[speaker001:] I've got some pretty firm feelings on this one and that is that we are definitely not getting our money's worth um primarily uh I think the one big thing that stands out among all this is uh the amount of money that our taxes go to to pay for interest on the federal deficit which is just an absolute inexcusable waste
[speaker002:] um-hum it's about uh twenty percent of the federal budget isn't it at this moment
[speaker001:] it's terrible you know it's huge I have no idea what the actual number is but it
[speaker002:] but you can't unfortunately you can't do anything about that except get rid of the budget deficit and not at this point in the business cycle you can't
[speaker001:] yeah I think that the people that um orchestrated this and engineered our having the deficit should have appreciated you know what it was ultimately going to cost it was a very bad decision to start letting that grow
[speaker002:] yeah yeah I would agree with that it was we were actually in twenty years ago we were not in bad shape we had we had been in pretty bad shape after World War Two and then we paid off some of the debt of or at least we inflated it away which is probably more what happened and uh then at the end of the Johnson Administration the budget Nixon's first year that was that was uh set up by Johnson was balanced and that was the last balanced budget we've got well of course part of the problem is that that um
[speaker001:] hum
[speaker002:] the federal government just grows and it seems like that the only way to restrain it is to restrain the increase in taxes if taxes are increased uh the government finds a way to spend it even you know given even that despite the fact that we have a budget deficit
[speaker001:] yeah absolutely
[speaker002:] I think what we really need to do is concentrate more on reducing waste on assuring that government be efficient you know we need more programs where people get rewarded for money saving suggestions we
[speaker001:] yeah absolutely and that's that's a terrible problem as well
[speaker002:] we need more programs to well I mean for example a tax reform law okay a so called tax reform of nineteen eighty six began as a tax simplification law which would've made it easier to enforce and would've saved us I mean another way that they in effect increase your taxes is by increasing the amount that you have to pay to get them prepared or the amount of time you need to take to get your records in order
[speaker001:] um-hum um-hum
[speaker002:] and the eighty six tax reform well just made it more complicated even though it started as a simplification bill if I were Ronald Reagan I would've said unless that reduces the size of the IRS code by thirty percent I'm going to veto it
[speaker001:] well as much as that's a bad thing I think that uh there's some other really major major things that need straightened out and you'd mentioned waste a little while ago
[speaker002:] um-hum
[speaker001:] and uh I've seen with my own eyes a tremendous amount of government waste I was in the marine corps and we had uh several hundred thousand dollars worth of transformers sitting on the wall that had been contracted out to be built as replacement parts for an old Westinghouse Radar Westinghouse wasn't going to support it anymore and Spencer you know Spencer Gifts that company said they'd go ahead and build these things and they didn't build them to specifications so they were unusable they were too physically large to go back in and we spent um four thousand dollars apiece on those things and there they just sat there taking up valuable space in front of everybody and they were there the whole time I was down there
[speaker002:] another thing that that that that reminds me of is um I was talking to people who work at AT&T Gilford Center
[speaker001:] uh-huh
[speaker002:] and they have a government contract to do work on some computer for the Navy I'm not sure what it's called called but it's some uh military standard architecture with a with a sixteen bit address space I mean they're still working with a sixteen bit address space
[speaker001:] uh no
[speaker002:] and they're writing all their software to overlay programs into this sixteen bit address space rather than going to something that was you know modern fifteen years ago I don't know how much it costs them to maintain that outdated software but you'd think at some stage they'd get the get the idea that it it it pays to get to be more current
[speaker001:] yeah I really wish there was some solution to this bureaucratic obesity that just seems to be prevalent in every sort of administration or administrative thing that gets so big
[speaker002:] well the Republican solution is to cut taxes and I uh that may prevent it from getting worse but it doesn't solve it we haven't gotten our budget back into any better balance if it had not been for the savings and loan debacle at least it would have remained the same as a result it's gotten worse but uh
[speaker001:] um not limiting taxes didn't hasn't stopped uh the government from spending they just went ahead and spent it and now we've got this giant deficit on top of things
[speaker002:] that's right that's right um so I I I don't know I mean there there there's only three things you can do you you can you can cut programs you can raise taxes or you can cut waste and at the moment people don't want programs cut although uh I'm not sure that some of them shouldn't be looked at more carefully programs uh uh and I think of of programs you know when you when uh uh like the the um aid to families with dependent children that appears to create an incentive for unmarried women to have more kids uh I'm a little concerned about that I'm a little concerned about cutting it out too because they might just end up aborting all of them
[speaker001:] uh-huh uh-huh
[speaker002:] but uh there there there you know Governor Thompson of Wisconsin has an idea which is pay the fathers of these children to marry the mothers and at least that way you get you get the mother you know the fathers to take up some of the some of