Conversation 704-001

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He's supposed to be finished just before that time.

I haven't seen him in a long time.

I'm going to sit the baby and talk to you about the gardener's book last night.

You can see that this gets over and I don't want to send it back.

I want to express it and send it to somebody.

I want to have somebody carry it over and be sure to treat it.

I put my hand over it.

I don't want to see it get back to me.

It's already gone.

He said to tell you how pleased he was that you were going to this thing, that I was not at all concerned about your making any commitment.

There was no need to.

It was the fact of an appearance that was great.

He knows we can't do much, doesn't he?

He knows.

This shows the personal interest in that.

That's more important than the commitment right now.

He said, no, you can't do that.

Of course, he did.

You know, I've always made the point that the domestic council thing, you know this, is considered, well, we've just got to get these programs ready, and somebody else's job is to sell them.

Now, they've gotten a better attitude this year, you know, sending the jeans off to rest.

It's still not enough.

Yeah.

And they want to write the platform, they want to, I mean, Mitchell did a fan art.

You see, John sits in our staff meeting.

Yeah.

So, very quickly, Mitchell said, property tax...

He said, no, he didn't say, his point was, politically, what is our position?

On the property tax and on tax reform generally, that's the hot issue in Wisconsin.

Where are we?

And our problem is we don't really have an answer.

And because we don't have anything, we need some work on it.

Early was the general, was the philosophic position that needs to be heard, though.

and everybody basically agrees with this, we've got to turn the focus to property tax, which is our issue, and go with that.

We've got to attack the other guys on the loophole business, which is the other one with some sex appeal, because we can't out-loophole-close them.

But we can hit them on the fact that they're the ones that voted for the loopholes.

They're the ones that put them in.

And that all this talk of closing the loopholes is a bunch of election-year bullshit.

you know just because we don't have an answer either so without an answer the best thing is

is trying to get his mind going through this.

We've got to.

That's what I mean.

We've got to get Connolly's position on the tax that developed on a purely political basis, which he's, as you know, he is working on.

And his whole problem is trying to get his people to work on the political thing rather than a technical tax

We've got that, and then we've got finally people who are aware of it trying to do something.

This Cobra withholding is an utter disaster.

I know we raised that with Conley and everything.

Yeah, but we've got to keep pushing it harder and harder.

They aren't doing enough.

They say they're doing something.

But I've made the case to them now, and I'm going to keep on making it.

I'll push Conley up and hit Conley.

Everybody says, oh, that's all taken care of.

You can do it by handling a thing.

And I've asked, have any of you tried to do it?

I asked for the new form.

What you have to do is ask for a new form.

And the form is a full-length page printed on both sides that is absolutely unintelligible to me.

And I do my own tax returns and understand a fair amount about how to handle tax stuff.

All right.

I can't figure the goddamn thing out.

I can't figure it out.

I sit there and look at the goddamn thing.

I'm totally lost.

I have the foggiest notion of what I'm supposed to do.

What the effect will be if I do it?

They should go on a blanket basis of saying to all employers with a little simple thing,

We recommend that due to an error in treasury calculation, or tax, internal revenue service calculations, your taxes being over withheld, your paycheck can be increased by X a month by signing this form, which will add one more exemption, which is permitted you by the law.

All he has to do is initial.

He doesn't have to figure anything out.

It should tell him simply he's going to get more money in his paycheck by signing this.

It should have the government seal on it.

They should go in every goddamn paycheck for the next six months.

And eventually everybody will sign the thing.

Then they'll stop withholding.

I thought we had a new IRS director.

You see, this is the IRS director.

It's a treasure there.

It goes beyond that.

They're afraid to admit they made a mistake.

What happened?

It's an absolute comedy of errors.

Some clown recalculated the withholding tables.

to take into account the people who hold two jobs or the people whose wives work and are therefore under without.

But the problem is most people don't hold two jobs or have their wives work.

So now we're withholding as if you did, which takes too much money out of your paycheck.

And it takes a lot too much out.

I know.

I know the issue.

The point is it's just crazy to do that.

They would start a television spot cam.

They'd do all that.

But you see, you do all that, and then when the guy says, oh, okay, I'll do it, what he has to do is ask for a W-4.

When he gets a W-4, he's going to look at it and say, all right, it's beautiful.

All right, we'll move on to this.

We have to get our return this year.

We've got to do it fast because, Jesus, that's money that we're just taking out of the public sector.

They get it back next year.

They get it back in April.

When they file their return next year, they won't mind it.

They've overpaid their tax.

They won't get it until April of next year.

So this year, we underwithheld.

So this year, we've just compounded here.

This year in April, right now, when they're filing their taxes, they're going to find they owe tax because they didn't withhold enough.

So we've done everything as wrong as we could from a timing viewpoint.

Taking the money away this year, then we're taking more of it away the rest of this year in order to give it back next year.

So impressing the economy.

Do you think it's psychological?

It's pretty diabolical, but I'd worry about it.

If it was, we ought to find the guy, because he's a hell of a lot smarter than anybody we've got.

Start using him.

Well, let's start.

Who can follow up on this?

We're pushing on it.

It's one that's just going to take a lot of pressure.

And you've got to dramatize it.

Nobody believes you.

All our guys said, oh, it's all taken care of.

And the only way you can sell them is to get them to look at that damn W-4 and say, you fill it out for yourself now and decide how much you want, how you want your checking to handle.

They don't know.

These are intelligent guys.

George Nelson's probably one of the tax guys, one of his tax experts.

God wanted to handle his own, and he could figure it out.

He could figure out what to do himself.

Oh, they've just got to leave.

In terms of a couple of things, it's capital loss carryover.

They've gotten it so tangled up now because they've changed the method on which you carry it over.

It looks like a joke.

Yeah.

But on the property tax, the problem is we did wrap the issue early.

The difficulty is with the way it is, however, that we pulled off because they began to hammer us on the value added.

But we can still be forced.

We've done it.

I'm talking about it.

Let's... Why, uh... Oh, I would attack them, of course.

But why don't we talk a little about the loopholes?

I think, actually, we care.

Well, then we got free.

Yeah, we'll leave someone behind as businessmen again.

But, you know, I can't say that our business venture has been more of a discordant adventure as far as I'm concerned.

We've got a story, incidentally, on the loophole thing.

The dramatic thing is these 200 people who earned over a quarter of a million dollars to pay no taxes, actually.

We've got a great story on that.

We made them pay.

We eliminated them.

We ended the 69 law.

That was a bad law to put through.

We were created by a Democratic Congress under Democratic... Well, the story is that the 69 law, it reformed.

So everybody had to pay something.

fortunately they not, that part of our thing got through.

I know what happened.

But of course a lot of the bad things got through.

But the difficulty is that the notorious leaders of the Ministry of Counsel they did not realize the necessity of PR.

It's funny because John,

You can't take it on and then get us people.

We just gotta do the job and do it well if you don't follow us.

But John and other fields have a record in doing the drug thing.

I'll do the numbers, I'm not gonna do the drug thing.

So I told you, I think that's a good one.

Go ahead, let's hit our issues.

Don't just fight in their ground.

Let's hear these present general votes here.

I missed you so loud.

Here's the thought that they said you had to come together.

Give word to Henry that the folks standing by are meeting with the president.

The folks are waiting.

He can wait and just say that I'll tell Henry I'll have to be here by 9.30 because I've got to go.

I've got to leave because Henry can step out on the macro and go back if necessary.

Well, apart from all that, you have to realize

It's part of the campaign growth.

But for that one, the property tax has got to be bought.

We've just got to be in a position to be for something like this thing here.

I'm not saying a hell of a lot, but it's better than saying nothing.

Why doesn't the audience go?

Why doesn't the goddamned Democrats have the audience?

We'll get some.

You see, here again, I know early women, particularly Harper, feel so strongly and I know very well that there are only 2% of the Catholics that care about private schools.

All right, let's suppose this.

I mean, let's suppose who that 2% is.

It's this audience.

Catholics have an enormous influence by their priests and by their teachers.

A lot more than Protestants.

We all pay attention to Protestants.

This is worth doing if you do nothing to get Cardinal Cook and Cardinal Crowe standing there saying President Nixon is a hell of a good man.

That's right.

And Crowe's going to say that.

Because he's got the guts to stand up for us.

He's got the guts to come to our meeting.

Hubert Humphrey asked to address this meeting.

I heard that today, and they turned him down.

Well, you can't.

One of the advantages of being in Cleveland City.

Rogers is so insanely jealous of Henry, he won't get up and brag about it.

Maybe Henry's got to do that.

I think so.

I guess not.

I think so.

We really have a problem here.

Rogers is not going to do a damn thing until he sees how this is going to come out.

He's not going to say a word.

Justifies it, of course, in its own way.

But the important thing is how it comes out.

Very true.

Laos and Cambodia came out basically the same way, but we scored well on Cambodia because we scored bad in Laos.

We scored bad in Laos because we tried to stay away from Laos and we tried to stay on Cambodia.

At the time, we were criticized as being wrong in Cambodia for wrapping it around us and dragging right on Laos by laying low and letting it go around being scarred with it.

Yet, we've gotten a lot worse scar from Laos than from Cambodia.

And no plus, but Laos provides two primarily.

I must say, he's very, very enthusiastic.

He's supportive of our actors, you know.

He was the one that he wanted and he said, well, you know, we're doing great.

We're getting away with it.

He went up to the committee and all the rest.

But we took on him too late, Bob.

We took on him too late.

Remember, I'm in the press conference.

Yeah.

In the office, which is also in the studio.

Yeah.

Because you can't.

We found out.

It's your story in that.

The problem I have right now, and it is going to be a very serious one that we're going to have to fight on Tuesday, actually, I was very excited to have him give me a hand up, but anyway.

It's whether to step into this thing at this point, with the press conference, because I'm afraid it is probably going to be too risky to do so.

You know what I mean?

See, everything new ones.

I mean, no question about my being able to justify what I'm getting at.

I can say why we are doing what we are doing.

I can say that the United States will, you know, continue to do, you know, use our airport, our airport to save American lives.

I think there's an enormous justification for that.

The critical question, though, is how does it come out?

That's what I'm going to ask you.

Do you see my point?

You don't want to get out on a limb on that, because that's what you have to live with.

Agreed?

Yep, insured.

That's what we have to live with.

You can't run out and say you know what's going on.

Well, we don't know.

Oh!

The weather's starting to break up.

It's a shock, though.

There's something in the news.

Oh, they might even get up in the news.

It's too late.

Well, Henry called me at 8 o'clock last night and he had the news.

But they may not get it yet.

It may take them a little while before they get it.

The kids have told me that Henry's on a good-looking girl.

It's a cherry blossom.

I mean, it's just...

Is Trish out there with these people?

Yes, sir.

What?

They're out here in Congress.

I'm going to leave the office.

Thank you.