President Reagan's Radio Address to the Nation on Taxes from the Oval Of...

Yeah.

.

My fellow Americans.

If you had to choose between shrinking the size of government is shrinking the size of your paycheck which would it be chances are you think you're paying enough taxes already and i agree with you.

The trouble is your opinions don't always count for much in Washington DC.

It seems to be taken for granted here that the federal government has an automatic right to grow at your expense.

Listening to people talk you'd almost think government-owned sure.

Earnings so please be a little skeptical when you hear the moaning from Washington's born again deficit fighters the truth is these are the same people who brought us big and bloated government in the first place and they haven't changed a bit.

The Democrats use foggy language like recovering revenue or stopping the revenue drain but you don't need a PhD in bureaucracy to know what they're offering a choice between a tax increase a tax increase or a tax increase in the down payment deficit reduction talks at the White House suggestions were made on behalf of liberal House Democrats suggestions for making you pay more taxes they added up to a hundred billion dollars or more.

Some examples Liberal Democrats want very badly to eliminate indexing that's the historic reform that will tie your tax brackets to the rate of inflation.

Starting next year you will no longer be pushed into a higher tax bracket just because you're receiving a cost of living raise keep in mind that indexing doesn't help the wealthy they're already in the highest tax brackets indexing helps those who need help.

But it deprives government of the automatic increase in its allowance so the spenders want to get rid of it.

I don't intend to let them another suggestion of theirs is a three-year postponement an additional estate tax reductions this would be a cruel blow to surviving spouses of.

Family-owned farms and businesses.

Hasn't the farm community suffered enough with the last administration's grain embargo and the liberals would raise personal tax rates on millions of families and small businesses these tax increases are neither wise nor compassionate and they wouldn't reduce the deficit they just reduced the recovery and none of us should want that yes deficits are a problem I've been saying so for more than a quarter of a century now but the problem is not the size of the deficit.

It's the size of government's claim on our economy with a government borrows or increases taxes.

It will be taking the same amount of money from the private economy.

So if we raise taxes before cutting spending the money will just be spent the deficit won't be reduced and government will grow bigger.

That's what the house democrats tried to do last year their budget resolution would have raised your taxes then squandered that money on new programs we have a better way to cut deficits cut the growth of government by cutting out the waste this will reduce government's claim on the people's earnings leaving more money for you to borrow spend invest and to help our economy grow.

Don't let anyone tell you it can't be done we've already cut spending by more than 300 billion dollars on a five-year basis.

Contrary to what you've heard we haven't done this by hurting the needy total spending on social programs as increased by 71 billion dollars during these last three years to cite two examples frequently.

Misrepresented Social Security and Medicare benefits to America senior citizens are higher than ever before.

Even after adjusting for inflation we've been cutting the growth of government by eliminating waste my inspectors general have identified nearly 30 1 billion dollars in agency fraud waste and abuse and we're going after it.

For example we've almost stop the growth of delinquencies on amount sold the federal government and we boosted collections by 12 and a half billion dollars last year as part of its new get-tough policy the department of education is cracking down on people who defaulted on their student loans and they're recovering 390,000 dollars a day and believe me there's plenty more ways to cut those three hundred billion in budget savings i mentioned are barely half of what we asked for from the Congress and the grace Commission made some 2,500 recommendations for reducing billions of dollars in wasteful government spending and subsidies.

I'll be speaking out in this topic in future radio talks but one thing is clear.

Raising taxes is a cop out cutting waste in government is the right way to go.

And this is what we're doing and what will continue to do with your support we can shrink government and stop the spendthrift from shrinking your paychecks till next week thanks for listening and God bless you.