Ronald Reagan Speech Wiki - User contributions [en]

75-16-A6

2022-03-03T14:28:24Z

137.148.48.19:

[[Category:Radio Episodes]][[Category:Domestic Policy]]
- [[Main Page]] \ [[Reagan Radio Commentaries]] \ [[Radio1975|1975]]

<TABLE WIDTH="80%"><TR><TD>[[75-16-A5|<< Previous Broadcast]]</TD><TD ALIGN="RIGHT">[[75-16-A7|Next Broadcast >>]]</TD></TR></TABLE>

= Mr. Nader's Great Treasury Raid =

<TABLE BORDER="0"><TR><TD WIDTH="60%" ROWSPAN="2">
=== Transcript ===
Newspaper columnist Pat Buchanan is back with me today with his viewpoint on a subject I think will interest you. He'll be right with you.

Nearing final passage in the Congress today is a rather innocuous sounding bill calling for creation of a, quote, "Agency for Consumer Advocacy." The new agency is being promoted and portrayed as a vigorous new champion of consumer interests in the councils of government. It is nothing of the kind. What this new consumer protection agency is, is first and foremost, a political payoff to Ralph Nader. A 60 million dollar slice of federal pork being voted in gratitude by Mr. Nader's friends and debtors in the 94th Congress. Like all such federal agencies, the first beneficiaries will be the men who staff it and run it. These new GS-17s and 18s will be drawn from the friends and allies of Mr. Nader. They will exchange their current frugal existence in some tax-exempt haven for the power, perquisites, security and comforts of life on the federal payroll as 36,000 dollar a year bureaucrats, and it is the American taxpayer, the American consumer, who will be paying out of his pocket the cost of supporting these super bureaucrats in the style to which they are anxious to become accustomed.

You are wrong, the consumer protection people say, this new agency unlike the established agencies will be free of influence by the so-called special interests. The claim is ludicrous. The new agency has already sold out to the special interests even before it was established. In order to get big labor support for the bill, Mr. Nader's allies in Congress cut a deal with the AFL-CIO, whereby all labor disputes are exempted from review by the new agency. But if labor settlements do not affect consumer interests, what in the world does?

In the last analysis however, the new agency is a consumer fraud, because no single agency, no single individual, can possibly represent the interests of 210 million diverse Americans. When Americans go out to buy a car for example, they look for different things. Some look first at the mileage, others check it out for safety features and for weight for long distance driving, others are interested in styling and comfort, others want the cheapest possible transportation for the lowest possible cost, some want the prestige of a foreign model, others wouldn't buy anything that wasn't made in the United States. How in the world can any single agency, any single individual, possibly represent these conflicting interests? The answer of course, is that the new consumer protection agency would not be representing what the consumers of America want, it would represent what Mr. Nader and his friends think they should want.

There's one common consumer interest however on which most Americans do agree. That is, that we already have too much government and too much bureaucracy. The last thing this country needs now in 1975 is new taxes to hire new bureaucrats in a new agency to make sure that the other bureaucrats in the older agencies are doing their job.

If the 94th Congress wants to pay off its political debts to Mr. Nader, let it find some less expensive way.

This is Pat Buchanan, substituting for Ronald Reagan.

Thanks for listening.
</TD>
<TD WIDTH="10%" ROWSPAN="2"> </TD>
<TD VALIGN="TOP" HEIGHT="250">
=== Details ===
<TABLE BORDER="0" WIDTH="80%">
<TR><TD WIDTH="150">Batch Number</TD><TD WIDTH="150">{{PAGENAME}}</TD></TR>
<TD>Production Date</TD><TD>??/??/[[Radio1975|1975]]</TD></TR>
<TD>Book/Page</TD><TD>N/A</TD></TR>
<TD>Audio</TD><TD>Yes</TD></TR>
<TD>Youtube?</TD><TD>Posted By Me</TD></TR>
</TABLE>
</TD></TR>
<TR><TD VALIGN="TOP">
===Added Notes===
* Recorded by Patrick Buchanan
</TD></TR>
</TABLE>

75-16-A5

2022-03-03T14:28:07Z

137.148.48.19:

[[Category:Radio Episodes]][[Category:Domestic Policy]]
- [[Main Page]] \ [[Reagan Radio Commentaries]] \ [[Radio1975|1975]]

<TABLE WIDTH="80%"><TR><TD>[[75-16-A4|<< Previous Broadcast]]</TD><TD ALIGN="RIGHT">[[75-16-A6|Next Broadcast >>]]</TD></TR></TABLE>

= Gun Control =

<TABLE BORDER="0"><TR><TD WIDTH="60%" ROWSPAN="2">
=== Transcript ===
For the next few days I'll have with me a guest with some especially interesting viewpoints. He's the nationally syndicated colonist Patrick Buchanan. He'll be right with you.

Here in the nation's capital, the Congress is busy working up alternatives to the President's new anti-crime program. Invariably the Democratic alternatives contain some version or other of a Federal law to license, control, ban or even confiscate handguns, in particular the dread Saturday Night Special. If handguns are outlawed, liberal Democrats argue, handgun crimes automatically will be reduced. "It is as simple as that," they say. These are by and large the same people who told us ten years ago that if we voted enough money for the poor we would eliminate poverty. They were wrong then, they are wrong now.

Outlaw guns and only outlaws will have guns is how the slogan runs, and there is truth as well as irony in that statement. For if handguns are declared illegal, the criminals will keep their weapons and so too will hundreds of thousands of citizens who prefer to become law breakers rather than to give up the protection they believe a handgun provides to them and their family. Federal gun control would be nothing but another failed federal enterprise like prohibition. Does anyone seriously believe that some thug who specializes in holding up liquor stores is going to surrender his weapon simply because Congress has declared he is not entitled to own a gun?

New York has the toughest anti-gun laws in the country and there are still an estimated 1 million weapons floating around in private hands within the city. Nevertheless, it is argued handgun controls will reduce the number of deaths by accident and the number of those killed in a family quarrel. But that is not the problem. Simply because several hundred people die each year in gun accidents is no reason to deny 210 million Americans the right to own them. As for a lover's quarrel resulting in a shooting, quite frankly, it is not the fear of one's wife or girlfriend taking the family cannon out of the closet and blowing someone away that is the fear that is eating at the vitals of American society. The fear that is making America an armed camp is not the fear of the armed citizen, but fear of the armed criminal: the mugger, the robber, the rapist, the killer.

This is the individual to whom state legislatures and the federal Congress should be directing their attention. Mandatory and separate sentences for anyone using a gun in the commission of a crime. Mandatory life imprisonment or the death penalty for anyone who kills during the commission of a felony. These are the kind of laws that are needed and a society which refuses to take these tough measures against criminals is not going to become more safe and secure by robbing its citizens of the right to keep and acquire arms. A doubling of the prison population is a far better answer to the fear that stalks America than cutting in half the number of guns in American society.

This is Pat Buchanan substituting for Ronald Reagan.

Thanks for listening.
</TD>
<TD WIDTH="10%" ROWSPAN="2"> </TD>
<TD VALIGN="TOP" HEIGHT="250">
=== Details ===
<TABLE BORDER="0" WIDTH="80%">
<TR><TD WIDTH="150">Batch Number</TD><TD WIDTH="150">{{PAGENAME}}</TD></TR>
<TD>Production Date</TD><TD>??/??/[[Radio1975|1975]]</TD></TR>
<TD>Book/Page</TD><TD>N/A</TD></TR>
<TD>Audio</TD><TD>Yes</TD></TR>
<TD>Youtube?</TD><TD>Posted by Me</TD></TR>
</TABLE>
</TD></TR>
<TR><TD VALIGN="TOP">
===Added Notes===
* Recorded by Patrick Buchanan
</TD></TR>
</TABLE>

Pages to Create

2022-02-24T18:35:47Z

137.148.48.19:

* [[Aid to Dependent Children Program]]
* [[Alexis de Tocqueville]]
* [[American Enthusiasm]] - podcast
* [[Barnyard Economics Teachers]] - podcast
* [[Battle of Concord]]
* [[Central Planning You Right Out of Your Freedoms]] - podcast
* [[Civilian Conservation Corps]]
* [[Confessions of a Misspent Youth]]
* [[Considering the Minimum Wage]] - podcast
* [[Disasters]] - podcast
* [[Exodus]]
* [[Federal Registry]]
* [[Atkins Letter|God Bless America]]! (a letter)
* [[Haile Selassie]]
* [[Hands Up, Don't Nuke]] - podcast
* [[Harvard]]
* [[Herman Kahn vs. the Club of Rome]] - podcast
* [[James Weir]]
* [[John Dalberg-Acton]]
* [[Kenneth Tynan]]
* [[Labour Party]]
* [[Natural Rights]]
* [[New Deal]]
* [[Nova Radist Stala]] (Joyous News Has Come to Us)
* [[Overhead]] - podcast
* [[Ronald Reagan warned us about Bernie Sanders|Paul Batura: Ronald Reagan warned us about Bernie Sanders]] – over 40 years ago
* [[Press Release]]
* [[Radio1977|Reagan Radio Commentaries of 1977]]
* [[Radio1978|Reagan Radio Commentaries of 1978]]
* [[Radio1979|Reagan Radio Commentaries of 1979]]
* [[Robert Myers]]
* [[SALT II Talks/Treaty]]
* [[Senator Byrd]]
* [[Spirit Animal of the Environmentally Woke]] - podcast
* [[Stanley Yankus]]
* [[Stop Government Intervention]] - podcast
* [[Tennessee Valley Authority]]
* [[The Best Basketball Story You've Never Heard]] - podcast
* [[The Conflict with the Soviet Union]] - podcast
* [[The Eight Surprises]]
* [[The Laissez Faire Capitalism That Never Was]] - podcast
* [[The Martin Koszta Affair]]
* [[The Next Chinese Target??]] - podcast
* [[The Principles Applied—Alternatives to Political Force]] - podcast
* [[The Principles Ignored—How Political Force Disrupts Our Lives]] - podcast
* [[The Resonance Differential]]
* [[The Superintendent's Dilemma]]
* [[The Three Principles of Capitalism and the Free Society]] - podcast
* [[The Tyranny of Soft Energy Production]] - podcast
* [[The Unspoken Reagan]] - podcast
* [[To Purchase Reagan Radio Commentaries]] - podcast
* [[United Nations]]
* [[Radio1976|Viewpoint with Ronald Reagan of 1976]]
* [[What Now?]] - podcast
* [[Where's the Beef?]] - podcast
* [[William McKinley]]

Nova Radist Stala

2022-02-24T18:31:43Z

137.148.48.19:

''Nova Radist Stala'' is a Ukrainian Christmas carol which was rewritten by the Soviet Union. Reagan highlighted the carol and its rewrites in one of his [[Radio1978|radio commentaries in 1978]].

{| border="1" cellpadding="2" WIDTH="80%"
|- style="background-color: #DDDDDD;"
| <CENTER>'''Original Song'''</CENTER>
| <CENTER>'''First Rewrite'''</CENTER>
| <CENTER>'''Second Rewrite'''</CENTER>
|- VALIGN="TOP"
| The joyous news has come<BR>Which never was before<BR>Over a cave above a manger <BR>A bright star has lit the world,<BR>Where Jesus was born from a virgin maiden<BR>Clad in raiment poor<BR>Like a peasant baby.<BR>The shepherds with a lamb<BR>Surrounded the child,<BR>And on flected knees<BR>They him glorified<BR>We beg you, our King<BR>We pray to you today<BR>Grant happiness and joy<BR>To this family.
|| The joyous news has come<BR>which never was before<BR>A red star with five tails<BR>Has brightly lit the world<BR>The Altars have crumbled<BR>And all the Kings have fallen.<BR>Glory to the working people<BR>To shepherds and the ploughman!<BR>Glory to our host<BR>And to his fair hostess!<BR>May all their family<BR>Especially the Children<BR>Grow up to be strong and happy<BR>So's to fight the rich men.
|| The joyous news has come<BR>Which never was before<BR>Long-awaited star of freedom<BR>Lit the skies in October<SUP>1</SUP>.<BR>Where formerly lived the Kings<BR>And had the roots their nobles,<BR>There today with simple folks<BR>Lenin’s glory hovers.
|}
1: The Russian Revolution of 1917 began in October, hence the mention of that month, rather than December.

After sharing the three versions, Reagan then explains that there is an additional verse added to the Soviet ones, but it is ONLY sung, never written down:
<blockquote>
We beg you our Lord,<BR>We pray to you today<BR>Grant us freedom, return glory<BR>To our mother Ukraine.
</blockquote>

Pages to Create

2022-02-24T14:47:32Z

137.148.48.19: Created page with "* Aid to Dependent Children Program * Alexis de Tocqueville * American Enthusiasm * Amish * Barnyard Economics Teachers * Battle of Concord * Central Planning You Right Out of..."

* Aid to Dependent Children Program
* Alexis de Tocqueville
* American Enthusiasm
* Amish
* Barnyard Economics Teachers
* Battle of Concord
* Central Planning You Right Out of Your Freedoms
* Civilian Conservation Corps
* Confessions of a Misspent Youth
* Considering the Minimum Wage
* Constitution
* Disasters
* Exodus
* Federal Registry
* God Bless America! (a letter)
* Government Gets You Either Way
* Haile Selassie
* Hands Up, Don't Nuke
* Harvard
* Herman Kahn vs. the Club of Rome
* James Weir
* John Dalberg-Acton
* Kenneth Tynan
* Labour Party
* Natural Rights
* New Deal
* Nova Radist Stala (Joyous News Has Come to Us)
* Overhead
* Paul Batura: Ronald Reagan warned us about Bernie Sanders – over 40 years ago
* Press Release
* Reagan Radio Commentaries of 1977
* Reagan Radio Commentaries of 1978
* Reagan Radio Commentaries of 1979
* Robert Myers
* SALT II Talks/Treaty
* Senator Byrd
* Spirit Animal of the Environmentally Woke
* Stanley Yankus
* Stop Government Intervention
* Tennessee Valley Authority
* The Best Basketball Story You've Never Heard
* The Conflict with the Soviet Union
* The Eight Surprises
* The Laissez Faire Capitalism That Never Was
* The Martin Koszta Affair
* The Next Chinese Target??
* The Principles Applied—Alternatives to Political Force
* The Principles Ignored—How Political Force Disrupts Our Lives
* The Resonance Differential
* The Superintendent's Dilemma
* The Three Principles of Capitalism and the Free Society
* The Tyranny of Soft Energy Production
* The Unspoken Reagan
* To Purchase Reagan Radio Commentaries
* United Nations
* USS Ingraham
* Viewpoint with Ronald Reagan of 1976
* What Now?
* Where's the Beef?
* William McKinley

PuzzlePalacePod

2022-02-23T18:17:18Z

137.148.48.19:

The following is a collection of the materials used in creating the ninth episode of the [[CitizenReaganPod|Citizen Reagan podcast]] about the [[Reagan Radio Commentaries|Reagan's Radio Commentaries]].

==Transcript==
<DIV STYLE="width: 80%">
Welcome to the Citizen Reagan podcast. As you may know, what I do with this podcast is discuss the contents of the Ronald Reagan Radio Commentaries produced between 1975 and 1979. Sometimes, I may decide to talk about some other topic, but with over 1000 of these Commentaries to cover, the bulk of my work will be on them.

This is one of those times where I will be branching out beyond the Commentaries, and even beyond Reagan himself. Reagan did record one at least one broadcast that pertains to what I want to discuss, but he'd mention this problem as early as 1961.
The topic is government waste and it is, for me, one of the single-most important reasons why I, personally, favor a smaller federal government.

In 1961, an article by Reagan was printed in [[Losing Freedom by Installments|Qualified Contractor]] magazine. It contained the following passage:

<BLOCKQUOTE>Early in our history we were warned that the farther the spending was removed from the source of taxation, the less restraint there would be in its spending. Today, shocking figures prove the truth of this. When you contribute to your local charities, you must give $1.10 for every $1 that is to be spent in good works. County welfare sees an increase in this overhead to where $1.23 must be raised for every $1 actually spent on welfare. At the state level it takes $1.49 and the federal government must raise $2.10 for every dollar it will spend on the recipients of federal welfare, a $1.10 overhead for each $1.</BLOCKQUOTE>
Ever since I read that, I've had one question in my mind: If it was that bad then, in 1961 before LBJ's [[Great Society]], how bad is it now?

I wish I could tell you I know where he got those numbers, but I have been unable to track them down. Incidentally, what is this "Puzzle Palace" Reagan's talking about? I haven't found anything about the origin of the expression as yet, but Reagan wasn’t the only one to use it. I've found a couple books using it in their titles. Personally, I've always taken it to mean the tangled web of government agencies and their bureaucracies. A place that if you try to enter, you may never be able to escape.

Also in [[Encroaching Control|1961, in Phoenix Arizona]], Reagan spoke about how our tax dollars are divided among the levels of government:

<BLOCKQUOTE><PRE>Today, 31 cents out of every dollar earned in the United States goes to the tax collector. And of that 31 cents, 23 cents goes to the federal government, leaving 8 cents for the federal, county and the local community to divide up between itself. No wonder we have to turn to government and ask for federal aid in all of our projects. But wouldn't it make a lot more sense to keep some of that money here in the local community to begin with rather than routing it through that puzzle palace on the Potomac where it’s returned to us, minus a sizable carrying charge?</PRE></BLOCKQUOTE>

By the way, yes, Reagan mis-spoke. He meant 8 cents for the ''state'', county and local community.

Then, in his famous [[A Time For Choosing|1964 speech for Barry Goldwater]], he executed some simple arithmetic:

<BLOCKQUOTE><PRE>We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet. But now we are told that 9.3 million families in this country are poverty-stricken on the basis of earning less than $3,000 a year. Welfare spending is 10 times greater than in the dark depths of the Depression. We are spending $45 billion on welfare. Now do a little arithmetic, and you will find that if we divided the $45 billion up equally among those 9 million poor families, we would be able to give each family $4,600 a year, and this added to their present income should eliminate poverty! Direct aid to the poor, however, is running only about $600 per family. It would seem that someplace there must be some overhead.

So now we declare "war on poverty," or "you, too, can be a Bobby Baker!" Now, do they honestly expect us to believe that if we add $1 billion to the $45 million we are spending... one more program to the 30-odd we have — and remember, this new program doesn't replace any, it just duplicates existing programs — do they believe that poverty is suddenly going to disappear by magic? Well, in all fairness I should explain that there is one part of the new program that isn't duplicated. This is the youth feature. We are now going to solve the dropout problem, juvenile delinquency, by reinstituting something like the old CCC camps, and we are going to put our young people in camps, but again we do some arithmetic, and we find that we are going to spend each year just on room and board for each young person that we help $4,700 a year! We can send them to Harvard for $2,700! Don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting that Harvard is the answer to juvenile delinquency.</PRE></BLOCKQUOTE>

Let me quickly confirm, yes, [[Harvard]] was $2700 at the time. I found an article from the [http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1963/5/21/college-graduate-schools-will-raise-tuition/|archives of the Harvard Crimson from May of 1963] stating Harvard would be raising its tuition. Before the raise, tuition was $1520 per year with an average boarding price tag of $1100. That’s $2620. Add in some textbooks and booze, and Reagan's dead on with that number.

More recently, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ryan Paul Ryan], while running mate to Mitt Romney in the 2012 Presidential election, made this statement (and I was actually there to hear it):

<BLOCKQUOTE><PRE>I see veterans... and cheeseheads! It makes me hungry, sometimes, when I see that.</PRE></BLOCKQUOTE>

Opps, wrong clip, though I was in the audience for that too.

<BLOCKQUOTE><PRE>Just last year, total federal and state spending on means-tested programs came in at more than one trillion dollars. How much is that in practical terms? For that amount of money, you could give every poor American a check for twenty-two thousand dollars. Instead, we spent all that money attempting to fight poverty through government programs.</PRE></BLOCKQUOTE>

Over the course of the last 240+ years, the United States federal government has been slowly accumulating more and more duties for itself to perform, instead of leaving them to the people, the cities or the states. As it has done so, it has created more and more need to tax us to pay for what it does. There are more buildings to maintain, more employees to pay, more, more, more and everywhere you look, there’s a hand out, needing to get paid.

For example, let's create a scenario. I am sure this is nowhere near how things actually work, but, for the sake of illustration, here it is: Say you or I have $10 that is going to the federal government from our payroll tax withholdings. It reaches Washington D.C. and someone at the IRS or Treasury Department routes it to the Department of Agriculture, but they have to snip off a little piece of that for themselves, you know, administrative costs. It arrives at the Department of Agriculture. Now they take their piece of it and determine where the remainder is going to go, a federal subsidy for school lunches being administered by a state, let's say. So, my money now travels to that state capital, where a state level education department takes it, gets their piece of the action and moves what’s left of our $10 to a city school district, which clips off a piece for its own administrative costs and finally pays for one or more underprivileged children's lunches. Let’s be generous and say that $5 made it all the way back down. I honestly don’t believe that it would be that much, but that's just me being cynical.

Now, let's tweak the scenario, slightly: That $5 landed right back in the city where you or I live.

Wouldn't my tax dollars, your tax dollars, all our tax dollars be more efficiently spent if that $10 never went through the federal or state levels of the government? Instead of $5, it could be $8 or $9 buying lunches for those kids because the only level of government covering its costs is the local level.

Now, I understand there are some things the Federal government must do, but that list is pretty short. I can think of 5 Cabinet-level departments that could be eliminated, with most, if not all, of their functions being transferred down to the state and/or local levels or maybe just being eliminated completely. Add in various other administrations, commissions, programs, boards and bureaus and we may be able to cut down the size of the federal government, cut the deficit and debt, cut taxes at the federal level. I freely admit, local and state taxes would likely go up as a result of those transfers of functions.

Why not do it? Why not make the change? Power. Those given power seldom release their hold on it. I am talking not just about our elected officials, but the unelected bureaucrats in these departments as well. By commanding the lion's share of the tax funds, they can hand it out to the lesser governments, state, county and local with strings attached. Strings cause all kinds of problems. Without going into too much detail, my own city was forced to remove traffic signals (which included crosswalks) as a condition of taking money from the state to pay for the new signals. Had they paid for the project themselves, they could have configured the streets anyway they wanted. Strings can be used to dictate education standards at every level. In fact, in yet [[The Myth of the Great Society|another Reagan speech, this one from 1966]], he tells the following story:

<BLOCKQUOTE><CODE>Some time ago a group of distinguished college presidents, alarmed at the extent to which academic freedom has been compromised by these vast money grants, went to Washington and they had a proposal they'd worked out. ... Over and over again in Washington they kept asking, "But why won't this system work?" and finally a Freudian slip occurred. Francis Keppel, United States Director of Education blurted out, "You don't understand, under the plan you proposed, we couldn't achieve our social objectives."</CODE></BLOCKQUOTE>

This is why schools like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsdale_College Hillsdale College] refuse federal funds. They feel they would be required to compromise their educational standards.

So, let me ask, in closing, is it worth it to compromise if it means you don't have to pay?
</DIV>

PuzzlePalacePod

2022-02-23T18:14:40Z

137.148.48.19:

The following is a collection of the materials used in creating the ninth episode of the [[CitizenReaganPod|Citizen Reagan podcast]] about the [[Reagan Radio Commentaries|Reagan's Radio Commentaries]].

==Transcript==
<DIV STYLE="width: 80%">
Welcome to the Citizen Reagan podcast. As you may know, what I do with this podcast is discuss the contents of the Ronald Reagan Radio Commentaries produced between 1975 and 1979. Sometimes, I may decide to talk about some other topic, but with over 1000 of these Commentaries to cover, the bulk of my work will be on them.

This is one of those times where I will be branching out beyond the Commentaries, and even beyond Reagan himself. Reagan did record one at least one broadcast that pertains to what I want to discuss, but he'd mention this problem as early as 1961.
The topic is government waste and it is, for me, one of the single-most important reasons why I, personally, favor a smaller federal government.

In 1961, an article by Reagan was printed in [[Losing Freedom by Installments|Qualified Contractor]] magazine. It contained the following passage:

<BLOCKQUOTE>Early in our history we were warned that the farther the spending was removed from the source of taxation, the less restraint there would be in its spending. Today, shocking figures prove the truth of this. When you contribute to your local charities, you must give $1.10 for every $1 that is to be spent in good works. County welfare sees an increase in this overhead to where $1.23 must be raised for every $1 actually spent on welfare. At the state level it takes $1.49 and the federal government must raise $2.10 for every dollar it will spend on the recipients of federal welfare, a $1.10 overhead for each $1.</BLOCKQUOTE>
Ever since I read that, I've had one question in my mind: If it was that bad then, in 1961 before LBJ's [[Great Society]], how bad is it now?

I wish I could tell you I know where he got those numbers, but I have been unable to track them down. Incidentally, what is this "Puzzle Palace" Reagan's talking about? I haven't found anything about the origin of the expression as yet, but Reagan wasn’t the only one to use it. I've found a couple books using it in their titles. Personally, I've always taken it to mean the tangled web of government agencies and their bureaucracies. A place that if you try to enter, you may never be able to escape.

Also in [[Encroaching Control|1961, in Phoenix Arizona]], Reagan spoke about how our tax dollars are divided among the levels of government:

<BLOCKQUOTE><PRE>Today, 31 cents out of every dollar earned in the United States goes to the tax collector. And of that 31 cents, 23 cents goes to the federal government, leaving 8 cents for the federal, county and the local community to divide up between itself. No wonder we have to turn to government and ask for federal aid in all of our projects. But wouldn't it make a lot more sense to keep some of that money here in the local community to begin with rather than routing it through that puzzle palace on the Potomac where it’s returned to us, minus a sizable carrying charge?</PRE></BLOCKQUOTE>

By the way, yes, Reagan mis-spoke. He meant 8 cents for the ''state'', county and local community.

Then, in his famous [[A Time For Choosing|1964 speech for Barry Goldwater]], he executed some simple arithmetic:

<BLOCKQUOTE><PRE>We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet. But now we are told that 9.3 million families in this country are poverty-stricken on the basis of earning less than $3,000 a year. Welfare spending is 10 times greater than in the dark depths of the Depression. We are spending $45 billion on welfare. Now do a little arithmetic, and you will find that if we divided the $45 billion up equally among those 9 million poor families, we would be able to give each family $4,600 a year, and this added to their present income should eliminate poverty! Direct aid to the poor, however, is running only about $600 per family. It would seem that someplace there must be some overhead.

So now we declare "war on poverty," or "you, too, can be a Bobby Baker!" Now, do they honestly expect us to believe that if we add $1 billion to the $45 million we are spending... one more program to the 30-odd we have — and remember, this new program doesn't replace any, it just duplicates existing programs — do they believe that poverty is suddenly going to disappear by magic? Well, in all fairness I should explain that there is one part of the new program that isn't duplicated. This is the youth feature. We are now going to solve the dropout problem, juvenile delinquency, by reinstituting something like the old CCC camps, and we are going to put our young people in camps, but again we do some arithmetic, and we find that we are going to spend each year just on room and board for each young person that we help $4,700 a year! We can send them to Harvard for $2,700! Don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting that Harvard is the answer to juvenile delinquency.</PRE></BLOCKQUOTE>

Let me quickly confirm, yes, [[Harvard]] was $2700 at the time. I found an article from the [http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1963/5/21/college-graduate-schools-will-raise-tuition/|archives of the Harvard Crimson from May of 1963] stating Harvard would be raising its tuition. Before the raise, tuition was $1520 per year with an average boarding price tag of $1100. That’s $2620. Add in some textbooks and booze, and Reagan's dead on with that number.

More recently, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ryan Paul Ryan], while running mate to Mitt Romney in the 2012 Presidential election, made this statement (and I was actually there to hear it):

<BLOCKQUOTE><PRE>I see veterans... and cheeseheads! It makes me hungry, sometimes, when I see that.</PRE></BLOCKQUOTE>

Opps, wrong clip, though I was in the audience for that too.

<BLOCKQUOTE><PRE>Just last year, total federal and state spending on means-tested programs came in at more than one trillion dollars. How much is that in practical terms? For that amount of money, you could give every poor American a check for twenty-two thousand dollars. Instead, we spent all that money attempting to fight poverty through government programs.</PRE></BLOCKQUOTE>

Over the course of the last 240+ years, the United States federal government has been slowly accumulating more and more duties for itself to perform, instead of leaving them to the people, the cities or the states. As it has done so, it has created more and more need to tax us to pay for what it does. There are more buildings to maintain, more employees to pay, more, more, more and everywhere you look, there’s a hand out, needing to get paid.

For example, let's create a scenario. I am sure this is nowhere near how things actually work, but, for the sake of illustration, here it is: Say you or I have $10 that is going to the federal government from our payroll tax withholdings. It reaches Washington D.C. and someone at the IRS or Treasury Department routes it to the Department of Agriculture, but they have to snip off a little piece of that for themselves, you know, administrative costs. It arrives at the Department of Agriculture. Now they take their piece of it and determine where the remainder is going to go, a federal subsidy for school lunches being administered by a state, let's say. So, my money now travels to that state capital, where a state level education department takes it, gets their piece of the action and moves what’s left of our $10 to a city school district, which clips off a piece for its own administrative costs and finally pays for one or more underprivileged children's lunches. Let’s be generous and say that $5 made it all the way back down. I honestly don’t believe that it would be that much, but that's just me being cynical.

Now, let's tweak the scenario, slightly: That $5 landed right back in the city where you or I live.

Wouldn't my tax dollars, your tax dollars, all our tax dollars be more efficiently spent if that $10 never went through the federal or state levels of the government? Instead of $5, it could be $8 or $9 buying lunches for those kids because the only level of government covering its costs is the local level.

Now, I understand there are some things the Federal government must do, but that list is pretty short. I can think of 5 Cabinet-level departments that could be eliminated, with most, if not all, of their functions being transferred down to the state and/or local levels or maybe just being eliminated completely. Add in various other administrations, commissions, programs, boards and bureaus and we may be able to cut down the size of the federal government, cut the deficit and debt, cut taxes at the federal level. I freely admit, local and state taxes would likely go up as a result of those transfers of functions.

Why not do it? Why not make the change? Power. Those given power seldom release their hold on it. I am talking not just about our elected officials, but the unelected bureaucrats in these departments as well. By commanding the lion's share of the tax funds, they can hand it out to the lesser governments, state, county and local with strings attached. Strings cause all kinds of problems. Without going into too much detail, my own city was forced to remove traffic signals (which included crosswalks) as a condition of taking money from the state to pay for the new signals. Had they paid for the project themselves, they could have configured the streets anyway they wanted. Strings can be used to dictate education standards at every level. In fact, in yet [[MythOfTheGreatSociety|another Reagan speech, this one from 1966]], he tells the following story:

<BLOCKQUOTE><CODE>Some time ago a group of distinguished college presidents, alarmed at the extent to which academic freedom has been compromised by these vast money grants, went to Washington and they had a proposal they'd worked out. ... Over and over again in Washington they kept asking, "But why won't this system work?" and finally a Freudian slip occurred. Francis Keppel, United States Director of Education blurted out, "You don't understand, under the plan you proposed, we couldn't achieve our social objectives."</CODE></BLOCKQUOTE>

This is why schools like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsdale_College Hillsdale College] refuse federal funds. They feel they would be required to compromise their educational standards.

So, let me ask, in closing, is it worth it to compromise if it means you don't have to pay?
</DIV>

PuzzlePalacePod

2022-02-23T18:03:26Z

137.148.48.19:

The following is a collection of the materials used in creating the ninth episode of the [[CitizenReaganPod|Citizen Reagan podcast]] about the [[Reagan Radio Commentaries|Reagan's Radio Commentaries]].

==Transcript==
<DIV STYLE="width: 80%">
Welcome to the Citizen Reagan podcast. As you may know, what I do with this podcast is discuss the contents of the Ronald Reagan Radio Commentaries produced between 1975 and 1979. Sometimes, I may decide to talk about some other topic, but with over 1000 of these Commentaries to cover, the bulk of my work will be on them.

This is one of those times where I will be branching out beyond the Commentaries, and even beyond Reagan himself. Reagan did record one at least one broadcast that pertains to what I want to discuss, but he'd mention this problem as early as 1961.
The topic is government waste and it is, for me, one of the single-most important reasons why I, personally, favor a smaller federal government.

In 1961, an article by Reagan was printed in [[Losing Freedom by Installments|Qualified Contractor]] magazine. It contained the following passage:

<BLOCKQUOTE>Early in our history we were warned that the farther the spending was removed from the source of taxation, the less restraint there would be in its spending. Today, shocking figures prove the truth of this. When you contribute to your local charities, you must give $1.10 for every $1 that is to be spent in good works. County welfare sees an increase in this overhead to where $1.23 must be raised for every $1 actually spent on welfare. At the state level it takes $1.49 and the federal government must raise $2.10 for every dollar it will spend on the recipients of federal welfare, a $1.10 overhead for each $1.</BLOCKQUOTE>
Ever since I read that, I've had one question in my mind: If it was that bad then, in 1961 before LBJ's [[Great Society]], how bad is it now?

I wish I could tell you I know where he got those numbers, but I have been unable to track them down. Incidentally, what is this "Puzzle Palace" Reagan's talking about? I haven't found anything about the origin of the expression as yet, but Reagan wasn’t the only one to use it. I've found a couple books using it in their titles. Personally, I've always taken it to mean the tangled web of government agencies and their bureaucracies. A place that if you try to enter, you may never be able to escape.

Also in [[Encroaching Control|1961, in Phoenix Arizona]], Reagan spoke about how our tax dollars are divided among the levels of government:

<BLOCKQUOTE><PRE>Today, 31 cents out of every dollar earned in the United States goes to the tax collector. And of that 31 cents, 23 cents goes to the federal government, leaving 8 cents for the federal, county and the local community to divide up between itself. No wonder we have to turn to government and ask for federal aid in all of our projects. But wouldn't it make a lot more sense to keep some of that money here in the local community to begin with rather than routing it through that puzzle palace on the Potomac where it’s returned to us, minus a sizable carrying charge?</PRE></BLOCKQUOTE>

By the way, yes, Reagan mis-spoke. He meant 8 cents for the ''state'', county and local community.

Then, in his famous [A Time For Choosing|1964 speech for Barry Goldwater], he executed some simple arithmetic:

<BLOCKQUOTE><PRE>We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet. But now we are told that 9.3 million families in this country are poverty-stricken on the basis of earning less than $3,000 a year. Welfare spending is 10 times greater than in the dark depths of the Depression. We are spending $45 billion on welfare. Now do a little arithmetic, and you will find that if we divided the $45 billion up equally among those 9 million poor families, we would be able to give each family $4,600 a year, and this added to their present income should eliminate poverty! Direct aid to the poor, however, is running only about $600 per family. It would seem that someplace there must be some overhead.

So now we declare "war on poverty," or "you, too, can be a Bobby Baker!" Now, do they honestly expect us to believe that if we add $1 billion to the $45 million we are spending... one more program to the 30-odd we have — and remember, this new program doesn't replace any, it just duplicates existing programs — do they believe that poverty is suddenly going to disappear by magic? Well, in all fairness I should explain that there is one part of the new program that isn't duplicated. This is the youth feature. We are now going to solve the dropout problem, juvenile delinquency, by reinstituting something like the old CCC camps, and we are going to put our young people in camps, but again we do some arithmetic, and we find that we are going to spend each year just on room and board for each young person that we help $4,700 a year! We can send them to Harvard for $2,700! Don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting that Harvard is the answer to juvenile delinquency.</PRE></BLOCKQUOTE>

Let me quickly confirm, yes, [[Harvard]] was $2700 at the time. I found an article from the [http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1963/5/21/college-graduate-schools-will-raise-tuition/|archives of the Harvard Crimson from May of 1963] stating Harvard would be raising its tuition. Before the raise, tuition was $1520 per year with an average boarding price tag of $1100. That’s $2620. Add in some textbooks and booze, and Reagan's dead on with that number.

More recently, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ryan Paul Ryan], while running mate to Mitt Romney in the 2012 Presidential election, made this statement (and I was actually there to hear it):

<BLOCKQUOTE><PRE>I see veterans... and cheeseheads! It makes me hungry, sometimes, when I see that.</PRE></BLOCKQUOTE>

Opps, wrong clip, though I was in the audience for that too.

<BLOCKQUOTE><PRE>Just last year, total federal and state spending on means-tested programs came in at more than one trillion dollars. How much is that in practical terms? For that amount of money, you could give every poor American a check for twenty-two thousand dollars. Instead, we spent all that money attempting to fight poverty through government programs.</PRE></BLOCKQUOTE>

Over the course of the last 240+ years, the United States federal government has been slowly accumulating more and more duties for itself to perform, instead of leaving them to the people, the cities or the states. As it has done so, it has created more and more need to tax us to pay for what it does. There are more buildings to maintain, more employees to pay, more, more, more and everywhere you look, there’s a hand out, needing to get paid.

For example, let's create a scenario. I am sure this is nowhere near how things actually work, but, for the sake of illustration, here it is: Say you or I have $10 that is going to the federal government from our payroll tax withholdings. It reaches Washington D.C. and someone at the IRS or Treasury Department routes it to the Department of Agriculture, but they have to snip off a little piece of that for themselves, you know, administrative costs. It arrives at the Department of Agriculture. Now they take their piece of it and determine where the remainder is going to go, a federal subsidy for school lunches being administered by a state, let's say. So, my money now travels to that state capital, where a state level education department takes it, gets their piece of the action and moves what’s left of our $10 to a city school district, which clips off a piece for its own administrative costs and finally pays for one or more underprivileged children's lunches. Let’s be generous and say that $5 made it all the way back down. I honestly don’t believe that it would be that much, but that's just me being cynical.

Now, let's tweak the scenario, slightly: That $5 landed right back in the city where you or I live.

Wouldn't my tax dollars, your tax dollars, all our tax dollars be more efficiently spent if that $10 never went through the federal or state levels of the government? Instead of $5, it could be $8 or $9 buying lunches for those kids because the only level of government covering its costs is the local level.

Now, I understand there are some things the Federal government must do, but that list is pretty short. I can think of 5 Cabinet-level departments that could be eliminated, with most, if not all, of their functions being transferred down to the state and/or local levels or maybe just being eliminated completely. Add in various other administrations, commissions, programs, boards and bureaus and we may be able to cut down the size of the federal government, cut the deficit and debt, cut taxes at the federal level. I freely admit, local and state taxes would likely go up as a result of those transfers of functions.

Why not do it? Why not make the change? Power. Those given power seldom release their hold on it. I am talking not just about our elected officials, but the unelected bureaucrats in these departments as well. By commanding the lion's share of the tax funds, they can hand it out to the lesser governments, state, county and local with strings attached. Strings cause all kinds of problems. Without going into too much detail, my own city was forced to remove traffic signals (which included crosswalks) as a condition of taking money from the state to pay for the new signals. Had they paid for the project themselves, they could have configured the streets anyway they wanted. Strings can be used to dictate education standards at every level. In fact, in yet [[MythOfTheGreatSociety|another Reagan speech, this one from 1966]], he tells the following story:

<BLOCKQUOTE><CODE>Some time ago a group of distinguished college presidents, alarmed at the extent to which academic freedom has been compromised by these vast money grants, went to Washington and they had a proposal they'd worked out. ... Over and over again in Washington they kept asking, "But why won't this system work?" and finally a Freudian slip occurred. Francis Keppel, United States Director of Education blurted out, "You don't understand, under the plan you proposed, we couldn't achieve our social objectives."</CODE></BLOCKQUOTE>

This is why schools like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsdale_College Hillsdale College] refuse federal funds. They feel they would be required to compromise their educational standards.

So, let me ask, in closing, is it worth it to compromise if it means you don't have to pay?
</DIV>