 You might drop it. Three Army personnel attached just right now. You do? Yeah. Well, we're darned. You get me on camera? We see each other every 15 minutes and why the greeting, well, Georgia's been all over the world and just got back from Saudi Arabia, so we're really saying hello here. And hello to all of you. Here we are again, trying to make this very brief and I've got very much time that never is much time. But we're revving up for a campaign again. I know you're all aware of this and maybe some few reminders are in order. I know that the Republican National Committee headquarters over there can give you all the facts and figures and everything you need for all the arguments that you'll be having in the locker room and cocktail parties and so forth from here on. But I can't resist maybe throwing a few at you. Right now, I think the issues in this campaign are going to be on our side. I know there's a recession. I know also that there are people that are charging that we're responsible for the recession. The only thing is, the recession came along before our program did. So I don't think we could do it retroactively. And, you know, we've been blamed for that. As a matter of fact, the other day I read an article, a group of astronomers have said that in the next 10,000 years, one of the largest stars in the Milky Way is going to explode. And he said the astronomers couldn't pin it down as to just win in that 10,000 years it's going to take place. But one thing is certain. It will be blamed on our even on. You know, I said some reminders. Jerry Ford and I were down in Texas the other night. We had a fund raiser down there for Bill Clements. And Jerry was reminding us about the 76. If you remember his opponent at that time, he invented what he called the misery index. You obtained it by adding the rate of unemployment with the rate of inflation. And in Jerry's time with inflation at 4.8% and unemployment of something in seven and a fraction percent, it came out to around 12 plus 12.4 or 5.4 or 5%. And Jimmy Carter said that no man had the right to seek reelection who had a misery index of that size. Shouldn't be allowed to run. But in 1980, the misery index was around 20. Inflation was 12.4. Yes, unemployment had even increased by then. And of course the interest rates had gone up to 21.5%. Now one of our congressmen, a representative in the House one day a few weeks ago in some discussion of our economic program, said something that was a kind of a nostalgic what if. And I thought it was wonderful. Dan Lundberg said, what if on the eve of the inauguration of this administration in 1981, a journalist had given his editor a story and said that the new administration would in a year and a half take inflation which had been double digit for more than 24 months down to zero, down to actual deflation. No inflation at all. The interest rates would go from the six point plus that they were in at the end of Jerry Ford's administration to 21.5 would come down by four and a half or five points in the first year of the new administration. And productivity which had been negative for three years would finally show the first time in four years real growth. And then he said the editor would turn him down and tell him that they had too much of a reputation for truth in their publication to print such a while. Well, yes, inflation has come down because as Dan Lundberg added, it happened. Everything that we said. For the last six months, inflation has been running at 2.8%. And for the last three months, it's been running at less than 1%. And there was one of those three months in which it actually was below zero. We had deflation. And there is national defense we talked about the last time. When we took office, this administration, we found that in any given day, half our planes couldn't take off for lack of spare parts. Many of our ships couldn't leave harbor when they were scheduled to for the same reason or for lack of crew. The morale of the armed forces is so low that the enlistment rates we couldn't keep up even the minimum requirements. And our non-commissioned officers were not reenlisting they were leaving the service in droves to take private jobs. Well, now the enlistments are up as full as they can be, but also, there's a greater increase in the quality of the people at the educational level, the intelligence level of the people that are enlisting. And the non-coms are staying in, in droves and the morale. Well, we ran into that, a temple off-air drone last week in Europe. There they were a whole bunch of our GIs and some of their families and their children out there to see us when we landed. There's no problem with their morale. And I had a letter from one of our ambassadors over there who'd been up on the Eastern German border and visited one of our armored cavalry regents. And he said as he left, a 19-year-old lad followed him over to the helicopter and asked him if he could get a message to me. And being an ambassador, he thought he could. And the kid said, well, would you just tell him for us, we're proud to be here and we ain't scared of nothing. Well, now I know that our opponents say that we're spending too much on national defense. Well, defense is less than 30% of our budget. But back in Camelot and John F. Kennedy was president, defense was 46% of his budget. And the budget cuts that we're asking that the needy are going to be doing without and that we're not going to be able to provide medical care for all the people that need it. Well, in Camelot, 20 years ago, the total budget, percentage of the budget that was devoted to human needs was 29%. In ours, it's 51%. But the truth is there hadn't been any budget cuts. The budget this year is bigger than it was last year. The budget next year is going to be bigger than the one this year. What we're calling budget cuts is a reduction in the increase in spending, which in the four years before we got here had averaged 17% a year. Well, this year we cut that in half. And next year it'll be sizeably reduced again and we think it's getting down to where one of these days soon we'll be spending within our means. We'll be balancing the budget. We've kept our promise to cut taxes. And it'll be continued. Had the first installment, the second installment will come in a few days on July 1st and the third one will come on July 1st next year. When the 82 campaign really gets underway, let our opponents, if you think, have any concern about the issues, let them explain why they fought as hard as they did to keep the increase in spending up and to not let us reduce that increase in spending. And let them explain to the American people why they opposed and fought all the way that tax cut program and then even after its pass, they're still trying to repeal some of the installments that have not yet taken place. Let me explain why now or let them explain, I should say, because I can't, why now they're so distressed about the deficits when for the last few decades their deficit spending over which they presided have led to the trillion-dollar debt that we now have. And they told us, if you'll remember in the new economics that we shouldn't worry about the deficit spending because we owe the debt to ourselves. Well, I don't know. We're out for a balanced budget and we're out for a constitutional amendment that will then make that a political constitution that the government has to adhere to a balanced budget from now on. When we were in Europe a few days ago on that trip, I think some other things were evident also. You read about all the demonstrations, but what you didn't read about so much was the fact that every street we went down in those six cities in four countries were lined with people, most of them waving American flags and holding up homemade signs that read, we love you, America. And we were able to tell them on every occasion and tell you that our defense buildup is not so that we can go to war. It's so that no adversary will dare start a war and that we will remain at peace. The, and so the Soviets, when they meet us in just 11 days in the 29th, they're going to meet us in the beginning of the negotiations to reduce the nuclear weapons that we both have aimed at each other in the world. It's so that this time they'll sit across the table from us and know that they had better legitimately for their first time join us in arms reduction or they're going to face the industrial might of the United States that's going to see that we keep on building whatever is necessary to ensure that there won't be a war. What we're planning is all summed up in a cartoon. I don't know whether you saw it. It was Brezhnev. Brezhnev was talking to a Russian gentleman and he said, I like the arms race better when we were the only ones in it. They're not going to have that anymore. And just in case you're worried, there's just always a deadly two little news items. One happens to be a figure again. Two days ago, we have a task force made up of inspectors general now and every six months they report and their only instructions were to go out there into every agency and department of government and be meaner than junkyard dogs. And they gave their third report just two days ago and in about six months that ended, March 31st, in that six-month period, they have saved the American people $5.8 billion. The other thing is as late as today, there's been a problem. You know what our concern is with Poland, Afghanistan and some of the other things that happened. And last December, we announced the installation of some sanctions with regard to the Soviet Union that this country would not sell them the needed equipment for them to go forward with their gas pipeline, natural gas pipeline from Siberia to Western Europe. And after the summit meetings and we've discussed about shutting off credit, we don't see why we should subsidize with low-interest loans further military buildup the Soviet Union. Today, we had our meeting today and the decision has been announced. We are not going to lift those sanctions. Indeed, we're going to expand them to American companies that have subsidized loans longer than I intended to and talking too long except just to remind you, we need to keep that Senate majority that we have. We wouldn't have achieved half of what we've been able to do if both houses were against us. So they've got to be returned to office and add a few to help them out. And then I know that tradition says that in this off-year election, the party that doesn't have the White House always adds to the members that they have in the House of Representatives. Let's change that around too. I don't know whether we could go all the way in one jump and get a majority in that other House, but I can tell you this would be the happiest house in the world. And then governors and state legislators. Remember the 11th commandment, all of us. Preach at every place we go and get them because we're going to get that federalism program in place in which we're going to do what we promised for years and turn back to the states of local communities. A lot of the things the federal government has been mismanaging. We're going to turn it back there and then we're going to get good solid Republicans there in the state houses and even in the local offices where partisan elections are permitted in order to manage those programs the way they should be managed. So God bless you all for being here and I'm going to shut up.