Ron Warris
1B
19761013
I’d like to have her go along for something, and I’ll sort of sit back here down and see the folks again. And, uh, I think that is our plan at the present time anyway, that we will, uh, go down.
I may take the van with me, and then we, it’ll be a little more comfortable for her, probably.
Possibly not. Maybe I’ll take the car. But, uh, either way, we’ll try and make it. So, uh, I’m just about to the tail end of this tape here now. I’m just about finishing it off, so that’ll make a complete hour’s conversation with you, Stuart. I, uh, would like you to listen to all this.
I hope you have. In fact, you will have to if you got to this point anyway. And, uh, in this book that I was telling you about, the truth book, there are many subjects that I think you would be interested in. For instance, uh, who is God? Why we grow old and die?
And where are the dead? Jesus Christ, the one for whom God blessed mankind, that’s the one that we studied here on this tape. Are there wicked spirits? Why has God permitted wickedness until our day? The reason why a little flock goes to heaven. This is quite an interesting subject there, Stuart, so you should read that subject.
This is, first of all, they’re going to go to heaven according to the Bible. This is not true. God’s kingdom comes to par in the midst of his enemies. The last days of this wicked system of things. Righteous rule makes earth a paradise. The true church and its foundation, that is connected with the heavenly class.
How to identify the true religion and get out from among them, that is, when we see the truth and how we come to the full knowledge of God’s arrangements, then we have to get away from this false teaching.
Top the customs of this great God. How to pray and to be heard by God. Christians’ obedience to the law. Godly respect for life and blood. Living a happy family life. Your decision to serve God. A true worship, a way of life. So, these are the things that’s in this book, Stuart.
Don’t be prejudiced and be like many that I know in Christendom.
Not only in Pentecost, all other religions do the same thing when they are prejudiced.
They refuse to even pick up the book and read it.
Well, I see it’s the end of the line, so I’ll have to say goodbye for now and I’ll get this ready for you and I hope to hear from you.
Maybe if I come down, we will talk to you again, but if not, maybe you could send me a tape. How would that be?
It’s distorted because with a 14% increase in the cost of living in the last two years, it means that women and young people have had to go to work and they didn’t want to because their fathers couldn’t make enough to pay the increased cost of food and housing and clothing.
We have, in this last two years alone, $120 billion total deficit under President Ford. And at the same time, we’ve had, in the last eight years, a doubling in the number of bankruptcies for small business. We’ve had a negative growth in our national economy, measured in real dollars.
The take-home pay of a worker in this country is actually less than it was in 1958, measured in real dollars. This is the kind of record that’s there. They talk about the future and address the changes of conversion in the part of Mr. Ford, Mr. Warren?
Governor Carter, I’d like to turn to what we used to call the energy crisis. Yesterday, a British government commission on air pollution, but one headed by a nuclear physicist, recommended that any further expansion of nuclear energy be delayed in Britain as long as possible.
Now, this is a subject that is quite controversial among our own people, and there seems to be a clear difference between you and the President on the use of nuclear power plants. Would you say you would use it as a last priority?
Why, sir? Are they unsafe? Well, among my other experiences in the past, I’ve been a nuclear engineer, and did graduate work in the field.
I think I know the capabilities and limitations of atomic power. But the energy policy of our nation is one that has not yet been established under this administration. I think almost every other developed nation in the world has an energy policy, but we have seen the Federal Energy Agency established, for instance.
In the crisis in 1973, it was supposedly a temporary agency. Now it’s permanent. It’s enormous. It’s growing every day. I think the Wall Street Journal reported next month that they have 112 public relations experts working for the Federal Energy Agency to try to justify the American people’s own existence.
We’ve got to have a firm way to handle the energy question.
And the organization proposal that I put forward is one of first steps. In addition to that, we need to have a realization that we’ve got about 35 years worth of oil left in the whole world.
We’re going to run out of oil.
And Mr. Nixon made his famous speech on Operation Independence. We were importing about 35% of our oil. Now we’ve increased that amount 25%. We’re now importing about 44% of our oil. It will shift from oil to coal. We need to concentrate our research and development effort on coal burning and extraction, to a place of mine, but also extreme burning.
It will shift very strongly towards solar energy. And have strict conservation measures. And then as a last resort only, continue to use atomic power. I would certainly not cut out atomic power altogether. We can’t afford to give up that opportunity until later.
But to the extent that we continue to use atomic power, I would be responsible as President to make sure that the safety precautions were initiated and maintained. For instance, some that have been forgotten.
We need to have the reactor core below ground level.
The entire power plant that uses atomic power. Tightly sealed in a heavy vacuum maintained. It’s got to be a sanitized zone. It’s got to be a full-time atomic energy specialist. Independent of the power plant. In the control room full-time. 24 hours a day.
Shut down the plant if it has no amount to develop. These kinds of procedures, along with evacuation procedures, adequate insurance, ought to be initiated.
So, shift from oil to coal.
Emphasize research and development on coal use. Also in solar power. Strict conservation measures. Not yield over time. That the Secretary of State put pressure on the President like this administration has done. And use atomic energy only as a last resort with the strictest possible safety precautions.
That’s the best overall energy policy in the brief time we have in discussion.
Mr. Governor, on that same subject, would you require mandatory conservation efforts to try to contain fuel?
Yes, I would.
Some of the things that can be done about this is a change in the rate structure of electric power companies. We now encourage people to waste electricity.
And by giving the lowest rates to the biggest users.
We don’t do anything to cut down on peak load requirements. We don’t have an adequate requirement for the installation of homes.
Or the efficiency of automobiles.
Whenever the automobile manufacturers come forward and they can’t meet the amendments that the Congress has put forward, this Republican administration has delayed the implementation date. In addition to that, we ought to have a shift to the use of coal, particularly in the Appalachian region.
Where the coal is located.
A lot of very high quality, low carbon coal. Low sulfur coal is there.
Employment is needed.
This would help a great deal.
So, mandatory conservation measures, yes.
Encouragement by the President for people to voluntarily conserve, yes. And also the private sector ought to be encouraged to bring forward to the public the benefits from efficiency. One bank in Washington, for instance, gives lower interest loans for people who adequately insulate their homes or who buy efficient automobiles.
And some major manufacturing companies, like Dow Chemicals, have through very effective efficiency mechanisms, cut down the use of energy by as much as 40% with the same out product. These kinds of things ought to be done. They ought to be encouraged and supported.
And even required by the government, yes. President Clinton, Governor Carter skims over a very serious and a very broad subject. In January of 1975, I submitted to the Congress and to the American people the first comprehensive energy program recommended by any President.
It called for an increase in the production of energy in the United States. It called for conservation measures so that we would save the energy that we have. If you’re going to increase domestic oil and gas production, and we have to, you have to give to those producers an opportunity to develop their land or their wealth.
I recommended to the Congress that we should increase coal production in this country from 600 million tons a year to 1,200,000,000 tons by 1985.
In order to do that, we have to improve our extraction of coal from the ground.
We have to improve our utilization of coal, make it more efficient, make it cleaner. In addition, we have to expand our research and development. In my program for energy independence, we have increased, for example, solar energy research from about $84,000,000 a year to about $120,000,000 a year.
We’re going as fast as the experts say we should. In nuclear power, we have increased the research and development under the Energy Research and Development Agency very substantially to ensure that our nuclear power plants are safer, that they are more efficient, and that we have adequate safeguards.
I think you have to have greater oil and gas production, more coal production, more nuclear production. And in addition, you have to have energy conservation.
Mr. Ghani? Mr. President, I’d like to return for a moment to this problem of unemployment. You have vetoed or threatened to veto a number of jobs bills in development in the Democratic Congress, Democratic-controlled Congress. Yet at the same time, the government is paying out, I think it was $17 billion, perhaps $20 billion a year in unemployment compensation caused by the high unemployment rate.
Why do you think it is better to pay out unemployment compensation to idle people than to put them to work in a public service job?
The bill that I vetoed, the one for an additional $6 billion, was not a bill that would have solved our unemployment problem. Even the proponents of it admitted that no more than 400,000 jobs would be made available. Our analysis indicates that something in the magnitude of about 150,000 to 200,000 jobs would be made available.
Each one of those jobs would have cost the taxpayer $25,000. In addition, the jobs would not be available right now. They would not have materialized for about 9 to 18 months. The immediate problem we have is to stimulate our economy now so that we can get rid of unemployment.
What we have done is to hold the lid on spending in an effort to reduce the rate of inflation. And we have proven, I think very conclusively, that you can reduce the rate of inflation and increase jobs. For example, as I have said, we have added some 4 million jobs in the last 17 months.
We have now employed 88 million people in America, the largest number in the history of the United States. We’ve added 500,000 jobs in the last two months. Inflation is the quickest way to destroy jobs. And by holding the lid on federal spending, we have been able to do a good job, an affirmative job, in inflation, and as a result have added to the jobs in this country.
I think it’s also appropriate to point out that through our tax policy, we have stimulated added employment throughout the country, the investment tax credit, the tax incentives for expansion and modernization of our industrial capacity. My opinion is that the private sector, where five out of the six jobs are, where you have permanent jobs, where the opportunity for advancement is a better place than make work jobs under the programs recommended by the Congress.
Just to follow up, Mr. President, the Congress has just passed a $3.7 billion appropriation bill which would provide money for the public works jobs program that you earlier tried to kill by your veto of the authorization legislation. In light of the fact that unemployment again is rising, or has in the past three months, I wonder if you have rethought that question at all, whether you would consider allowing this program to be funded, or will you veto that money bill?
Well, that bill has not yet come down to the Oval Office, so I am not in a position to make any judgment on it tonight.
But that is an extra $4 billion that would add to the deficit, which would add to the inflationary pressure, which would help to destroy jobs in the private sector, not make jobs where the jobs really are. These make-work temporary jobs, dead-end as they are, are not the kind of jobs that we want for our people.
I think it’s interesting to point out that in the two years that I’ve been president, I’ve vetoed 56 bills. Congress has sustained 42 vetoes. As a result, we have saved over $9 billion in federal expenditures. And the Congress, by overriding the bills that I did veto, the Congress has added some $13 billion to the federal expenditures and to the federal deficit.
Now, Governor Carter complains about the deficit that this administration has had. And yet, he condemns the vetoes that I have made that has saved the taxpayer $9 billion and could have saved an additional $15 billion. Now, he can’t have it both ways.
And therefore, it seems to me that we should hold the lead, as we have to the best of our ability, so we can stimulate the private economy and get the jobs where the jobs are, five out of six in this economy. Governor Carter? Well, look forward doesn’t seem to seem to reflect it.
In fact, when 500,000 more people are out of work than there were three months ago, or we have two and a half million more people out of work than there were when they took office. But this is such a human being. I was in a city in Pennsylvania not too long ago near here.
And there were about 4,000 or 5,000 people in the audience on the train trip. And I said, how many adults here are out of work?
About 1,000, raise your hand.
Actually has fewer people now in the private sector and non-farm jobs than when he took office. And what he talked about was success.
7.9% unemployment. It is a terrible tragedy in this country. He says he’s learned how to match unemployment with inflation. That’s right. We’ve got the highest inflation we’ve had in 25 years right now. Except under this administration, and that was 50 years ago.
And we’ve got the highest unemployment we’ve had under Mr. Ford’s administration since the Great Depression. This is such a human being.
And his insensitivity in providing those people a sense of work has made this a welfare administration and not a work administration.
He hasn’t saved $9 billion through his veto. He’s only been met saving $4 billion. And the cost in unemployment compensation, welfare compensation, lost revenue, has increased $23 billion in the last two years. This is a typical attitude that really causes havoc in people’s lives.
And then it’s covered over by saying that our country has naturally got a 6% unemployment rate or a 7% unemployment rate and a 6% inflation.
It’s a tragedy. It shows a lack of leadership. And we’ve never had a president who’s been one of the 20 states who’s vetoed more bills. Mr. Ford has vetoed four times as many bills as Mr. Nixon per year. And 11 of them have been overridden. One of those bills that was overridden.
He only got one vote in the Senate and seven votes in the House from Republicans. So this shows a breakdown in leadership. One of the rules I must stop you on.
Mrs. B?
Senator Carter, I’d like to come back to the subject of taxes. You have said that you want to cut taxes for the middle and lower income groups.
Right.
But unless you’re willing to do such things as reduce the itemized deductions, the charitable contributions, or home mortgage sales, or increase the taxes or capital gains, you can’t really raise sufficient revenue to provide an overall tax cut of any size.
So how are you going to provide that tax raise that you’re talking about? Now we have such a gross and unbalanced tax system. As I said earlier, it’s a disgrace. Of all the tax benefits now, 25% of them go to the 1% of the richest people in this country.
Over 50%, 53 to be exact, percent of the tax benefits go to the 15% richest people in this country. And we’ve had a 50% increase in payroll deductions since Mr. Nixon went in office. Eight years ago. Mr. Ford has advocated since he’s been in office over $5 billion in reductions for corporations, secular institutions, and the very, very wealthy who derive their income not from labor, but from investment.
That’s got to be changed.
A few things that can be done.
We have now a deferral system so that the multinational corporations who invest overseas, if they make a million dollars in profits overseas, they don’t have to pay any of their taxes unless they bring their money back into this country. When they don’t pay their taxes, the average American pays the taxes for them.
Not only that, but it involves this country’s jobs. Because instead of coming back with that million dollars and creating a shoe factory here in New Hampshire, Vermont, if the company takes the money down to Italy and builds a shoe factory, they don’t have to pay any taxes on the money.
Another thing is a system called DIF, which was originally designed, proposed by Mr. Nixon, to encourage exports. This permits a company to create a dummy corporation to export their products and then not to pay the full amount of taxes on them. This costs our government about $1.
4 billion a year. And when those rich corporations don’t pay that tax, the average American pays it for them. Another one that’s very important is a business reduction. Jet airplanes, fast travel, the $50 martini lunch.
The average working person can’t take advantage of that, but the wealthiest people can.
Another system is where a dentist can invest money in, say, raising cattle, and can put in $100,000 of his own money, borrow $900,000, $900,000, that makes a million, and mark off a great amount of loss through that procedure.
There was one example, for instance, where somebody produced pornographic movies.
They put in $30,000 of their own money and got $120,000 in tax savings. But when these special kinds of programs have robbed the average tax payer and have benefited those who are powerful, and they can employ lobbyists, and they can have the CPAs and the lawyers to help them benefit from the roughly 8,000 pages of the tax code, the average American person can’t do it.
They can’t hire lobbyists out of an unemployment compensation code. Governor, to follow up on your answer, in order for any kind of tax relief to really be felt by the middle and lower income people, you need about, according to congressional committees on this, you need about $10 billion.
And this is something.
The deferral on foreign income is estimated, this is about $500 million.
This, you said, was $1.4 billion.
The estimate of the outside, if you eliminated all tax shelters, is $5 billion. So where else would you raise the revenue to provide this tax relief? Would you, in fact, do away with all business production? And what other kinds of preferences would you do away with?
No, I wouldn’t do away with all business production. I think that would be a very serious mistake. But if you could just do away with the ones that are on sale, you could lower taxes for everyone. I would never do anything that would increase the taxes for those who work for a living or who are presently required to lift all their income.
What I want to do is not to raise taxes, but to eliminate loopholes. And this is the point of my first statistic that I gave you, that the present tax benefits that have been carved out over a long period of years, 50 years, by sharp tax lawyers and by lobbyists, have benefited just the rich.
These programs that I described to you earlier, the tax reform, the overseas, the debt, and the tax shelters, they only apply to people in the $50,000 a year bracket or up.
And I think this is the best way to approach it, is to make sure that everybody pays the taxes on the income that they earn, and make sure that you take whatever savings there is from the higher income levels and give it to the lower middle income families.
Governor Carter’s answer tonight does not coincide with the answer that he gave in an interview to the Associated Press a week or so ago. In that interview, Governor Carter indicated that he would raise the taxes on those in the medium or middle income bracket for higher.
Now, if you take the medium or middle income tax payer, that’s about $14,000 per person. Governor Carter has indicated publicly in an interview that he would increase the taxes on about 50% of the working people of this country.
I think the way to get tax equity in this country is to give tax relief to the middle income people who have an income from roughly $8,000 up to $25,000 or $30,000.
They have been short-chained as we have taken 10 million taxpayers off the tax rolls in the last eight years, and as we have added to the minimum tax provision to make all people pay more taxes.
I believe in tax equity for the middle income taxpayers, increasing the personal exemption. Mr. Carter wants to increase taxes for roughly half of the taxpayers of this country. The governor has also played a little fast and loose with the facts about vetoes.
The records show that President Roosevelt vetoed on an average of 55 bills a year. President Truman vetoed on the average, while he was president, about 38 bills a year. I understand that Governor Carter, when he was governor of Georgia, vetoed between 35 and 40 bills a year.
My average in two years is 26. But in the process of that, we have saved $9 billion. And one final comment, Governor Carter talked about the tax bills and all of the inequities that exist in the present law. I must remind him, the Democrats have controlled the Congress for the last 22 years, and they wrote all the tax bills.
Mr. Ryan, I suspect that we could continue on this tax argument for some time.