Conversation 757-005

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This is too important to us, but it is something.

And this whole business of dealing with the press, thank God I went ahead and did that press thing last week.

Because we got on the record.

We got the whole thing covered.

And we had a press thing.

They can't sweep about that, right?

Very, very good.

Where is Tommy now?

The Madison Hotel.

Okay.

What do you want to try and do?

Do you want to... Well, I would say that if it's scheduled and prepared, that if possibly I could see you at 5.30.

5.30?

Yeah.

Okay.

uh connie should be over at the madison hotel and we should see if the you see if i have a little faster everybody would be uh

John is available, and he has a dinner at 7.

Oh, is he sensitive to time?

Oh, I did.

I reported it to him.

It's not.

That is like one person at a time.

He gets the air done.

All right.

And I stayed a little bit longer.

I'm sorry.

I mean, you've got more to come.

That'll make a good show in the background.

What?

In the background, of course.

It'll do that.

I heard it doesn't make much of a problem.

It's based on the six brains that we said it won't lose.

I thought it was more than that.

Oh, that's right.

You're right.

Yep.

I'm happy to do this over and over again.

Well, the car's got down on the ladder, so I'll be driving along to the front end of the bus.

The rest of the people are down on the other side of the street.

And you can place a rent right out of the place.

It's where it's best to place.

Tell us all about it, John.

What all did John have to say?

Nothing.

Great jobs.

Great jobs, right.

He likes red eyes.

He does.

What kind of eyes?

What

I called him, you know, slowly, and it's pretty close, but he signed up, but he didn't want to sign up.

Oh, hi, how are you?

So now I'm getting to work here.

I'm going to ask the majority to sit here.

Herb, get some of the water.

Come on, everybody, pull up some chairs.

Tom.

Oh, here, I guess we should have put him in the helicopter going over.

No, he didn't want to.

He was over at the church.

He met me at the airplane.

At the second one.

No, the first one.

When the plane landed, he was down at the elevator.

That was the second one.

That was the traveling one.

That's the one before we got on the job.

The governor.

The governor met us, if you recall, at the air station.

Well, I think that, uh,

Generally, we've taken a look at the economy and heard it done that.

First off, we wanted to take some glance at the economic and take a look at some of the politics that we're going to go about peddling in our good wares.

how we might get some of the things done we're talking about, like the spending ceiling, for instance, and getting as much mileage out of that politically as we can.

And I thought that was kind of the nature of this.

We met before the Democratic convention, and at the end of the meeting, you suggested that we have a meeting of this group, plus these characters over here.

I forget the thinking going in more than just what the CPI is.

It's about what the unemployment rate is.

There's lots of countries out there.

The state's one of the politicians.

Yes, sir.

I said, I'm the CPI, but it was this month.

Did you want to be part of the politicians?

All you have to come up with now is a tax package.

OK.

Thank you.

tax-passing manufacturing, some way to keep food prices down.

Well, unemployment, as I heard, helped a little with brownie employment.

We'll have some bit of a flurry of demand on those with price on the front due to the flood.

And we'll have some blips there.

I think it has probably hurt a lot of the fresh grocery business pretty badly now.

Well, Mr. President, I guess we're all aware of good news for the last 10 days or so.

The problem we have is that the news just cannot continue to be that good.

We cannot expect another quarter of 8.9%.

rate of increase of real GNP, and that 8.9% will be revised in numbers that come out on the 15th, and the revision may very well make it a little less.

And in any case, we can't go on and have a month with 0.1% CPI, and probably the plumbing rate will move up a little so that

The kind of problem with talking these days is to make sure that we don't have any big high hurdles up here to jump over and people will expect that things can be not quite as good as they were in June and still be as very good as they were in June.

That way, we basically do expect that the envelope rate, the trend in the envelope rate will be down during the remainder of the year, but I think probably the best bet is that the next number that comes out on Friday will be

a little higher than that 5.5 we had, 5.7, something like that.

And as we've said many times, we're going to have a few months still of CPR dominated by rising meat prices until, although we have been having a little, we've had a little decline in meat prices at wholesale, but that's probably just a blip.

We'll have to prioritize and retain meat prices for a couple of months.

But basically, the picture is going to be good.

It's going to be, I would say, at least as good as we predicted at the end of the year.

And there's a very good chance it'll be better.

And as we said earlier, whatever it might be, there's not much we can do about it right now, in any case.

But unfortunately, we don't have to go step by step.

I apologize, of course.

That was a weird wrap.

the kind of attack we're getting from the other side is that we're not doing enough to pump up the economy, but it seems to me it's not a very convincing attack because it involves them saying that the deficit of $5.3 billion is really big enough, and while it may be right, it's not very credible.

And it should follow totally with regard to the election problem.

That runs through everything.

Well, I think that one of the threats that he sends is a testimony that stands to our benefit.

talked about the fact that taxes must be increased.

There are four increased spendings.

And I suppose they want the deficit, if that implies in the immediate sense.

But they were also very free to say there's got to be a tax increase.

The second was that we were under taxation, but we were not taxed enough.

That's the old ball rate theory, that we're spending our money on the wrong things.

Yeah, we have to reorder it.

and that we need more in the public sector and less in the selfish private sector.

Mark, the bureaucrats, you're wasting.

Technically, all that really sounds very nice, but all of the issue studies in the key states show that the issues on which Nixon gets negative ratings in his ability to handle are inflation, taxes, and unemployment.

And that the only negative issues in the next place, on a general basis, one are here and there, you get a negative split on the one side, and that's like crime or...

I'm not so sure.

I don't know.

We've got a lot of things.

I don't think we're just talking about it all.

But we have had surges in meat and some other categories of food, and I doubt that this has made a big impact.

That's what's hanging over us is the food prices.

Well, it proved new in August.

It was fairly new.

and it's maybe in a year's reading.

We're gonna have to consider price index and some of the last four months that we've been going through is gonna count as an unemployment of over 100 so that we, you know, just tell the story very hard and it's in a short period.

It's not surprising that people would think we were not making progress on unemployment, but nobody could really say we weren't until June.

The thing that scares people, I think, coming back, present coming, is when they look around and they see people getting laid off.

And that has, the layoff rate has dropped and has been down now for, oh, five or six months.

Well, the real problem here is not what has happened with the selling sector.

Well, what Herb says is really what's happened is good, and that what's going to happen is going to not maybe be quite as dramatically good.

It's going to continue to be basically good.

And thirdly, that doesn't make a hell of a lot of difference whether it's good or bad.

We can't do anything about it anyway.

But taking the point that we're in good shape now, we'll continue to be at least in reasonably good shape, if not better shape than now.

We apparently have a whole story to tell.

Well, the question is, how do we tell it?

And whether, basically, as of now, it would appear that we have public perception of the lines.

Life's about a long time.

Unfortunately, it's about six months.

And I don't know whether Senator is crooked or straight, but the Senator stuff that I've been seeing indicates that the majority of people just don't know anything about this.

They're still back six months ago when everything was terrible.

I don't know, did you read Schlesinger's piece in the Times Magazine yesterday?

Okay, but he just baldly asserts things that simply aren't true.

He says Nixon has been a total failure in stimulating the economy.

Nixon's been a total failure in hauling inflation.

There's been a total feather that unemployment will be over 6% by the election.

In other words, he's playing the big lie technique.

Any menu of the vote, I suspect, Eric, is probably going to be at least a little bit longer.

Probably.

I don't think it would have bothered our director.

No.

I don't regret the same one at all.

I was just going to say, my guard's fine.

Yeah.

He's been talking in terms of unemployment six, eight months ago.

And don't bother him about that.

He couples the two.

He said the highest inflation and the highest rate of unemployment at the same time in history.

And it doesn't matter if that's not today.

I would take issue with the curve and the fact that the CPI being 110.1% is really less meaningful to the consumer or the voter than what he or she perceives she is paying in the market for what she's buying.

on all the rules that I've looked at, including the very latest Harris one, who sent down these just now to the Congressman.

The cost of food, and similarly to the price of food, is still a major fear that people still think they're paying a hell of a lot more than they were last month in the month before.

And your CPI figure doesn't take into account the fact that there was a significant increase in food

balanced off, I guess, reductions in other areas.

But it's the food they buy every day that really is rude.

And that remains a cutting political issue.

That's a source of discontent with a very large number of people still.

But still, those are the kinds of things that can be said about that.

I don't think we should accept the fact that food is not the only thing they buy every day.

And when medical care was rising, medical care was rising, everybody was worried about that.

And now we've got that down.

That's something that affects people very intimately and continuously.

I feel like that's one of the strongest Nixon issue points that the key statement holds is health care.

Nixon's confidence angle is higher there than anything else except foreign policy.

I don't know if you're one on cancer or someone who's gotten through this.

I suppose the nursing home's got a lot of traction around and a lot of copy and controversy.

But I think these things really are the result, perception results from the controversy.

They're highlighting the controversy.

And then, on the other side, doesn't ask him that, which is, well, he's bitten off, but it can't be done.

He has no level of perception on that.

Nobody knows he has.

It's not, you can't sell.

Can you sell the records as it is if you can't ?

What can we do what we can't sell before the election?

You see, we don't use the benchmark if you can't .

So if that's the problem, then we've got to just ride through it.

Does anybody think we can do anything about the, for example, food prices?

All right, thank you.

The connection between

your action of taking the import quotas off and the fact that we've had stability actually a little defined wholesale price of beef since you did that.

And you could see it in the import of the operating fast in the futures.

So I think that was an action that at least had some impact, which we talked about.

You took some lumps on it, I know.

from telegrams from the farmers.

But that was helpful.

We are, it seems to me, getting ourselves postured so we're very much against inflation.

And the idea of watching the spending and so on fits in with that as well as our efforts to wage price gain.

We always say that

We want the economy to expand and dis-expand and so on.

Nevertheless, there's a choice there about whether you're going to be all out for expanding the economy and getting unemployment down, never mind about inflation.

That's basically seems to be the hell or sap in supply.

Or whether you take the posture that we are getting ourselves into deeper each day.

And we are drumming up the people who work on the spending ceiling.

And I think a lot of support for that idea.

On the food crisis, one thing we could do is back away from a different platform because the recovery platform calls for an increased program of consumer education so that people will understand that high farm prices are because the farmer's getting what he's doing.

and that we should have better than 100% parity, which can only be achieved one of two ways, of course, higher prices or a tremendously increased support program.

So there's nothing in the recovery platform that offers any kind of lower food prices, quite the contrary.

And we could go on what we've accomplished, what we're doing, and it really is seriously

The physical things that are perceived are very useful even if they don't work immediately.

So some movement toward some kind of additional food price or stranger control or something of that kind is always a possibility.

We lose a lot if we do it.

Harris is pointing out this morning that he has just pulled this in depth.

the consumers by factors of about 70 to 20 do not blame the farmers for hiding the prices.

They blame the processors in the middle.

So there's your scapegoat.

Now the point we have here is whether or not, I'm just going to be cynical and tell about it, whether or not about a month before or six weeks before the election,

I think that's too soon.

Because something that isn't going to work, you don't do it that soon and have it proved that it won't work.

About a month before, whether or not you could impose some kind of freeze, call it what you will, on that particular segment.

In his view, and this is only his upholstery because of the economics, in his view, that very dramatic effect indicated that we were fighting a problem of high food prices.

So the question is, is there anything we can do?

That's why I raised the point.

I mean, let's assume that our present case is that people ought to be for it.

The experts, most of them, now do say the economy is rising, inflation is down, and that we have good economic policies.

All right.

The experts know that, but the people don't.

Do one of two things.

Either you have a very intensive campaign of convincing the people that your policies are good, query whether that'll work.

It just may be too much of a timeline.

Or second.

You frankly play a game, and we have to realize almost 15 was a game in this.

I mean, it worked, but it's also a game.

Now the question is whether or not we've got anything we can do in this area.

The same is true, George, in the tax reform field.

Not tax reform.

I mean, tax reform in terms of some promise of relief for taxes in this area.

The question is to do something that is not totally irresponsible.

That indicates that we are concerned about the problem and want to do something about it, rather than just defending everything and saying, well, the bills plan is irresponsible, the government plan is irresponsible.

So as far as we're concerned, that puts us in the position of being for the tax system as it is.

One thing everybody is sure of, they all think the cabinet system is wrong.

Now, when I say they, except for the sophisticates, the voters do, by a very, very solid majority.

So what do we do about that?

What you have to do there is to position ourselves in some way that is solely a political issue, in some way, that we are on the side of.

not just the status quo, but change, and change which is not just moving players around, giving them some sort of relief.

So, McGovern, the reason the McGovern thing comes out positive on that is that he, and all of his hemorrhaging colleagues, gave the Walters and Kidd a decision very hard.

They're prime right hand hands.

None of them had any solutions.

None of them had anything that worked.

But people got the impression they were for something.

You don't have to be responsible.

We have to be useful.

But the point is, as you get closer to an election, that you figure out something.

And if it's a given, let it be that.

But something that will indicate concern about the problem.

Now, let me cover one other point on that.

What I recall when I told these senators and congressmen here today,

I think the ceiling, the spending ceiling, should not be so old in terms of ceiling, the ceiling of spending.

Most people are forced to actually move it around.

And it is for what they want, period.

The balance of budget is not really down.

That was an issue that's also been pulled by about 65 to 35.

So what do you find then?

People are only interested in spending if it affects their taxes.

If cutting spending cuts their taxes, therefore, if raising spending raises their taxes, they're against raising.

But if spending simply means we get more from the government, it doesn't hurt.

Therefore, that's spending.

And here's what you do about the spending thing, therefore.

What we've got to do as a lieutenant, so it is, a vote for the spending ceiling is a vote against higher taxes.

a vote against higher taxes.

You cannot say that if the spending ceiling does not pass, there will be higher taxes.

I wouldn't be caught on that, because then you have to say, oh no, the president will fight this lonely battle by himself and will have to veto things and hope to Christ that Congress doesn't overwrite the vetoes.

But you can put it another way.

A vote for a spending ceiling is buying insurance against higher taxes.

If you don't have a spending ceiling, an irresponsible Congress

by all the tremendous efforts of the president to stop this bad spending will add to the budget and inevitably you're going to have higher taxes.

I wouldn't confuse it as you have to if you're going to be totally sophisticated and say either higher taxes or higher prices.

I've often said that, but I think it's really true.

We all know that if you don't have to raise taxes, you just have a big deficit when inflation rises.

But I think that we ought to present it this way, that if you want no higher taxes, you've got to spend it.

That will put the McGoverns, for example, particularly McGovern and our political opponents in a position that if they vote against the spending sealer, they are voting in effect for higher taxes.

You may have that issue later, but it's really quite true that if you don't have the NAM spending sealer,

There's a very good chance that the Congress will run away on the spending front, and the next year we're set up in the Department of Taxes.

There's another reason to do this, which we have to recognize in the quiet of this room, and that is that the goddamn Congress does continue to expand.

They override the strategic links, and with the thought, oh, they will cut a lot of defense, which they'll never do.

But if they continue to do that, we may be faced with the necessity for higher taxes.

And I don't want to be in a position that we can't put the blame squarely where it falls on the government and Congress, because it's the Congress that's succeeding the budget.

So I think the spending ceiling, I think an all-out assault should be made on the spending ceiling front, not because it holds spending down, but because we want to avoid increasing taxes.

Now, from a political standpoint, that's the way to sell your privacy.

Would you agree?

Oh, yeah.

I think it's played very well so far.

The final version, which is quite different from the original draft, I think it's very good.

And I think it's tough stuff.

And I think a lot of the portions are very good.

Steve, over here.

John, I thought it's very good.

But on that, coming back to the other points, the real question is whether, as I see it, on two fronts, I think, frankly, I think the economy should be considering doing that.

I can look to the future and think you do reasonably well.

But on the other hand, there are two fronts where, from a political standpoint, we ought to try to make a couple of plays before the election.

One is impressive.

Well, I think it's a duty.

you can do anything i mean what i mean the food price not only don't i didn't let me say i do not want to do something that will impose on the economy a bunch of damn controls that will make it i mean there's totally a response to the food price mark you can do something to show concern about it then we should do it other than security will be closed in other words people understand

On the tax front, George, and we want to talk about this at a later time, we simply are going to have to come up with something that indicates that we, you know, we've got to tax them in a little bit of hours rather than hours.

I don't know.

But you see, I've inclined to think, Bob, I've inclined to think that, well, we've got to try possible things.

First, Bob, when you get three courses, as I see it, one, the really only responsible thing to do, if you're going to talk responsibility, is to sell the thing as it is.

By God, it's a good record.

That's what we ought to do.

We've done very well.

We've gotten patient.

The economy is growing.

Unemployment will be coming down.

It has already begun to subside.

The work week, et cetera.

But one thing that Bobby Griffin mentioned, which he thinks that you might have a chat with some of the other people, he said, you know, we're looking very, very bad at this, because we predicted that if we got car sales up, that each so many cars, 100,000 cars, 25,000 jobs, it's just,

You've got sales up, and all of the auto companies are doing is simply increasing the overtime.

He said, by God, they ought to hire a few more people at this point.

I don't know if this is true or not.

It's true.

But if it is true, kick them in the ass and say, between now and the election, hire a few people and cut it over.

They've got a lot of productivity to create when you've got a lot of productivity.

Well, I saw the enormous productivity increases.

That's what it is.

But you see, let me just, first you can sell what you've got.

That's responsible.

this is the real question if we could find her we could find it out of your furl back of all your mind if you could find something we could do something we could do on the control side of the processor that we ought to do if you could find something we can offer in the tax reform field i mean maybe we jiggered the next summer

Don't worry about Hobart Grill, or is it Jack Ness's, they're gonna be actors, they're gonna be actors, whatever we do.

But my point is, if we could have something positive to talk about that.

Now, if you can't find it, I understand.

But let me say, don't be too damn responsible in that respect.

See?

That's not my problem.

But, see, I think I've been as open-minded about the idea of a freeze at some time in the next few months as anyone else.

But I thought of a freeze as something we would do if things looked pretty bad or were not approved.

But because it seems to me that to take a step like that, after all what you said, and it is the kind of measure that everybody knows, and it's an admission that things aren't going well, but we don't have to admit that when they are going well.

Now, things have turned bad.

How about a selective freeze?

Well, I think we were only ever thinking of meat as a freeze thing, because that's the big problem.

But I would be afraid that if we were on the one hand saying, look, everything's getting lost fine, how would we explain the fact that we can't?

The other sentiment here is that, again, going back to what the public perception is, they feel that the cost of living has risen faster than their wages by 82% to 9%.

They feel that food prices have been rising faster than any other price level.

They take food prices and inflation as the number one issue, probably way above unemployment.

And then, as the President pointed out, when they're asked the cause of the rise of food prices, 64% say food, middlemen, and processors.

31% say people wanting to buy them.

24% say the food store out there, and 15% the farm.

So it's obvious there's a natural loyalty.

And I keep going back to the great surprise election in the heathland.

And nobody caught a ball of bulls or anything.

It was the last 10 days.

And it was apparently almost completely a housewife surge against the prices of food that did take a jump within that period.

And it won him the election because he had been talking

about doing something about that over the last three or four weeks.

And I just hate to see that work in reverse.

And the other president is a great friend of ours.

Oh, he hasn't produced at all.

But he won in the election show.

The other president, the opposition, has not contested.

No, not yet.

And the reason is that they don't know what the hell to do about it.

And they don't have to.

They don't have to.

There are farms where I can absolutely guarantee an increase in food prices, but nobody pays much attention to us.

The opposition doesn't have to use this, because if they have something that is causing discontent, they just want to sit there quietly.

Things that we can do in the food area.

We still have tariffs on meat, for instance.

And we can sock in to try to... We talked about this out in San Clemente.

And we could come in and ask for those tariffs.

They can lower our food.

And probably we could get it cached, but it would be something invisible that would be done.

Most of these things that we can do have some chance of making a difference.

What about the carbon and energy?

Is it correct that oil prices are destined to improve in September and October?

I mean, don't ask me to cross my heart, but that was our expectation.

That's what the Department of Agriculture says, and all the people we've talked to have said that.

It doesn't mean we don't want to meet out there.

So that's how it will happen.

I think we can tell our story better.

I think this is a great thing, something to maybe have a good

But, you know, we have these meetings with the various other agricultural interests, supermarket people, with the packers, and so forth.

And if there's one thing that all of them look at, it's the trees.

on raw agricultural products, and particularly on beef, as something that would be, that would not achieve, as a result, raw for a backfire on it.

And they're very strong on that, even those who are not farmers directly.

That's raw products, but that is market-driven.

They're part of a process, intensive process.

But if we freeze them, if we freeze the price of meat in the retail store, of course, the market is not very elastic, so it's going to go down the price of meat in the farm.

What happened during the 90-day freeze?

We just froze at the retail level.

We froze at the retail level, and we froze at all levels except on the farm, but it wasn't very big.

The farm price was nicely declining, so there was no problem.

There was no tendency for the meat price at retail.

I would say this.

I admit it in case you can't help it too early.

We also must remember if we do, can we not delay?

Because that is such a big election gift.

And the rest of the people we're talking about immediately after Labor Day, if we do, if we do, I don't know.

And you've also got to figure anything you do is going to take at least a month before people realize you've done it.

It just doesn't become enough for people.

But you can personalize this.

If you were able to do what you did, Mr. President, on August 15th, and have it increased, just food prices, I could tell that

I was wondering when I consumed it, if the price of lard is going to be the same next week as it is this week, and we get, you could, you could deal with profit margins with processors.

And half of those profit margins have been squeezed down, and they are being controlled.

Yeah.

The other thing that's controlled, that is the processing of it, as soon as the capital is slaughtered,

That price is controlled.

It's only the price at slaughter.

I mean, if you're going to do anything on the wages, you would have to do that for cosmetic purposes so that you would be doing both at the same time, and that that would be focused in the middleman range rather than the farmers or in the stores.

And it might be too complicated, and as Chuck says, it takes a while to become known, but it would be a focused, visible sign of activity.

We're already doing it.

What about running against it?

How about separating out food prices and the CPI?

It's a separate item to do.

Now, if you get a CPI convert, that's a point.

That's one of the components there.

The CPI includes food.

John's saying put out a CPI exclude.

Right.

And then a food index.

Right.

Like those potatoes and index.

Right.

All right.

So it's part of the food factor.

The president announces that we've got to have a campaign against higher food prices.

And so he's directing the Bureau of Labor Statistics henceforth

to publish a food price index to the American people so that everybody in the whole chain of food processing will have a personal, vivid realization of what's happening in this country on food prices.

And we're going to make a concerted effort.

And we're going to focus down.

And we don't approve of it.

And we don't defend it.

And we think it's bad.

And it hits the low guy.

And we're for the low guy.

And so it comes out.

next month, and it's a big no.

And then the president goes on, and he says, by God, this is terrible.

Now everybody's going to rally around.

And if it doesn't get better, then I'm going to have no alternative but to do something about it.

And he gets to identify himself with an attack on that specific problem.

Meantime, the rest of the CPI is getting greater once you take that out of there.

Well, that's true.

A year ago, I think you could have gotten away with that stuff right now.

Well, you know.

Well, why don't we do this?

Why don't we leave this for a further thought here and see what the problem is?

I mean, basically, it's just a, it's the food crisis is the only problem.

The CPI numbers don't, unfortunately, mean a damn thing.

Unless they go up to God.

I mean, they, when I say they don't mean a damn thing, I don't mean that we should just shove them in the house and cut the rate of inflation.

We've got to tell people that they just gotta feel

You can say your spendable earnings are up 4%.

They don't believe it.

But you've got to keep saying it.

After all that you keep saying it, they might start to believe it.

They don't believe their taxes went down.

That's right.

They don't realize that 14% of the people, 66% below 10, don't go to the big houses.

They don't go to the big houses.

People don't realize they're going to be taxed.

And I think that that's what we've simply wondered about.

The taxes have gone down, inflation's gone down, and the rate of inflation's down.

It's the only way to play this, and I've been trying to do this with audiences, and you just are met with disbelief.

You say to people, your taxes have gone down so-and-so, you're in the $25,000 bracket, your buying power's gone up 4%, meantime food prices have only gone up so-and-so.

And so you're in that...

I suppose when you start talking about that, you see there's one danger about bragging about this.

The danger is that it appears you're for the state of school.

It just may be looking at it from a class political standpoint.

So that means, well, we've got a problem.

We see this other guy's going to be worse.

Then you come to ours.

I agree that, in terms of economics and this and this, perhaps we ought to certainly try to accomplish.

But in terms of, I'm not sure.

I know it's all in that paper.

But do you think it can be sober?

I think it can.

At this point, I think we have...

The Social Security tax takes about 40% only out of the tax.

The tax reduction, as compared to that, is a reduction of about 60%.

language and price control from Mr. President.

Over the past four or five months, as you know, we've sort of been allowing portions of the program to become decontrolled.

But we have been talking tough.

So we've been haranguing people.

We harangued bankers and so on last Thursday.

On the other hand, we

have been willing to raise the low income exemption from last week.

And we always have had small firms that are not under the controls, or the 60 or fewer.

So that's the general thrust that we've had.

But let me ask you this, George.

Will you give us your big package, my word, in terms of tax there?

Are you prepared to talk about something on that?

What are you doing about that platform, John?

On taxes?

Well, we're talking about a promising little pie in the sky out there on property tax relief.

And then we can have, well, we've got to remember, don't interrupt, we've got to remember that this is a very dangerous area.

I've got to account for that one.

We'll show you various alternative re-arrangements.

and try to identify where all the bodies are buried.

And there are bodies buried all over all of these things, which is well known.

We have things that range from very low and sort of comprehensive to things that are major but small by comparison.

For example, we have been working on them pretty well.

a proposal that would simplify the system a lot.

It wouldn't be a gigantic reform.

It wouldn't redistribute income.

But it would certainly make it a hell of a lot simpler for people to fill out their income tax returns.

So we have a variety of things that I think we'd be ready to talk to you about and say, by the end of next week.

Let me just say that I don't want any

that was what i think our economic policies have been enormously effective and uh positive the fact that there's political issues

just one of those times we just have to find a way to just to get the understanding of what certainly exists as I read the cost of financial things these days, except for sanctions and so on, the understanding among most economic sophisticates is that we do it rather well.

Well, I think we're getting a much better stress.

And I think that despite the fact that people see in a food store, their attitude towards everything is not being qualified, whether they keep being told flatly, or they think they're terrible, or they're depressed, or whether they're being told something down, we're a bunch of folks.

I'd like to reiterate the question.

about the council's role in all this.

We have, well, we have two kinds of difficulties.

The first is kind of traditionally .

And, furthermore, it's a very small agency, and the staff is all of them.

We keep tracking the staff, particularly insulated from anything.

So we get tons of material, some which is very crocheted from across the street or elsewhere, to be checked.

It really comes down on us, because I think it seems to me we need some better machinery.

I think he's asking for a budget increase.

No, I was very upset about it.

Well, first we need some better machinery for kind of fact checking and all that kind of stuff, which I just can't ask myself.

And second, I'd like a little directive on the role that you expect the three of us to play.

There's a special problem about marinas because everybody in the world wants marinas to get out and make speech.

And that's too much.

You just cannot.

I think we have to back off this a little bit in the public eye and be as helpful as we can inside, but be very selective about it.

I think that a lot more of this checking and so forth can be fired at.

If you have things about taxes and a lot of economic policies that the Treasury people can talk about.

You've got the Congress people who don't know what to do.

Because that's what we've been doing.

You shouldn't be doing any of that at all for 17 years.

Well, I think you've got that part.

Cut that off.

Cut us out, John.

It's just got to be done.

Because it's a small step in the right direction.

Now, as far as the, uh, as far as what you do in terms of speech and arresting, uh, uh, I think that, I think that it would be more selective, and frankly, it would be more selective.

I don't think you know what I'm talking about.

That's the damn rule.

That's the great thing that comes along.

It's a general rule.

I would argue that the three members of the council

should accept no speaking engagements, except a very few that you do in your professional capacity that you would do anyway.

I mean, there's certain national associations I assume you always speak to.

Accept the opportunities from time to time to go on television, on interviews.

I think it's a total waste of marine equipment, you or the health office, to speak at any

Public gathering.

Too late.

It isn't carried on television.

Too late, too late, too late.

Just the television.

Huh?

What?

Sometimes that's the way.

You don't need that as a way to get down on television.

No, no, no.

I think that if you get a solution, and the moment you have to make a speech, you've got to prepare something.

You think it's going to be different.

You've got to get around the text and all that crap.

And basically, I think your greatest, the most important thing you can do

is to do Q&A on television from the standpoint of just informing people.

And frankly, another thing that can be very, very effective is to talk to other speakers, like the serving types and the rest of you, and say, look, here are the facts that need to be educated.

But this business I'm doing, like the editorial board of Wall Street Journal or the editorial board of Time magazine, look, they're not worth five minutes this time.

It was worth that a year ago.

Three months to go.

Done.

We are writing.

We can write something.

We have one thing going that I think will be... That's good for us.

We're writing a piece about the role of women in the economy.

It's going to be in the Ladies' Home Journal in October.

Excellent.

And we could do something about... We can do something about this in non-state with young people.

Can you?

I think we could.

I think there's a place in it.

I do think that any part of this is going to be printed before October 5th.

That's right.

October 1.

That's good.

Right.

Anything that's going to come out before, but if the publication is significant enough to, if they're broad enough, the readership that you've got.

But I would say this, I couldn't remark, you'll be nibbled at night and day.

God, they're going to want you to go out and do this club and that club and this group and that group, etc., etc., etc.,

And I don't know the word.

I mean, TV is the name.

TV is the name.

And you're all going to choose the song to sing.

And on that, all that requires, of course, homework.

You've got to sit and think about the question.

But you can all have it.

Right.

You can ask the question.

I would also like you, and this is the hardest one,

It's a total waste of time for any of you to spend 30 seconds with a barbell on.

But people keep doing it.

Somebody seems to think that somebody needs a barbell on.

And it's too late to worry about affecting people in Washington now, because that doesn't make any difference anymore.

The material we get out, people .

Like our own staff here, I've been trying to talk to them virtually every week.

an hour or two with John Osborne, I'd say, why?

Say, what, he influences them?

Too late, forget it, done, done.

Don't do that.

None of these people are worth the time now.

They're not worth it.

The only thing now is the direct big audience, and that's tolerated right now.

That's what matters.

Or an interview, now, going the other way, a thing, I mean, you don't want an interview in U.S. News.

Not bad.

Now, it would still be worthwhile.

Not bad.

Or then for Barron's, or then for the Wall Street Journal, because it covers national stuff.

But it's a business.

We're not going out and doing basically editorial support, which is very useful to them at certain times, and you should go later, because that's part of a long-range educational process, and it's part of your duties.

Basically, we all have to do it.

But now, we just said, yeah, I'm just too busy right now.

And I've done it.

Did they show it to CBS?

Let me tell you this.

This can help you, which I think this would be very helpful.

Who determines what your schedule is?

Do you determine for the council?

And if you do that, do you let them fix it all individually?

How's that done?

Well, we receive invitations, some directly, a lot of them are found to us from Chuck or from somebody else.

And we decide, we talk to each other, the three of us, so that we don't like all this to be out of town.

Sure.

Well, let me suggest this, Bob.

I think you've got to do this.

You and Chuck should, there's got to be a screening of this for, in this area.

And us, the three, we probably overworked you because of the

because of the situation we have and, you know, economic good news and the rest and trying to get it out.

But right now, with three months to go, I think it's very important not to, to just use that bulletin board and hope.

Of course, we should do the same.

We should do the same with the evidence of trouble.

I'd like to hear what you think, Mr. President.

I think that, let me say that you can assure them they're all done a hell of a job.

The three of you just have some curve answers.

I mean, you've got a power case to serve.

You've got 10 or so people questioning you and all the rest.

When I say hard, it shouldn't be hard, but it is.

That's the way it is.

Always for us it is.

And if I could just say one thing, I think the best use of your time, the three of you, is to figure out

how you can multiply by preparing in simple terms the strongest facts for others to use.

In other words, let others say things that you don't want to say.

In other words, you've got to be responsible.

You can't do this and that.

But you know, you've got a lot of people going out to make speeches.

There are all sorts of people.

Everybody from Rumsfeld to cabinet officers and all the rest to congressmen to senators.

They're all out.

They all want to make times.

And the more that you can give them, if you can sit and say, well, let's give them some ammunition, and maybe they go a little further.

You go, that's just fine.

They're politicians.

They can do that.

That would be the best use of your time.

Far better than you're working to prepare something for you yourself to say.

would be to prepare something that would be broadly used by others, and it's out and it multiplies, and the line, you know, that's, you know, various at this point.

Then you're not also, that keeps you in your non-political position a little better, too, which I'd like to do.

We don't want it to appear that you're just talking a bunch of attributes and pips.

I mean, you should be, you've got to retain some professional

And that is removing the need for more tax revenue.

And if you start with that, because none of the others are on that.

They're all about trying to find more to take care of this imagined need.

But your position on the idea of trying to... No increase.

No increase.

That's the first thing you all said.

We've been working on it.

Thank you.

I've got to go.

Well, I'll leave you, sir.

We'll show you a lot of possible ideas and get an idea of how you react to them.

So whenever you're ready to have them, but I'm not trying to force you into doing them all.

Thank you.