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A. People go to Washington to serve, not to cash in. The government should come from the people, and we should have a government that gives people an effective voice. The people feel very strongly now that they have no voice in their government.
We have a political system that's driven by getting money. Running up and down the halls of Congress all day, every day, are the organized special interests who have the money that makes it possible to buy the television time to campaign to get re-elected next year. There are no villains here. It's just something that has evolved.
Now make the Congress -- make the White House -- sensitive to the owners of the country again. That's very important to me. These are principles of mine.
We cannot -- it is morally wrong, this is a fundamental principle -- spend our children's money. To my knowledge, the President never talks about the $4 trillion debt and what we should do with it, and yet I'm supposed to have the perfect solution to it immediately.
Q. You have also said repeatedly that you favor a constitutional amendment that would require a vote of the people before Congress could raise taxes.
A. Yes.
Q. How does that help the deficit?
A. We have a $4 trillion debt. We added 10% to it just this year because it's an election year. The first thing you have to do is stop the bleeding. That is the deficit. You should not continue to build the debt, O.K.?
Now then, the second thing: our current tax system is a very ineffective, inefficient tax system basically put together by special interests over a period of many years, and it's got a thousand patches on it, all by the special interests. You've got to change the tax system, and it has to have several characteristics. One, it's got to be fair. The current tax system is not. And two, in my judgment, it should be paperless for most of the people and get rid of this giant, ineffective bureaucracy we have around the irs.
Q. When you say the tax system is unfair, to whom do you think the tax system is unfair?
A. The grossest inequity I have seen in my adult life is when they created the new tax system and had the bubble where people like myself would pay at a lower tax rate than people who had a lower income. I was publicly on record long before this came up as saying that's wrong.
Now, for me to pay a lower rate than some guy making less than me is a joke. That's wrong. When you look at the taxes I've paid in my life, I don't have to tip my hat to anybody. There are individual years where I've paid well over $100 million in taxes. And for a guy who started out with nothing, you know, I just consider that a happy event, because if you're paying that much in taxes, things are going pretty well in your life, right?
Q. Let's say you're President of the U.S. You have clear ideas about some of the things that should be done. You have 535 members of Congress down the street. And you haven't been elected either as a Republican or as a Democrat. How do you get them on board?