robert Rubin told us in the executive offi ces of Citibank. We agreed with him.
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While we have included some numbers and charts to illustrate what we expect will happen if the nation ’ s four defi cits are not addressed, to keep the story interesting, we focused on
people — the people who are making important decisions about the economy and the fi nances of the federal government.
Who wouldn ’ t want to hear, for example, Paul O ’ Neill, the 72nd Treasury secretary of the United States, tell us, in person, his account of the day Dick Cheney, then vice president, told him “ Reagan proved defi cits don ’ t matter, ” or later when he got fi red for “ a difference of opinion ” over the Bush tax cuts. What Reagan proved was defi cits don ’ t matter if you, the electorate, don ’ t hold them, the offi ce holders, accountable.
Having written a chapter entitled “ The Fabulous Destiny of Alan Greenspan ” in Financial Reckoning Day (Wiley, 2003), we didn ’ t know what to expect when we interviewed him.
But we found his explanation for why interest rates remained so low during the 18 years of his tenure as the chairman of the Federal Reserve very interesting. The end of the Cold War, he said, and the fall of the Iron Curtain had created a demand for capital in the East that kept interest rates low in the West.
cintro.indd 9
8/26/08 11:36:38 PM
10 The
Mission
We met with Robert Rubin, the 70th Treasury secretary of the United States, at the Citigroup executive offi ces where he was presiding, only fi ve months before the subprime crisis began in earnest. But Mr. Rubin told us, calmly, how diffi cult it was to reach “ political coalescence ” when the Clinton administration showed a federal surplus on the budget “ for the fi rst time in roughly 30 years. ”
Warren Buffett joined us in an unassuming meeting room at his Berkshire Hathaway headquarters in Kiewit Plaza in downtown Omaha. Initially, we believed we only had 20
minutes with him; however, when he entered the room he told us he “ wasn ’ t doing anything else today. ” By the end of the interview we had exhausted our list of questions and had over an hour of fi lm with him.
The point of this particular literary exercise is simple.
We wanted to show what Alice Rivlin, the fi rst director of the Congressional Budget Offi ce, meant when she said,
“ People may think somehow that decisions are made by other people far away, but in a democracy that ’ s not really true. It is your representative in Congress or in the Senate that is infl uencing what happens — so it ’ s pretty important for people to pay attention to it. ”
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As the conditions of the once - vibrant U.S. economy began to take a turn for the worse, the American people seemed to be paying more attention to the country ’ s fi scal challenges. And when the debt crisis gained mainstream attention with the near default of Bear Stearns in July 2007, the I.O.U.S.A. project took another turn. By mid - September, we were forced to throw out the whole fi lm as we ’ d conceived it to be up