so Eric what do you think um
that
well i'm more more interested in the long-term effects than the short-term effects in terms of uh balancing budget and so forth um
yeah
i tend to view um and i i take a fairly radical view towards economic policy and feel that
well it has to be done somewhat arbitrarily at uh on in some uh instances i think that um goods should cost um real total costs rather than just manufacturing costs
and that means uh if you oh produce something that creates uh uh adverse health effects that should somehow be reflected in the product if you uh the cost of
forestry that you cut down and such needs to be uh reflected
so you think that they that those products should cost more
in
well i think i think my long-term sense of of budget concerns is that we're going is
a lot of others government's spending goes on goes towards this uh health care and things like that and a lot of causes of poor health or need for health care are
brought about by various factors such as such as pollution stress you know work work environment conditions and so forth but generally the government is
um-hum
yeah
government or individuals end up paying for that rather than the uh some of the source of need for the health care
um-hum
um but that's a very long-term sort of concern
um i don't i don't have great short-term effects other than reducing spending and raising taxes and no one likes the idea of raising taxes very much and uh
no one likes the idea of reducing spending very much so i don't see any real uh real immediate hope i mean it's the whole quota's living on debt i mean but and they buy things on credits constantly
wow um-hum well do they i mean um i never liked doing that and i i didn't up until uh several years ago when it came down to the point of
um-hum
you you don't have a choice you know if you if you need to have a car then you have no choice and uh
yeah well exactly
um-hum um-hum
and uh it it gets even worse when you think about trying to do things like buy a house
yes well i i don't know anyone who paid cash for a house that's for sure yeah you don't have much um i
really i mean so what choice do you have then
i mean it seems to me one might have choices if one radically restructured the system but that's not really a possibility at this point it has it's own inertia and
yeah i did it's just that uh
there needs to be some some change take place so that the inertia can begin to go in a different direction and strike down
yeah i hope so
you know that's the problem that i think we have
yeah well i'm i'm in academics and actually i'm in the job market now trying to get a professorship and i'm watching uh the education budget getting cut
back so severely um at least in California where i am where there's a very severe budget crisis because of agriculture was wiped out last year and um a number of other things and uh
um-hum
yeah
because i'm i i have a lot of i have some personal investments in this uh in addition to whatever philosophical investment
um-hum
there is and i don't know it's amazing that in the last ten years we've gone from a uh a major loaning nation to a major debt nation
yeah
in the in the course of a decade um we are a lot has changed more radically
um-hum
and
well we were we were in debt before that it just wasn't as apparent
yeah it was it's it's uh seems to have worsened considerably
somehow we still
i guess believed that the countries that we were helping were were eventually going to pay us back
and that hasn't happened
um-hum um-hum yeah well uh i can see you know it's it's it's
it's kind of funny because we it seems like we loan money you know we money with strings attached and if the government changes and the country that we loan the money to
um i can see why the might have a different attitude towards paying it back it's a lot us that you know we don't really loan money to to countries we loan money to governments and it's the
um-hum
oh that's true i hadn't thought of it that way i think
and it's the governments it's the governments should that that's really what we do you don't go up to the country you talk to the president or the chair or whatever of some group and you loan it to these people who are representing the government
and by extension representing the country but when those people are gone and you have some new
you know starving third world country with a brand new government that threw the previous rascals out um
they're personal incentive for repaying that debt is understandably low because it's they didn't they didn't borrow i mean you know it would be like you paying off the debts of uh some neighbors of yours you wouldn't feel very happy about it
yeah that's true
yeah that's true
um
so it's a sort of like this is uh i see a
i don't know there's if there's a metaphor going on who are we loaning the money to and people can disagree about who that money is being loaned to
yeah
yeah in some in some cases it uh i think it's actually going to you know the people that it's intended for in other cases
uh and and this is all based and this is all up to actually the government that's in control now in some cases the the money actually does filter down to the to where it's
um-hum um-hum
supposed to get to and in other cases it it does not
um-hum um-hum
yeah i i i tend to get a little upset about loans to countries to obviously corrupt governments um
yeah
there a number of them for political reasons because we're enemies of the neighboring government or something like that so we give them an either corrupt government anyway but it's hard to view that so much as a loan as a bribe at that point
yeah
um
i don't really have a good solution for the budget thing either except for that um i know that they're trying to be they're that they're supposedly trying to be fair with taxes and by making it more equal
but
i can't really understand why
um it has to be the same percentage where you have someone that makes
um a very low amount of money the same percentage may affect them thirty five or forty times more severely than the same percentage
um-hum
um-hum
of someone's well if if they earn a great deal of money and i would being somewhere in the middle feel like that it would be a lot more fair to have a little more heavily weighted
um-hum
toward the top end if i i can put my you know i think to myself if i had that much money
you could afford to pay more taxes
i could afford to pay more taxes it wouldn't bother me a bit
um-hum
um-hum um-hum well boy uh i mean i completely agree with you um on
the stress that the tax burden for the upper class has actually decreased over the last ten years um
yeah they used to have and what do they i don't know what the percentage is now they used to be taxed thirty percent
yeah it's it's
and i remember hearing an interview with uh who was it the man who invented Hawaiian Tropic
um-hum
you know and he he was talking about that he was talking about nobody went broke over paying thirty percent
um-hum
well the US pays the US pays less taxes than almost every industrialized country um
you know
well that's
they they get well it it depends on how you look at that because like Sweden they pay a lot in taxes but their day care is government subsidized
um-hum
yeah they
they get things that they pay for
women who want to stay home with their children are subsidized to do that they don't have to live um
um-hum um-hum
um-hum
hand to mouth because it the government there and the country there has placed a very significant value on motherhood
um-hum
yeah i i think that's um well i think that's an important thing personally um
um-hum i think we could learn some things from and the and the health care system you may pay more in taxes but your health care is taken care of and you don't have the corruption and in uh
um-hum
well they
medicine that that we have here with the the outrageous charges and
yeah i think the the Americans that i know who are are are sort of antitax a lot of them seem antitax because they're distrustful of the government will spend their money wisely
and the sense is i can spend the money on myself if i gave it to the government they would just waste it
seems to be an an an attitude i hear is a lot of people and i think you hear that attitude you if you go to Sweden you won't hear that as much people will say well we need those services and we're it makes our country great so we will are more willing to pay for it uh
hum
yeah
yeah i think that if we could model
you know programs after those that are already i mean they did a lot of work finding a program that worked and if we were to do the research take under advisement what they have
um-hum um-hum
yeah
already working and adapt it
that that that particular day care system um works very well and the Canadian health plan is probably the best one in existence today
um-hum
yeah well it uh it may not last once they i hope it does but it's uh it's uh sad situation part of this this you you hear the phrase creeping socialism
hum
which is uh uh a propaganda phrase used a lot against exactly such types of spending programs and um
yeah
you usually say creeping socialism to conjure up fears of bread lines in Moscow um but if you use i mean this creeping
