i guess my basic feeling is that
as a middle income tax payer i'm not paying too much if i'm sure that i'm getting value for the dollar i mean that i guess sounds like a cliche but
uh looking around at a a lot of the infrastructure particularly in the northeast here uh you know bridges and roads in terrible shape and
i don't know i'm sort of overwhelmed by it all
do you think that that's because the uh
because the politicians have been seduced by the opportunity to get the vote
uh so they've spent the money on
on uh popular how should i say it programs that show up immediately you know like giving away uh
uh let's see how shall i say it
paying money to people that that uh
uh
it it takes years for a bridge to begin to show neglect uh whereas a temporary uh
uh input of money can uh
which they can never turn off by the way will get this guy votes
yeah it's entirely possible certainly anything that's been
discussed over the the last dozen years or so or maybe even longer in terms of of tax reform or or revenue reallocation
seems to be concerned with just that you know who's who's gonna start getting more and how fast um i kind of came of age in the
sixties and it seemed to me seems to me that the the general attitude in the
entire country is a lot different then than now i mean i think there was more a a general sense of prosperity
there was
yeah although
my
oh excuse me
i was just going to say there's significantly more money
and we weren't a debtor nation in those days
yeah i i've never been able to reconcile that fact which which does seem to be true with the fact that the typical middle class family
today seems to have you know and expect some what more in terms of material possessions and vacations and what not
but back then uh i think there is more of a sense of because there was a feeling of prosperity people did not mind paying for social programs
for instance or public improvements and today there
there seems to be a sort of a jealous guarding by each generation
well
i think two things have happened number one
uh
it's like uh
pay play now pay later uh somebody's we're we're to the point now where
where the pay later is uh is here and and uh
when i was growing up they always warned me against borrowing money to go on a vacation because you have all year long to think about those payments
and it just goes by pretty fast well the play now pay later uh
mentality uh sounded pretty good at the time when you when you had a fair amount of disposable income and uh
um-hum
um
the the debt load is way up uh
you know in the sixties
what was the cost of tuition the cost of tuition in those days was
was the cost of uh almost monthly rent today right
i don't
yeah pretty much i mean i i paid whatever something on the order of four thousand dollars a year for
tuition and room and board and comprehensive fee and uh for those those figures have been dwarfed today certainly
yeah i mean well i'm not saying monthly rent is four thousand dollars but but tuition uh i bet tuition was about a third of that uh
yeah
you know perhaps anyway what i'm saying is that everything costs more these days uh and we've reached a point where
where people are like i say taxes are going up uh your expenses have gone up and the perhaps the thing that's more important uh
uh
progressive we are now making what uh what we used to think of as only the rich made
you know the daily the minimum wage is let's see what is it when i was a i'm
i graduated from college in sixty one and i can remember when i graduated i hoped someday to make eighteen thousand dollars a year
and taxes on eighteen thousand a year uh were a whole lot less than uh
you know taxes on what what i thought was a very good salary
yeah
um
are about the same as they are today only i'm making
