yes
um
i guess my
initial view is
our tax burden hasn't gone down in recent years despite our total tax burden despite tax cuts but
among industrialized nations we have one of the
lowest in in the world and in part of the matter you get what you pay for we're gonna have national health insurance which seems likely it's necessarily gonna involve more taxes
uh i suspect they take the view that cutting income tax rates has been good for the the economy that most other countries have a higher share of the tax burden
in various kinds of sales taxes uh
energy taxes particularly and that to the extent we need to raise more taxes that's the direction we should look
right well i guess i kind of have mixed feelings
um you know you always sit there and out of each pay check so much comes out of it and you wonder you know where's it all going and we have such a huge uh national deficit and
where it's all going
and i guess a lot of times there's questions wondering well if it's doing a whole lot of good i know there's a lot of social programs out there that need help
but you kind of always wonder well where where's the money going
well one one one of the big tax that has gone up a lot in this year is the social security tax which in principle is going into into a big trust fund but
um-hum
that is a particularly regressive tax uh it's a tax on the first dollar earnings
and Senator Moynihan's uh proposal to to to cut there i think would makes a lot of sense
i'm sorry i couldn't i couldn't hear that
i think Senator Moynihan's proposal to to cut the social security tax which isn't really going to going to beef up up up the social security program could make a lot of sense
right right yeah i agree with that
as far as other countries i'm not um i don't keep up on it too much just as far as what you know as what they're doing i know we were in Ireland last year and i know that the tax there is extremely high much higher than we pay here but
um-hum
oh yes
but as far as other countries i'm not uh up to par on
i think Japan i think Japan is probably about equal to ours
uh-huh
and other major countries are higher i had friends were amazed at the sales taxes the classes of things when they went to Canada not so long ago
uh-huh
and as a whole most other countries have a higher level of cradle to grave government services
and it's a real real they're they're real trade-offs there
right
right
yeah but and and you sit there and wonder um
i guess this doesn't really have to do with taxes but just money in general and and um wondering if you're gonna have enough when you retire to live on
uh i that that's a scary thing with this
no no real knowing about uh the the there's a lot of inflation risk that isn't taken care of in most private pension plans
um-hum
yeah that's true
but um are you involved with the legislature up there or since
no i'm at the National Institute of Standards and Technology
uh-huh
uh they're part of the Commerce Department
here in here in in Gaithersburg Maryland
uh-huh i was just wondering since you said Washington DC and you and you picked this topic i was just kind of curious
well well
i i i didn't pick it uh
oh you didn't
i um i like i don't really recall what i may have filled out on the on the form but i i certainly think certainly been given topics different from the ones that i'd mentioned before
oh did you see i haven't placed any calls did they automatically assign the topic
yes yes when you place a call topic is given to you
oh i didn't know that i thought whoever made the call could choose what topic because i haven't made any calls yet i've just received some
oh you should try it
oh i didn't realize that okay
hm
yeah because it's kind of a it can be a rather controversial subject depending on who you're talking to
uh many of the subjects are uh
and taxes
taxes especially um one thing that has kept kept our tax burden high and this will change somewhat in the next few years is the is the level of defense of the defense budget
exactly
and that's that same subject
