protect the rights of the smallest minority that had ever existed—the individual. You could not work for President Paul Porter and not be fully dedicated to these ideals.
It was with those things in mind that Secretary Fleming had accepted the quiet assignment given to him by the President several days ago. In all honesty, he had thought the President was sending him on a wild-goose chase. The suggestion that something like what he had suggested could even exist was unthinkable before the threat by the Chinese. And while Porter might not have possessed a Ph.D. in economics, he did hold an MBA and he was an extremely intelligent man. Still, Fleming couldn’t understand how the President had come to suspect what they now knew to be true.
Fleming had been cautioned to lay things out in a manner as easy to understand as possible. Though Porter encouraged his people to ask questions when they didn’t understand something, he knew that when it came to economics, most people were in the dark and didn’t want to flaunt their ignorance. “Assume they know a lot less than you,” the President had directed him.
Keeping that directive in mind, Fleming accepted the remote from the Situation Room tech, cleared his throat, and began his presentation. “After Snow Dragon came to light, the President asked me to look into something. He was curious about the fact that the Chinese believed they would be able to land and establish permanent forces in the United States after an attack.
“What did this mean? The intelligence suggests that the Chinese are training some sort of specialized force in North Korea, but to what end? And why would they believe they would be able to put troops on American soil without any fear of international reprisal?
“The Chinese do not possess any specialty that would be uniquely needed in the aftermath of a catastrophic event. None. This left us with only two reasonable possibilities. One, that the attack is biological in nature and that they possess some sort of immunity to the causative agent. This type of scenario is obviously outside our area of expertise at Treasury, and is being considered by other, more appropriate national security parties here in this room.
“Which brings us to the second. Is it conceivable that China could make a legitimate, legal claim to the United States after a catastrophic terrorist attack?”
“Of course they can’t,” stated the Secretary of Defense.
Fleming raised his index finger in caution. “Up until this week, I would have agreed with you.” He advanced to his first slide. “The national debt under prior administrations has been mounting at an alarming rate. “Skyrocketing” would actually be a better term. The bigger our government gets, the more money it needs to operate. In order to get that money, it has two choices. It can continue to raise taxes again and again on our citizens and risk a revolution, or it can borrow in relative quiet, out of sight of everyday Americans who don’t pay attention. The federal government has chosen to do a crippling combination of both.
“While high personal taxes leave Americans with less money to invest and spend in the marketplace, high corporate taxes leave businesses with less money to hire employees and force them to move things like manufacturing and customer service call centers offshore in order for their products to be competitive.
“We saw the last administration increase the top marginal tax rate by 5 percent. The increase pulled billions of dollars out of American households and ended up being only enough to run the federal government for six days.
“We then saw this same administration, desperate to reverse its falling poll numbers, continue to stoke the embers of class warfare. There is no more anti-American, anti-democracy rhetoric than this. To turn neighbor against neighbor because of the size of one’s pocketbook is to plow the ground and sow it with the seeds of socialism. In America, only opportunity is assured, not outcomes. Anyone who promises otherwise is acting contrary to the values upon which our Republic was founded.
“The bottom line is that the federal government was never intended to be the size that it has grown to. The Founders intended for it to remain small and for the majority of issues to be handled at the state level where citizens can be more easily involved and have their voices heard.
“But as the federal government has expanded, it has become its own living, breathing organism. You have all heard the President liken it to