um go ahead tell me what you think do we get our money's worth
hey listen if i had my way i wouldn't pay my taxes not with the not with some of the things that i hear that our tax money is going for some ludicrous things
yeah did you see Sixty Minutes last night
no i did not i was
well they did a thing on the the thirty five billion dollars we waste every year just on storing stuff for the military we don't need and uh
well how does this grab you how does this grab you
it's staggering
um this i i mean i'm i'm a lady but this i heard this on a Christian program and it was
uh about the NEA and that's the National Endowment for Arts and they fund
they funded this thing this act on a stage and did a study on it between two lesbians and two homosexuals and wrote a report about that with our money
well there are a lot of things that people i think generally
and then it just frosts me terribly
well i think it's interesting to look at um
where the money goes and it goes a lot of places where it probably ought not go and and i don't think generally i think what's interesting is
absolutely
that we probably represent the majority of people in this country in terms of their feelings about the government and how it serves us given the extraordinarily large sum of money the government has to operate with
i believe that's true yes
and that what i think is gonna be really interesting is what we do about it i mean we are gonna have to change the people who represent us
that's correct
i mean and i think it's gonna be real interesting to see and and then force upon them uh
heavy involvement from the public
yeah right that's your i think that's the only thing that's gonna change it and
um-hum
yeah heavy involvement from the public
our our anger is gonna have to to give rise to to more activity on our part
yeah
um i've i've said for years that there's full employment for the politically active and in our society uh there's very little full employment most people in this country are getting worse off not better off
absolutely
eighty percent of the public according to Bill Moyer's uh recent uh piece for uh Public Broadcasting
which by the way is a very good use of government money i think PBS is wonderful but this special
focused on the fact that eighty percent of the people in this country are are seeing their real incomes and thus standards of living decline and twenty percent are seeing theirs improve
that's not a formula for a better society
no it is not it's lopsided very much so
and the government really plays a role in this
uh-huh that's right they pull the strings
i mean well well they are the people whose strings are pulled and by i guess powerful interest
right the yeah
you know and it's really interesting to see how that affects people because essentially more and more people in this country are not
likely to revolt in the way that people used to think of of the voter revolting
but people are pretty much getting the picture that some people get taken care of and others don't and they think it's unfair and when they recognize it's their tax money they're gonna do more about it
i think i'll tell you one quick uh one thing very interesting CBS after the State of the Union address is gonna open up a telephone line
an eight hundred number and people can call in and say what they think about what's going on in this country they expect
um-hum
opening it for one hour that they'll get three hundred thousand telephone calls
i'm sure they will
and i've thought for years it would make a lot of sense to put create an eight hundred number for voters to call and and vent their frustration with government
um-hum
like one eight hundred capitol or something like that you know you just a number you could call from anywhere anytime i think that's coming and i think once once people really start to communicate how they feel things are going to change until then
uh-huh
i think you know it's gonna be really painful so the question is how soon are we gonna start to get our money's worth and as you said it's how soon we get involved and i think we need to create mechanisms to allow us to get involved like allowing us to call a toll free number and say hey look
do it this way not that way or i like this or i don't like that or this is how i feel about your spending my money on art that i don't think is art
yes i understand that but hopefully that the people that are listening to what our comments are take some action on it
well that's the good thing about what is happening because i think more and more the news media which takes a heck of a beating and and deserves some of it is telling us more you know about the problems
so the more we communicate hey look we want a change here because you know as it turns out we've wasted a tremendous amount of money on our defense spending in this country
oh absolutely
over a very long period of time
right absolutely
um and uh
we only see the tip of the iceberg it's only you know there's so much
right
yeah
of it going on that it would really you know uh set us into a deeper depression if we knew the whole picture
well you may be right what i think is really gonna be interesting is to see how uh we as a society deal with it and i and i think it is what you say it's it's a
