 of the United States. Thank you very much. And I want you to know how proud I am when your Congressman, Del Lada, comes out here and introduces me. There were two names on that bill that cut the costs of government and that cut your taxes when we started our new program in 81, and one of those two names was Congressman Del Lada. Well, it's great to be in Deshler. Home of the Deshler flag and home of the Bavarian house. And it's great to see all of you here in this Buckeye state. In this job I have, you get to meet some important people like kings and queens and heads of state and prime ministers and so forth. But I've always said the best part of the job is remembering that George Bush and I are working for you and nobody else. I thought I'd just drop by today and you could have a report from your two hired hands. We're now three and a half weeks from Election Day and the American people are getting the full flavor of the very clear choice that is facing them. It's a choice between two fundamentally different ways of governing and two distinct ways of looking at America. My opponent, Mr. Mondale, offers a future of pessimism, fear, and limits compared to one hours of hope, confidence, and growth. Now, I know that he's sincere and I know that he is well-intentioned. But he sees government as an end in itself and we see government as something belonging to you, the people, and only a junior partner in your lives. My opponent and his allies live in the past. They're celebrating the old and failed policies of an era that has passed them by as if history had skipped over the Carter Mondale years. On the other hand, millions of Americans join us in boldly charting a course, a new course for the future. It's fitting that we're campaigning today on Harry Truman's train. We're following the same route he took 36 years and one day ago. He was the last Democrat I voted for and I campaigned for him in 1948. But Mr. Truman could make very plain the differences between himself and his opponent. My friends, that's just what we're going to do today. Let's start with the record, the record of the administration that Mr. Mondale in which he was carried as a full partner. In those four years, they took the strongest economy in the world and pushed it to the brink of collapse. They created a calamity of such proportions that we're still suffering the consequences of those economic hard times. When we got there in January 20th, that was no fresh-faced, well-fed baby left on our doorstep. It was a snarling economic wolf with sharp teeth and the suffering of America, the deep and painful recession and the outrageous and frightening inflation. These things didn't start by accidental ignition or spontaneous combustion. They came about through the concerted management, mismanagement of the administration of which Mr. Mondale was a part and his liberal friends who controlled the Congress. They gave us five, in little more than a year, five you can count them, economic programs they said would curb inflation and wound up giving us the worst inflation in nearly 40 years. While it took them five plans to nearly triple inflation, it's only taken us one to cut it by about two-thirds. Senior citizens were driven into panic by higher rents, exorbitant fuel costs, dramatically increasing food prices and federal health care costs which in those four years went up 87%. They called it fairness. They punished the poor and the young who struggled as prices of necessities shot up faster than others. Millions of Americans led a life of daily economic terror filled by those unrelenting costs. Let's look at interest rates. My opponent has referred to something that he calls the real interest rate as being quite a punishment today. Well, people don't pay interest based on some academic smokescreen or foggy economic theory. What they know is that when Jerry Ford left the presidency, the interest rate, the prime rate, was six-and-a-quarter percent. And when Mr. Mondale left office, it was 21-and-a-half percent. The highest in 120 years, average monthly mortgage rates, more than double. Car loans were hard to get and expensive. The automobile and home-building industries were brought to their knees. And after all this economic punishment, our opponents said the trouble was, you lived too well. And they told you you would have to sacrifice more, that we were now entering an era of limits and things would never again be as good as they once were. Well, I found out that it's not so much that our opponents have a poor memory of this ruinous past. They've just got a darn good forgettory. One of the things they like most to forget is the misery index. Now, that was a thing, and some of you young people probably won't remember, but in 1976 in the campaign, they added the inflation rate to the unemployment rate, and it came to 12.6 percent. And they said that, with that kind of a misery index, Jerry Ford had no right to run for reelection. It was so big. Well, then came the 1980 campaign, and they never mentioned the misery index. And I don't think my opponent's going to mention it in this campaign, possibly because when he left the vice presidency, it was over 20 percent, and today it's only 11.6 percent. He does a very good job of slipping and sliding and ducking away from this record. But here in Ohio, during the primaries, Senator Gary Hart got his message through by reminding the Ohio voters of the true record, and I quote, he too was a Democratic candidate. He said, Walter Mondale may pledge stable prices, but Carter Mondale could not cure 12 percent inflation. Walter Mondale, he added, has come to Ohio to talk about jobs, but Carter Mondale watched helpless as 180,000 Ohio jobs disappeared in the period between 1976 and 1980. Those disastrous consequences did not come about by accident. They came through the implementation of the very policies of out of control spending, unfair taxation, and worship of big government that my opponent still supports. His philosophy can be summed up in four sentences. If it's income, tax it. If it's revenue, spend it. If it's a budget, break it. And if it's a promise, make it. All this year, he has lavished his campaign with promises that staggered even his Democratic opponents. But of course, there is a predictable answer by one who makes so many promises, and his answer is very simple, higher taxes, and massive new tax increases are precisely what he proposes. A few weeks back, he called his new plan, Pay As You Go. Well, what it is, of course, is nothing to the old plan. You pay and he goes. Those tax increases, to pay for his promises, add up to the equivalent of $1,890 per household. If Harry Truman had to apply a motto to this radical taxing scheme, let me again say to the young people who perhaps don't remember that Harry Truman was the one that sat in the Oval Office and said, the buck stops here. I think today with regard to my opponent's plans, he'd say, your buck never stops. When the centerpiece of his economic program is back-breaking tax hikes, you can see why the opponent spends so much time using outrageous scare tactics. Now, that's not my opponent's only tax extravaganza. He came up with still another one in our debate. He said, and I quote, as soon as we get the economy on a sound ground as well, I would like to see the total repeal of indexing. Now, this tax is even worse because it would be a dagger at the heart of every low- and middle-income taxpayer in this country. It would mean bone-crushing new levies against those who can least afford them. Indexing was a reform that we passed to protect you from the cruel, hidden tax when government uses inflation to force you into higher tax brackets. And they do that when you only get a cost of living pay raise that's supposed to keep you even with inflation, but you find yourself paying a higher percentage of tax. Now, under the Mondale plan, here is what would happen to a family struggling on a $10,000 per year income. By 1989, they would be paying over 73% more in income taxes. Now, we're told that he now says he misspoke the other night that he actually meant to say just the opposite about indexing. But on several occasions since 1982, he has expressly proposed the repeal of indexing, and he's done this quite often. In politics, they call this a flip-flop. But if you'll forgive me, I prefer to call it a fritz-flop. Well, indexing is just one example, but there are many others. Yesterday, he wanted to give a $200 tax break to every family dependent, and today, he wants to raise taxes, the equivalent, as I said, of $1,890 per household. Now, lately in the campaign, he's been talking about two Reagan's. He said there was a new Reagan and an old Reagan. Now, that doesn't have anything to do with my age, because he said the old Reagan was the youngest, but that was me some time ago, and then he was quoting the new Reagan, and he says I'm saying different things. Looks good, Ronnie. Thank you. Well, I decided to copy him and do a little old and new mandailing myself. The old mandail said that if you tighten the budget and reduce deficit spending, why you could worsen a recession and cause unemployment? And the old, the new mandail thinks that higher taxes will lead to a higher care of better economy. Now, the new mandail thinks, or the old mandail publicly supported Jimmy Carter's wrong-headed grain embargo, and the new mandail claims he opposed it privately. Very privately. The old mandail sponsored National Bible Week in the U.S. Senate. It's not bad. Now, the new mandail says there's too much religion in politics. Well, yes. The old mandail called the space shuttle a horrible waste, a space extravaganza, and he personally led the campaign in the Senate to kill it. Now, the new mandail praises American technological achievement, and while you and I are standing here across your state in this train, we know that several young men and women of ours are riding several times around this earth in the Challenger, and God bless those young heroes for whatever. Just when you begin to lose faith in that old new mandail, why then you suddenly find there is some constancy. The old mandail increased your taxes, and the new mandail will do the same thing. You know, in our debate, I got a little angry at those times when he was distorting my record, and on one occasion I was about to say to him very sternly, Mr. Mandail, you are taxing my patience. And then I caught myself. Why should I give him another idea? That's the only tax he hasn't thought of. From now until November 6th, we're going to make sure the American people know about this choice on which their future depends. And we have two roads to tomorrow. We have the road of fear and envy that he proposes. On his roads you frighten the elderly with false statements. And right now I'm going to interrupt myself. I think one of the things that has made me the most angry in this campaign and in the 1982 congressional campaign was when we heard the political demagoguery for personal political advantage. We heard them frightening the people in this country who have to depend on Social Security, frightening them by telling them that we had some secret plan that we were going to take their benefits away from them or reduce them drastically. And he's saying it again. Well, if there's anyone in our administration that had any such idea, he wouldn't be there long. I want you to know I have no plan and I will absolutely battle against any suggestion of reducing or taking the benefits these people on Social Security are getting or those who are anticipating going on Social Security and expecting to get, they're going to get those benefits the way they are. But he strives to divide Americans against each other seeking to promote envy and portray greed. Franklin Roosevelt warned that the only thing we have to fear in this country is fear itself. Well, sadly, tragically, the only thing my opponent has to offer is fear itself. Well, that's the difference between us. We see America's best days ahead. We see ourselves in a springtime of hope ready to fire up our courage and determination to reach high and achieve all the best. We see a life where our children can enjoy at last prosperity without inflation. We see a life where they can enjoy the highest of creativity and go for the stars, not have their hopes and dreams crushed or taxed away by greedy politicians. The American people are walking into the future unashamed and unafraid. But here, let me say, it's mutual. One of the most thrilling things in this whole campaign, wherever I've been and in meetings like this, is to see the turnout of young people that come to these meetings. It's so wonderful because I want to say to all of you young people that my generation and several generations between yours and mine grew up in an America in which you started out knowing that there was no limit to how high you could climb, how high you could fly, that whatever your own ability and energy and effort would take you, there would be no restriction or penalty for it. And we just took that for granted in this country. And then we came to a time when people tried to tell us it wasn't that way. That there were penalties and that there were limits and so forth and to reconcile yourself to not doing that well. Well, I think you are the very reason and the most important reason for this election. I just want to tell you and I'm going to take the liberty. I think I speak for myself and those several other generations that I mentioned out here. What we're determined is that you're going to have the same kind of America that was turned over to us by our parents. That's what we're resolved to do and what we're going to do. I know you're all ready for this great new era of opportunity and this may gall our opponents, the train's getting ready to whistle and I have to move on to the next stop before darkness catches us. I know, I wish I didn't but I do. And I say it may gall our opponents but I think that the people of this country agree with us when we say you ain't seen nothing yet. And if I gave a personal greeting and a farewell over there to my fraternity brothers of talk, half absolutely.