[AUTHENTICITY CERTIFIED: Text
version below transcribed directly from audio]
DR. DOBSON: Mr. President, you've had a busy day,
haven't you?
PRESIDENT REAGAN: Yes, and I'm sorry to have kept you waiting, but it kept -- it
kept one tradition intact: Every time I have earlier in the day a meeting with a
congressman, I'm behind --
DR. DOBSON: You're going to be running late.
PRESIDENT REAGAN: -- schedule for the rest of the day.
DR. DOBSON: Well, I sure appreciate the opportunity to chat with you for a few
minutes on behalf of our audience at Focus on the Family. Our people care deeply
about the family, and I know that you do too, don't you.
PRESIDENT REAGAN: Yes.
DR. DOBSON: That's been an integral part of your Administration and we've
appreciated that. And in fact, I -- I really would like to ask you some
questions about that --
PRESIDENT REAGAN: All right.
DR. DOBSON: -- relative to government and the family. Would you -- Would you
express your views on -- on the degree to which healthy, individual families are
related to a strong and healthy nation? Is there a connection between those
things?
PRESIDENT REAGAN: Yes, I don't believe you can have one without the other. A
strong, healthy nation without the family unit is the -- is the very base. And I
just finished saying a little while ago to another group that, "As the family
goes, so goes the nation." So -- And I do think that there has been a tendency
on government -- I don't think it was with malice or anything; I think we're
well intentioned, but bureaucracy, once created, keeps seeing areas where it
feels it could do good and could be helpful. And the result has been, we've had
many tendencies over recent years of government that would in -- in effect
supplant the -- the family. Let me give one example: the programs with regard to
family planning. And suddenly you find an organization or an agency that is
directly making contact with, let us say, "underage youth," with regard to
something that is very vital and certainly is the very heart of our moral
standards, birth control information, devices and so forth, and at the same time
is saying that the family has no right to know that they're doing this.
DR. DOBSON: They've invaded parental rights --
PRESIDENT REAGAN: That's right.
DR. DOBSON: -- in that regard, haven't they? What should be the role of
government in the family, in building, in forging strong families?
PRESIDENT REAGAN: Well, I think that everything that government can do, first of
all, it starts with its prime responsibility, of course, of securing our
freedoms and -- and our security, both against outside assailants and against
the criminal elements within our own country. But it does not interfere, and it
does everything it can to strengthen the family economically. I think the
greatest social program there is in the world is a job.
DR. DOBSON: Speaking of the financial side of it, in your
address to the nation in May, where you
presented your tax proposal, you -- you mentioned that you felt the tax
structure had been unfair to families.
PRESIDENT REAGAN: Yes.
DR. DOBSON: In what way?
PRESIDENT REAGAN: Well, back in 1948, $600 income tax deduction for an -- for a
dependent member in the family. And until we raised that with our tax program to
[$]1,040, it had stayed [$]600 even though inflation had brought it to the point
where properly it should be $2700. Well now, we're only trying in our tax reform
to bring it to [$]2,000. That's a lot closer to the [$]2700. But in other words,
by not indexing things of that kind, the government was actually annually
increasing the tax without make -- doing a thing -- letting inflation do it for
them, but not recognizing that...the $600 exemption was supposed to be based on
having some relationship to the cost of raising a child, and to not adjust that
to the increase in costs; and, of course, government played a part in creating
the inflation.
DR. DOBSON: That $2,000 deduction is -- is a centerpiece of your tax proposal
for those of us in the pro-family movement. Yet, we hear in town that Congress
is not terribly excited about it, and there's a lot of pressure to reduce or --
or even eliminate that increase. How committed is your Administration to that?
PRESIDENT REAGAN: Very committed. And I -- I can't believe that they could get
much of a following for deleting something of that kind. As a matter of fact,
the
House Committee on Children, Youth and Family,
the select committee, dominated by the opposition party, the Democrats, being a
House committee, that has just ruled that our proposal is more fair to the
family than any of the other tax proposals before Congress.
DR. DOBSON: I saw that article in the Washington
Post. Did that surprise you that they endorsed it in that way?
PRESIDENT REAGAN: The committee?
DR. DOBSON: Uh-huh.
PRESIDENT REAGAN: No, because I've seen signs that this may be one of those that
we're not going to be Republicans and Democrats. We're going to be Americans.
That -- It is -- It's going to have a
bipartisan [support].
DR. DOBSON: The -- Are there other pro-family ingredients in that tax proposal
that you feel strongly about?
PRESIDENT REAGAN: Well, the very fact of reducing the rates, of course. The very
fact that, while we claim three brackets, 15, 25, and 35 instead of the present
14, there really is a fourth rate: zero. Because families down battling there at
the poverty level edge --
DR. DOBSON: Won't pay any taxes at all.
PRESIDENT REAGAN: -- are going to be exempt from taxes entirely.
DR. DOBSON: Talk about the increase in the IRA limit for homemakers to, or those
that stay home, to $2,000 --
PRESIDENT REAGAN: Yeah.
DR. DOBSON: -- as a way to redress the inequity that we've seen there.
PRESIDENT REAGAN: That -- That is another one here. The wage earner has, of
course, been entitled to that. But more and more, I think we've come to
understand that with the prevalence of women in the marketplace and the work --
in the workforce and all, there was a tendency to, a while back, to see the
homemaker as not being considered employed. Well, I think they're employed very
definitely, and in a very arduous job. And it's a recognition that they too
deserve some of these things that -- if they are doing that, and therefore not
out in the marketplace, they should not be deprived of the right to provide for
their own retirement years.
DR. DOBSON: We went to the Census Bureau recently to do some checking on
statistics and found that 63 % of American women over 16 years of age are in the
home at least part-time --
PRESIDENT REAGAN: Yeah.
DR. DOBSON: if not full-time or part-time [sic]. And only 37% are in the
workforce full-time.
PRESIDENT REAGAN: Yeah.
DR. DOBSON: And many of those are students and -- and single women. So, it is
important to address those that have chosen to stay home --
PRESIDENT REAGAN: Yeah. Yeah.
DR. DOBSON: -- and take care of their children.
PRESIDENT REAGAN: And there are other things. In...every other area and
department of government, there's been a tendency on the part of the
professionals in education to rule the family out of having any voice in how
their children are educated, that somebody else will tell them what they're
going to learn and how and why. And I think they -- that's why the great
strength that we've always had in this country, [in] the educational field, is
keeping the running of education as much as possible at the local community
level, where the parents can participate with the teachers and the
administrators of the school.
DR. DOBSON: Mr. President, I hear that congressmen, senators say they are not
hearing from their constituency on tax reform and that maybe the country isn't
ready for it or doesn't want it. Do you believe that?
PRESIDENT REAGAN: It could be, because if you look at -- at what is out in the
public, or what the public is hearing mostly, are from the lobbyists for special
interests who are bringing up that the "tax is at fault" or the "pro-plan is at
fault," because of this particular thing it should be removed or that should be
removed. This is why I've been trying to get around the country and talk about
the tax bill in its entirety. And this is the strangest thing: Yes, a senator on
the plane going down to North Carolina the other day was saying [he was] not
hearing of it when he's back -- been back home in this August vacation.
And yet,
he's present when I stand up in front of 15,000 people who've been in the hall
for two hours before I get there, sweltering in a building that has no air
conditioning and in which it's even hot outside and hotter in the building. And
I think they counted I was interrupted in my presentation of the tax reform
program, I was interrupted by applause 24 times. And the speech was only about a
15 minute speech. And the -- And it was mainly on, as I pointed out, changes,
items, what this would do and what that would do in the tax program.
Now, Sunday, on television, I heard Sam Donaldson on one of the network talk
shows say that tax reform was a kind of a one-week story, that they covered it
by...covering me out there making one of speeches and so forth. But now it isn't
news anymore because having covered it, and me saying pretty much the same thing
wherever I go, why they're not going to touch it anymore. And yet, anytime that
someone wants to raise another objection, someone with a -- a title of some
kind, and say, "We oppose" this or that in the tax program --
DR. DOBSON: That gets coverage.
PRESIDENT REAGAN: -- that will get covered --
DR. DOBSON: Yeah.
PRESIDENT REAGAN: -- because it will be the first time they've heard that.
DR. DOBSON: You have called this tax proposal the "strongest pro-family
initiative in post-war" America [history] --
PRESIDENT REAGAN: Yeah.
DR. DOBSON: -- and even called it a "second American Revolution." Those who feel
strongly about that, and especially the $2,000 exemption and the other things
that -- that have families in mind -- and we're talking to a lot of them right
now -- what can they do to support that legislation?
PRESIDENT REAGAN: This is one in which, Congress, again, the very fact that some
congressmen haven't been hearing, congressmen have got to hear from them.
They've got to take pen in hand and write their congressman, or call him, wire
him, whatever. It does make a difference. And when they're congressmen [are]
home, they've got to make them hear from them that -- that they want this. But
it -- it is a kind of revolution. You stop to think that the income tax passed
in 1913, which then only applied to about 3% of our population, you didn't pay
any tax unless you were up there in a quite high bracket. But it has come on
down now to where, subtly, the government has, or the Internal Revenue Service
has, portrayed the taxes in a -- in a way as if all your money belongs to the
government except that which they allow you to keep.
Take the term, the recent years. "Tax deduction" has become tax expenditure,
meaning when the government lets you deduct something, it is an expenditure of
their money. When I -- back when we were doing some things in California when I
was governor, I had had to raise taxes against everything I believed in because
there we did have a Constitution requiring a balanced budget. You come into
office in the middle of the fiscal year. So, I came into office with six months
to go for the end of the fiscal year and a multimillion dollar debt at the
federal level would have been billions -- and here I say millions -- but that
had been run up in the first six months. And by the Constitution, in my first
six months, I've got to do something. I cannot come to the end of the fiscal
year with that deficit. I had no choice. To, you know, to implement savings
plans would not take effect that quickly. So I had to pass a tax. And I told the
people that -- how I felt about taxes, and I said, as quickly as we can, and
this is straightened out, we'll give this back to you.
So, the first time was when my director of finance, who happened to be a fellow
named Cap Weinberg, came in to see me. And Cap told me that we now had gotten
out of the woods and that we were going to have a $100 million surplus. And he
said, "Since you haven't been able to do anything that you might have wanted to
do in some program that you had in mind because of the financial situation, I
thought I'd tell you before the legislature finds out about it and comes up with
some spending programs." And I said, "I do have one idea." And he said, "What is
it?" And I said, "Let's give it back."
DR. DOBSON: That's unheard of.
PRESIDENT REAGAN: Cap says, "It's never been done." I said, "They never had an
actor up here before either." So, we figured out that [$]100 million at that
time was about 10% of the state income tax. So we simply told the people to
figure out their income tax and send us a check for 90% of what they owed. And
we already had the rest, the $100 million. Well, several times this went on till
the final one, before I left office, that we gave back was $850 million that we
gave back to the people in a tax rebate. And I will never forget a senator
storming into my office and he spoke so eloquently of what -- it was government
philosophy. He said, "Giving this money back is an unnecessary expenditure of
public funds."
DR. DOBSON: Goodness. I was a Californian at that time, and still am, and I got
some of that money and I've never had a chance to tell you I appreciated it.
PRESIDENT REAGAN: Well....
Mr. President, in January of 1984 you invited nine specialists on the family,
including myself, here, as you recall, and you asked us the question, "What can
government do to help the family?" And the press was not here; it was not
publicized; it was off the record -- you made that clear. And your purpose, as
you said on that day, was genuine: to find out what we thought you could do to
help the family. That tells me that you really do care about the family.
PRESIDENT REAGAN: Yes.
DR. DOBSON: And I appreciate that, and on behalf of several million of our
listeners and friends all across the country, I appreciate your continued
support.
PRESIDENT REAGAN: Well, we shall continue because we've seen some other
countries in the world where they have virtually eliminated the family and the
raising of children and so forth. [The] state has taken them over. I like our
system best.
DR. DOBSON: You have a heavy responsibility, Mr. President, and we will continue
to pray for you.
PRESIDENT REAGAN: Thank you very much. Thank you.
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