 In 1965, I was the representative of the A.A.S. of the California Legislature in school. Uh-huh. Now I have a lot to live down. Healthy change. Pretty good training, man. Ron Bacon was the first good to see you again. Mr. President, yes, we're going to congratulate you. I think you're fine. Good, Jane is yours. Yes, you're very welcome. My pleasure. Thank you. Russell Paul, Mr. President. John Mayer is the president. Here, please. Thank you very much. Why don't we want to come up and say thank you so much for coming to my position? Because you have been an awful lot in the community. We appreciate your disaster declaration. Just a little token of our appreciation. I got several things to present to you, to tell you what all it meant to us. Well, listen, I didn't require any presentations. I was happy for whatever good it could do, but little did I do except shovel a couple of sails there. But I must say, I was really struck in town as I told the congressman here. And I was used to flood springs. They always came in the spring, and they always came from one direction, the river. It was the first flood I'd ever seen. It came from all directions, and even from underneath. That's right. And straight up. But I'm also very much your program, the aid that you, with all of your distress, have provided in California. That's a wonderful example of the neighborhoods that exist in our country. But I don't know if we talked about this quite some time ago. Then Mike David was with me on a row of speaking engagement. We fell in love with the community with some heart in our head. I wanted to stop there. That's right. I appreciate it. Bate and Horne's got a representation. Appreciate it. The Governor now follows the follow-up of the red cross, even if you're out from 6. That's $1.00 for the plethora of these. Thanks very much. Mr. President, it's local self-effort funds that were raised to contribute to the red cross in that $83,000 that's local. That's great. Mr. President, you might be interested in knowing, in 1978, the same fund raised $378.00. But your visit is motivated going from $378.00 to $83,631.00. We're having sales. I'll show you what you did. Thanks to you. Mr. President, it's your birthday and your visit in the row. This is a picture of the billboards that have been placed around the area commemorating your visit. We just really appreciate everything you've done for us. Thank you, Mr. President. It's a big honor. Well, it's the day of all the briefings. Those are all the briefings, Mr. President. First day of arts I've received. I don't think there's been anything quite like that. My goodness, that makes me very proud. We're going to try to go up and get this world book record and I'm as signature as we've got to put you to. Mr. President, if I can be a little personal about it. My daughter is one of your greatest admirers. And this was designed and done by a man who's a response to an eye area trying to get the young people and the purpose of this is to thank you for trying to put a smile back on the face of America. Oh, for heaven's sakes. Well, would you give her my heart, though, thanks? Yes, indeed, sir. Good news. Susan. Susan Sheldrager, sir. Thank you, sir. Well, my goodness. President, this is a little scrapbook of some of the pictures and the memos when you visited our science center. Did you ever remember when you were there for our appreciation? We saw it because he said that it was the wheelbarrow that taught our people to walk upright. Mr. President, may I invite your attention, that preceding page just as you just turned, may I, sir, the last sheet that you just turned? Those are church bulletins yesterday on your birthday. We refer to that as Super Sunday for all Americans and people in all the churches, many of the churches and synagogues, are signing these sheets wishing you a happy birthday. So those are yesterday's church bulletins in northeast Louisiana. And this is 30,000 before yesterday. We'll accept the churches and the churches will be coming now. Excuse me, let me point out, sir, there, Mr. President, those are pictures of places where those, when those stickers were put for people where they could go in and sign and say thank you and happy birthday, but those were all over the city, the TV was carrying it, the cable news network carried it, so all of them, we don't understand these polls, sir, the performance. We don't know anything about the 50,000 people who don't understand polls, so we just express our love to you in a very meaningful way and not knowing understanding the polls. We appreciate your having me deeply moved. I'm gonna look through this. Excuse me for a minute. And they have beautiful, beautiful letters to you. Of course, they all want a picture of you and a letter from you and all that sort of thing. They'll get it if there's any addresses in there. Incidentally, is your daughter's address in there? I sure will get it to you, sir. Please do. Communicate. Thank you, sir. I'm gonna be looking through this at a greater length, believe me. So new orders will translate immediately into new production and employment and so forth. Quite strongly given the slack of labor market. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, sir. I'll be proud of you. Yes, sir. Nice to see you. How are you? Nice to see you. It was a pleasure to have you. It was dear to all of you. I know you're crazy soon. What do you do? How are you? I'm good. Good to see you. David, you're on channel four. Good to see you. Great. And Matthews from channel seven. Yes. Thank you, sir. Thank you, sir. Thank you, sir. Yes, sir. Hello there. How are you? David, I can say you look all familiar faces you are. I'm glad, however, that when I'm watching you, you could stand and watch me because I'm usually in the dressing room upstairs, changing clothes. I had to go through the exercise. It's overcoming from it. But I'm happy to have you here at the White House. I do watch as I say your newscasts. And I'm well aware of this across the country. People depend on local news and they do have the national news and get their news from the local news broadcast. I know you've been briefed, or were being briefed, by Dave Stockman and Buck Chavitton. And you'll be hearing from Bud McFarlane and Kepp Weinberger a bit later. But just let me say that since economic recovery has been the lead story on most programs lately, it's awfully good to see. You've been seeing more signs that the economy is on the mend. If I could just mention a couple of them. You know, of course, that inflation rate for 82 is down to 3.9. But not too much attention has been paid to the fact that for the last three months of 1982, it was down to an annualized rate of 1.1. If that could continue to 12 months instead of three. The index of leading indicators up eight of the last nine months. Real wages have gone up in the last three months. They've been going down for the last four years. Housing starts are up. Housing permits are up. And sales of new homes has grown by 75% since last April. The auto industry is picking up. We all know General Motors has announced they're going to call back more than 21,000 people in the next few months. Initial claims for unemployment insurance down. And of course, I think we must have all been pleased to see at least the slight turnaround there before an intense percentage point turnaround on the average. And more than that, if you take the new method of counting, which I always thought should be the ending method, I don't know how we've been able to ignore almost two million people that are fully employed in the military. And yet at the same time, I don't know whether you're aware that every time one of them left the military, didn't get a job, he was counted as unemployed. But he or she were not counted as employed and they had those jobs. I think it's a more sensible way of counting. We've tried to be cautious with our projections, but I think it's interesting that the Congressional Budget Office, which is usually more pessimistic than ourselves, is now sounding more optimistic that we can have a better recovery. Alice Rivlin has just become so attractive to me. But we intend to work with the Congress, as I'm sure you've been told, to see that this stays on track for now. I know we only have a few minutes. Mr. President, what do you think about all of these stories that you're really not in control of the budget data and you've flunked David Stockman's multiple choice questionnaire? I've got a doll in my desk. I stick pins in there when I read them. I don't know what that, well I suppose I should have been too surprised. I think it happens to more than one person. I recall attempts of that kind when I was in Sacramento as governor. Then they called it the Palace Guard. But no, and I think anyone that's in our administration will tell you that it has anything to do with policy making, that I make the decisions. Maybe part of it has come about because of the change that we've made in the Cabinet system. As nearly as I've been able to find out, previous administrations back through the years have sort of used the Cabinet as maybe they'd come once a month and go around the table with each Cabinet head and give them a little brief verbal report of what his agency was doing. Well, I started something in California with the Cabinet that I brought here. And that was that it's a kind of a board of directors operation. We sit around the Cabinet table as we're sitting here. And instead of just the one person if he thinks that, well, it's his agency problem and he's the only one who can speak on that note. Everybody has a picture and we sit there and we discuss and sometimes argue when it goes around the table and around and when I finally heard enough, finalize my own decision. I make the decision and that ends the discussion there. If I haven't, if it's something that's so tough that there's so much right on both sides, send them a way to come back the next day and we'll take it up again. And maybe that was the way up to this. I noticed that it's always from those unidentified White House informants that this talk, this conversation comes, but I would turn my back and let the Cabinet members answer and I think you find the answer to which I made the decision. Mr. President, are you at all concerned about an apparent continuing perception among a number of Black leaders that the White House continues to be, if not hostile, at least not welcome to Black new points and that administration policies are working to widen the income gap between Blacks and Whites and also increase Black unemployment? I'm aware of all of that. And it's very disturbing to me because anyone who knows my life story knows that long before there was even a thing called the Civil Rights Movement, I was busy on that side as a sports announcer. I didn't have any Willie Mays or Reggie Jackson's to talk about when I was broadcasting majorly baseball. The opening line of the baseball, baseball guide, said baseball is a game for Caucasian women. And as a sports announcer, I was one of the very small fraternity that used that job to editorialize against that ridiculous blocking of so many fine athletes and so many fine Americans from participating in what was called the Great American Game. I was raised that way. I bless them, my father and mother both long gone now, but I can remember when I was only that high and one of the all-time great motion picture classics, Berkeley Nation came to our town in Arnold so my father simply announced that no member of our family would see that picture because it was based on the Ku Klux Klan and to this day, I have never seen the great motion picture classic. So yes, it's very frustrating, but none of it. And I wonder sometimes if some of those leaders aren't, maybe they'll even realize it, but aren't more interested in maintaining a kind of difference in a spite because that's their position and their line of work. But the truth is, none of it is true in this administration. I can cite you the figures on what we have done with regard to civil rights violations. I can cite you what we have done for the Negro colleges and their funds raising effort as for what we've done with regard to unemployment or trying to make a difference. I know this thing about supposedly the our tax program is for the rich. I've never been able to figure that out. We have a progressive tax system. You move as you get more income into higher brackets. In recent years with inflation, you've moved whether you've got a higher income, but just if you've got a pay raise that's simply that you supposedly break even, you didn't break even because the government puts you up in a higher percentage bracket. But when we gave our tax cut 25% across the board, yes, if you want to use the number of dollars, a fellow that's paying $100 income tax is not going to get as many dollars in relief as the fellow that's paying 1,000 or not up 10,000 or 100,000, but proportionately, they are. And if we had staggered our tax cut instead of level across the board, we would have in effect legislated an increase in the productivity, which as we know goes from a quite lower percent on up now to 50, but it once upon a time went to, well, when I was getting some of that if money in Hollywood was 94% and it used to curtail your picture making efforts because there came a point every year when somebody submitted a script and you said, not me, I'm not gonna work for six cents on the dollar. But I think that anyone would find, and with regard to unemployment, there's no question that this has been, and it's one of the things that I think for years we've been trying to correct, that when unemployment comes, and there have been seven spells of this since World War II, before this one, and always the same thing was true, that it seemed that black employees suffered more on a higher rate of unemployment. I have tried to convince many black leaders and labor leaders that with regard to the minimum tax for youngsters, for teenagers, for kids that want summer jobs, we should have a two-stage tax because before there was a minimum wage, I said minimum tax, did I, minimum wage, before there was a minimum wage, young teenage blacks had a far lower rate of unemployment than teenage whites. And as the minimum wage was put into effect and began to increase, this reversed. And I think that it's, of course, affected all teenagers, but I think that for youngsters beginning to win the workforce, they're not gonna take any adults' job away from them, they never did. They're learning a job, they're getting a skill, they're performing tasks that at a proper price an employer will hire them. But if you make the price too high, there are tasks that the employer feels he can do without. And so no one is hired to take those jobs. Mr. President, you just celebrated your birthday, happy birthday. Thank you. And the week before that, the week before that, the foot race began toward New Hampshire and Illinois, the Congress, what are you going to announce, your intentions about either that? Well, I think if you look back over history, that is a ticklish thing for a president whose first term, he makes a early decision one way, becomes a lame duck. If he makes it the other way, he's then accused of everything he does is political campaigning. So I think that you wait, and I have not made the decision the other way, because I also believe that the people let you know what the decision should be. Do you think you're ready for it? This is all the stuff you ordered. Well, I think this, oh, look at the other stuff. Oh, the other side, I can understand that. I look at it four years ago when it was, or no, six years ago when it was the Republican's turn for scrambling against a Democratic incumbent, and it was just much the same picture. We had a dozen or so out there. Right there for two years, I think. You were out there for two and a half years before his primary election. No, as a matter of fact, I refused to make a decision on that for quite some time. And maybe you're confused. There was a group that started in the country, and believe it or not, I didn't do it at all. There was a group that started. Would you be reelected if the election were held today, Mr. President, under review? Well, this would be the headline if I answered. I'm just confused by some of the polls. I know a little about polls anymore, and I know a lot of it depends on how the question is asked. But I get around the country enough, make enough appearances, that somehow I don't seem to run into many of those people. As a matter of fact, we have a kind of a standing thing in our family. Nancy's very critical of me, because when you go out and the streets are lined with people and you move away from Washington and so forth, and I know that much of that's simply because of the institution itself, the presidency. But the reaction of those people, but Nancy's annoyance is she says that I always somehow managed to see the one person in the whole crowd who is doing like this or making a vulgar sign or something at me. And it is true. I do. Are you watching the years? We've reduced it. But now it is unemployment in the economy. I could expect that. I'm very concerned about unemployment myself and tragically it's usually the last thing that comes back when you come out of a recession. But yes, I would think that that would be, if there is no recovery, obviously that would be a sign. Mr. President, in our area we're particularly concerned with a large number of federal employees, of course, there are local viewers. And how does the administration justify or explain to them the freeze and the cutbacks and the reduction in the long term and the pension plans, which are so much better than private plans are generally? Well, for one thing, we have not affected the people that are present in the employees, except there has been a change, that there's had to be an increase. Their pension plan is such that today many retirees are getting more money in retirement than the person is getting in wages who was doing the job they retired from. And so it was out of balance. And it was only fairness to ask with the built-in increases in those pensions that they contribute to a little larger share. Now we've also added, we are covering them now for Medicare. They do not have such coverage. And with all the talk about whether Medicare is being increased in cost amount of participation, which it is in our proposed budget, no one has added that we are adding to that for the first time, catastrophic care, that these people will now be protected against that catastrophic illness or injury that now and then totally devastates a family because there's no way that any individual could meet the cost. With regard to whether it's fair enough to ask them to take a freeze. First of all, a freeze in colas is not as significant as it was back when under the previous administration the inflation rate was 12.4% or even 14% at one point. It isn't that big of a sacrifice, but in the condition that we're in and in an effort to help this economy, we're asking that of everyone. And I was impressed, I don't know which one of your stations it was, but I was impressed enough to make a phone call with that young enlisted man over at Fort Myers that someone interviewed as to how he felt about having the military pay froze. If anyone has a right to complain, they do because up till recently they were far behind anyone with regard to pay that was commensurate with the work they were doing at all. Could we have just one more question? Mr. President, I would like to ask you about your relationship with Mr. Bagan. I'm sorry. There is a settlement proceeding on pays on the West Bank. There's tension between our forces and Israeli forces in Beirut. And I'm wondering if the Reagan plan is falling totally deaf ears as far as Bagan is concerned. Is your relationship, has your relationship improved at all? Well, I don't think that it is it is as strange as some would have you believe. I think that we established quite a personal bond on his visit here. It's true we disagree on this particular issue about getting out of Lebanon because we know that in our efforts to try and bring the Arab states around to the position that Egypt once took so that they can make peace with Israel. We have to be careful and one of the big contentions is the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Lebanon. And Israel is delaying we believe unnecessarily in that. So Phil Abib has gone back again and with a proposal and a plan and we're hopeful that they finally will because the Arab nations are holding back and are reluctant unless they see this kind of gesture of goodwill. Also, I think that there's a certain moral point that we think Israelis are neglecting not observing. And that is the new government of Lebanon after all these years of revolution and appeal has asked all the foreign forces to leave. For them not to leave now puts them technically in the position of an occupying force that they are there by force in this country that has said to them we now want you to depart. So we're going to continue trying to bring this peace to Lebanon but we don't believe that we can move to the actual peace negotiations in the Middle East until the Lebanon situation is clear. And I personally believe that if this requires an increase in the multinational forces for the stability that we should be willing to do that and finish answering your question before I take yours. We thought that asking government employees to freeze in the increase in pay was not too much when you stopped to think the sacrifice that's being made out there in the private sector. Those that are unemployed in this particular but also those many employees that have taken voluntary cuts in benefits and programs and in salaries in order to help their employers that we could do the same thing. We are all concerned about perhaps the misuse or misinterpretation of words or phrases. One of those happens to be at this time the phrase we will not have make work programs whereas we understand and Congress understands that sometimes many of our viewers do not understand and they think it's part of the party Ronald Reagan saying that we will not have any solution to the unemployment program and I just wonder if you would expand on that voice. What you need when you say you're not for work, make work programs. In the past recessions there was always a tendency the one thing that was politically unacceptable was unemployment. So the government would rush in with a lot of artificial stimulants and government spending and so forth and large parts of that would be job programs where the government would suddenly go out provide funds to higher people. I was governor when some of those took place in our own state and I saw local communities and governments dream up things that they didn't need because the money was available but those programs then were supposed to be temporary and at the same time you were adding to the cause of your recession increasing the deficit spending and no one was paying any attention as to whether that increased deficit spending was taking away unemployment over here in the private sector but the worst feature was that many of those programs the smallest percentage of the money actually went in to paying the workers the federal government had a very high overhead and quite a carry in charge for those now there is a difference and Tipo and Neil and I have discussed this that it isn't make work if you simply stimulate or move up or accelerate a program of necessary public works. Now this is what we did with the gasoline tax everyone I know said well I said I would not take a palace crew before I would ever accept such a gasoline tax. The framework in which I said that at a press conference was when it was being proposed as just a tax for general revenues to increase taxes, tax gasoline but more than a year before Drew Lewis had come to me with the rundown on our highway system and the bridges and even the real great risk and danger just the other day we saw a bridge collapse with several deaths and a year before when he had come with that proposed a users fee a gas tax to simply finance that kind of construction I had to ask him at that time could he wait here and he did. When he came back this latter time the report was even more dangerous more threatening. The numbers of school buses in the country that in their zones where there are bridges come to the bridge and stop and the students have to get out and walk across and then the driver stays in and drives the empty bus across and picks him up again because they're afraid of an accident with all those children in the school bus so this time having told him to wait in here I said yes we'll go for it now this is legitimate this is work that has to be done the jobs are already going not to individuals that are suddenly given a job whether they fit it or not these are people workers and construction companies delegation from the road building industry in Illinois presented me the hard hat when I was out there because of the jobs in Missouri they've already started on their program of rebuilding and even building new ones. Now we have asked and it won't change the budget a bit that every agency and department that has got building maintenance work that isn't needed doing and has not been done and so forth to accelerate it. It's in the budget already don't schedule it for a year from now or six months from now if you can't move it up and do it now that would be legitimate work the the make work jobs I can give you one example of one that I vetoed when I was governor came from Washington and a governor could veto and if it wasn't overridden 60 days with the federal government might stay permanent. This was a program to put 17 able-bodied welfare recipients to work in a county park cleaning up the park and keeping it cleaned up why would I veto such a thing is that but because more than 50% of the budget was going to go to 11 administrators to make sure that the 17 got to work on time and I thought the percentages were a little long you have another meeting just tell us how you celebrated your birthday listen well yesterday we had to come down early so we wouldn't get snowed in and we just had a few people for a dinner that we had been planning for some time and that's when the birthday was I just received a very heart warming set of unusual gifts in the other room from some people from Monroe, Louisiana and among them there was a framed picture I'll take this as the celebration a framed picture of the billboards that they put out all over Monroe regular billboards same happy birthday to me and thank you me for coming down on the flood and another one was a fact similarly of a check that the good fellows of Monroe contributed for flood for the $83,600 their normal annual contribution is around $370 and so that was enough of the celebration you really don't celebrate when you get to this age you just say thanks he's afraid that his daughter sent you he's a dooder too well you tell Monroe I'm very grateful no I gave that up I've got a there's a gym up there and I'm doing different sets of exercises no I tell you I gave it up I've been doing it about 15 years and I began and I don't seem to be as tight as ever I was hard and finally a man knowledgeable in that field told me that that was yes it was but it was also stretching the muscles and since those muscles there was no place else for him to go but to bulge I quit and I've got another set of exercises what's your favorite exercise what's your favorite exercise well it's a it's a whole variety of main to different muscles and the same gentlemen gave me this schedule of two for all in days there's a little modelist machine up there with the weights and the pulleys and so forth and I didn't think at my age you could grow muscle but I'm happy to have some coats let out not down here thanks for coming thanks for coming alright thank you all and what we're saying is that we probably won't get much more discretionary cut the something out ladies and gentlemen so we'll talk to you again the second day in a row same answers that's a bigger question let me see Eleanor by now you must all know everything about the budget all the physical affairs and I wanted to come in for a few minutes at least and welcome into the White House I know many of you have been here before but we're always glad to have you back we're well aware of the impact an editorial has not only on the folks at home but on some people up on the hill an editorial in the hometown paper can very often mean much more than any call from a lobbyist or even a call from the White House there's a news story I'd like to emphasize today that you've been hearing about is that all the signs that we're now seeing point toward an economic recovery or have you two covered that very well you wouldn't I wouldn't be going counter to you if I I said as long as you say the recovery is here as long as you say the recovery is here well that's what I want to make sure that you agree on because that's what I'm going to say yesterday a lot of attention has been paid to the 1982 inflation rate but I think even more significant and everyone seems to have overlooked is that while it was 3.9% for the year for the last three months of 1982 it was running at one point on an annualized basis at 1.1% and I think the fact that it had come down to that and left that other lower average something that we can focus on is offering a little hope here we know of course that unemployment rate went down last Friday I'm hopeful that one of these days now that they've changed the method that they will stick with the change method instead of giving us two sets of figures and it was only a few months ago that I found out that they were not including the military in the unemployment figures and there's almost 2 million Americans that are fully employed but what really triggered my reaction was when I found out that when one of them left the service and didn't have a job he was considered unemployed but he wasn't employed or considered employed when he had ones and I'm sure you noticed that the set of figures, this was the first time January using them, the set of figures if you include the military went from a 10.7 rate then of unemployment to 10.2 in the old fashioned way it's still 10.4 down from 10.8 but there are other figures one of the most significant was that actual employment rose by 350,000 in January which means that businesses are hiring and re-hiring workers we've all seen the announcement of General Motors more than 21,000 over the next few months of those were indefinite layoffs the average work week went up an hour in January which brought it almost to the full 40 hour figure housing is coming back housing starts are up, permits are up, new home sales are up 75% since April of last year also supporting the recovery ideas, the fact that there's nearly a 12% increase in new orders for durable goods and of course as you've probably been told the leading indicators have been up 8 out of the last 9 months now if some of you were suspicious that my emphasizing all of this on top of what you've been hearing is in the hope that you might take this as the message to take back home your suspicions are absolutely correct that's what I had in mind I'm optimistic I'm going to do all that I can all of us here in the administration are to work with the congress to make sure this recovery stays on track but now that's enough monologue I know you've been connecting a dialogue so far and you can continue with that someone has a question Mr. President I come from Baltimore which is a city that in the past week has lost 2,300 jobs at western electric and about 950 jobs at the sparrows point of land affected by steel one of our big concerns is what happens to a steel worker who's been on this job for 25 years and suddenly his job is gone how do you feel about retraining how can this country retrain its work force and in what direction well we know that there has to be retraining because as you probably have been told already part of this unemployment problem is structural for example over a 2 year period when we first came in here there were 3 million new people into the work force for the first time and the new jobs because of the recession were not being created to put those people to work there will be changes I don't know whether the lay has gotten to the point of someone with that much seniority laid off I was in an automobile plant the other day you know out in St. Louis and in that plant the person those people still employed the one with the least seniority were 16 years there because the layoffs come designated by seniority or lack of it but the one job training plan that we've gotten past that we introduced and has already been legislated into law is designed we think better than many of the previous programs first of all where some of those job training plans only about 18 cents out of every dollar went to actual training this one better than 70 cents out of every dollar will go to training but we're going to direct that in cooperation with local officials and business and industrial leaders in the communities to train people for those jobs that are vacant there in that area and you all know from your own papers that on any representative Sunday you have quite a package of help wanted ads now I mentioned that once in a press conference and immediately got challenged that I was indicating that people were lazy and wouldn't go to work I wasn't doing anything of the kind we didn't have this job training program in place at the time and what I was pointing out or trying to was that if you read those ads and I've done so many of the papers the last time was in Los Angeles they were 45 and a half pages in the Sunday LA Times but you saw that they called for skills and here to me was the greatest indication of the structural unemployment with 12 million unemployed in the country we could have that many pages of help wanted ads in an area which was above which was around the national average or above it indicated that there were job openings and there must be a lack of people with the training to fill them so we're doing more of this and in the present budget we have made proposals about using unemployment funds in cooperation with the states that have their own unemployment funds for training for relocation and so forth I think it can be done but that's the direction we must go instead of giving someone an imitation job temporarily Mr. President there have been some reports that you made leading toward recommending or endorsing some kind of jobs program could you tell us exactly how you feel about this the thing that we have talked about and that is again provided for already in the budget is that where there are legitimate we got this idea from the gas tax program and incidentally with all this talk that I am going to take a palace coup to make me accept the 5 cent gas tax that was when they were talking about it as just general revenue tax increase but Drew Lewis secretary of transportation had come to us over a year ago with a complete report on the state of our highways and bridges in the country and the desperate need in the almost emergency situation then at that time I asked him if he could hang on for a year and come back a year later which he did so that really was a users fee the gas tax was passed to get this necessary work that needs to be done get it in work now what we have said to all of our agencies and departments is that the budgets for all of them maintenance work construction things of that kind that are called for and what we have said expedited accelerated don't wait if you've got it on schedule some place down the line it's already in the budget it won't add anything to the deficit to do it go to work on it and start doing it to help in the recovery Mr. President are you prepared to accept compromise reductions and the $239 defense budget no I think the only political mistake we've made there with the defense budget is that in the old fashioned way that has persisted so long in government where you pad the budget a little bit and then go up on the hill and let the congress cut it where you already knew it could be cut we didn't do that under Secretary Weinberg we've been trying to find the cuts ourselves and where we can promote savings so a considerable amount of money was actually found by us when inflation went down faster than we thought fuel costs and everything going down management changes that were put into effect and from the original five year proposal of 1981 we came in we'd reduced that about $41 billion ourselves then congress added another chunk to that in the 83 budget and in this one when our people up on the hill said if there's anyway anything we can find and I say cap was corroborated there were some things we hated but I insisted that we stay with whatever we found must not delay or reduce our effectiveness our ability to redress the military situation that had been allowed to carry rates so badly and we came up with $11.3 billion now maybe we should have been smart and left the 11.3 and let the congress find it but the minute we went up there with that cut in place then they seemed to think well that must mean there's room for more I think if there was we would have found it Mr. President what would happen if your NX commission comes up with a recommendation contradictory to Secretary Weinberger's recommendation well that's the purpose of the commission we'll study that find out what it is they recommend and I realize that I'm the one that finally has to decide what we'll take up to the hill as a recommendation to congress but I'm hopeful that the commission can come up with something that will be acceptable but at the same time we'll meet the need for correcting this the balance that exists I must say to all of you that here the drumbeat that has gone on consistently about the defense spending and all all during the campaign this question was thrown at me by audiences every place I was amazed how many the American people were aware that something wrong had taken place with regard to our military I would get the question it comes down to a choice of rebuilding the defenses or balancing the budget which would you do and every single time I said I would come down on the side of national defense and I never made that remark to an audience that I did not get in many cases a standing ovation but at any rate an ovation and I think this steady drumbeat and this criticism from up on the hill has created a false belief among too many people in this country that maybe in one or two years we've solved the problem but we've got a long way to go before we really can say that we're able to meet the first prime responsibility of the national government which is to be able to guarantee the safety and security of this nation and our people the truth of the matter is everyone seems to overlook that as a percentage of gross national product the defense spending is a smaller share of that than it has been at almost any time in the past except for the preceding few years when it was allowed to deteriorate so badly and even the outgoing administration had recognized that because they had submitted a plan for a five year build up of the military and we now are adding only about three billion dollars a year to what their plan was and frankly part of that is because they could not have bought for the money figure they put in all the things that they had put in as required weapons systems and improvements Mr. President we have to ask you about the big news of the day which is the Israeli administration's report on Sabra and Shatila it was a recommendation of General Sharon Resign and there may be some change in the Israeli government imagine you've studied it by now do you have any comment? well this is a very easy one that's a strong democracy over there and that's an internal problem and I just don't think that we should be commenting or injecting ourselves into that internal problem thank you Mr. President we can get on the way around well I'm sorry thank you so much thank you all for coming here we'll see you again thank you Mr. President