[speaker001:] well I definitely think taxes are too high uh taxes at all levels uh state local and federal are over fifty percent of many people's uh income now and uh the amazing thing is to think that one of the primary reasons for the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution was exorbitant taxes but for them exorbitant taxes were under ten percent it was ridiculous you know uh that that uh we we took such drastic action over taxes uh and it's so much worse now but people are just apathetic about it and sit back and do nothing
[speaker002:] well let's see uh yeah I think taxes are high but uh yeah maybe in some cases they're not high enough for instance uh here in my state uh
[speaker001:] you have a real high sales tax there if I recall
[speaker002:] yeah we do yeah but the but the reason the sales tax is high is because we don't have an income tax
[speaker001:] uh-huh
[speaker002:] and uh you know we don't have an income tax because uh basically nobody nobody wants any new taxes but the upshot is that we can't properly fund uh education here
[speaker001:] oh really
[speaker002:] yeah so like the amount that we spend on education here in uh in the state of Washington per uh per student
[speaker001:] get out of my room
[speaker002:] is is actually in the in the lower percentile uh I mean is is is low it we're we're ranked fairly low
[speaker001:] interesting
[speaker002:] uh per fifty states yet uh you know yet we expect a lot out of the schools you know we've got here in the Seattle area we've got a lot of uh uh high technology industries we've got Microsoft here well Microsoft expects well educated employees
[speaker001:] sure
[speaker002:] but uh you know Microsoft is only paying property taxes towards uh towards uh towards schools so and there are those that argue well they waste too much money in schools or those or there there's you know more money doesn't solve the problem but I feel like in public schools that they uh uh that they really don't fund it they they don't basically fund it very well
[speaker001:] my my feeling about at least I I don't know if we want to get off the subject of taxes and on to the subject of schools but around here uh some of the public schools get more funds than the private schools uh in terms of you know the per student expenditure at say Carver High School in Atlanta is over eleven thousand dollars per student but the best private school is uh has a tuition of only seven thousand and all of their students of course rank consistently in the top ten percent on the SAT etcetera and the the public school that gets uh quite a bit more money just doesn't uh doesn't turn out that quality of student and
[speaker002:] well it's cheaper to to educate uh people who are in the top ten percent than it is to have to educate the handicapped and the developmentally disabled and all that stuff
[speaker001:] yeah but I think a lot of it is just that uh the money is wasted on bureaucracy and it's not very efficient um uh we we have you know a state department of education and things which all all they do is do statistics and push paper around and none of the uh one of the things that's happened here is that uh the percentage of the money going to instruction meaning teacher's salaries and books and materials has been falling even though that the uh total funding has been going up uh so that uh you know whereas twenty years ago seventy percent of the money going to schools went to teacher's salaries and books and materials now it's only forty five percent and that's really scary to think that uh
[speaker002:] yeah that's I've I've been hearing that that's uh that that's been going down and uh I don't know what uh what all the reasons are for that
[speaker001:] yeah I think that uh one of the reasons our taxes are so high is just that uh on on top of the inefficiencies like what I just described is the government tries to do too many things that the government has no business doing you know we're spending a couple a hundred billion dollars a year to maintain troops in Europe and Asia uh we have no business spending that money and uh we're spending over two hundred billion dollars a year on interest on the debt uh there was a Presidential candidate forum here last Saturday and just we just had our primary in Georgia and uh uh you know I I one of the questions I asked the representative of Bob Carey who was there was uh and we have a projected four hundred billion dollar budget deficit this year what are you gonna do to to correct that and all he talked and and all they could say all the is the only thing he would do is consolidate some cabinet