Editing 79-11-B1 (section)

=== Transcript ===
About half-way through my years as Governor some members of my staff gave me a visual
demonstration of government's appetite for paper. They brought in the forms required for
hiring a single civil service employee in California's state government. We laid them
out on the floor of one of the corridors end to end. They made a paper pathway 75 feet
long.

I remembered that recently when I heard of another such demonstration: A group
in California called "Californians for Environment, Employment and Energy through
Planned Development", decided to measure the red tape involved in building a single-family
house in California.

They made a banner of more than 100 governmental and regulatory permit and processing
requirements that must be met by a builder in our state. The banner was 200 feet long.
Even that, however, fails to measure what it means in time and cost. Home construction
that used to take six months now takes up to two years. And that 200 feet of red tape
is responsible for about 20 percent of the cost of a house.

While we are on the subject of paper, what is the situation at the federal government
level? Well, in the last fiscal year the government used 66 billion sheets of standard
eight-and-one-half by 11-inch paper.

You can draw all kinds of visuals with that. We could make a paper trail almost a
half mile wide from Los Angeles to New York. But the one I like best is that you could
cover Washington, D.C. with a blanket of paper 25 sheets thick. Now if we had enough
glue--no, I better not think that way.

If you are curious about the institution it takes to shuffle that paper, try this
for size. The Sears Tower in Chicago--110 floors--is the tallest building in the world.
The U.S. government occupies space equal to 613 Sears Towers and more is being added every
month.

Here is one with a little international flavor. Our government is still stubbornly
refusing to recognize and thereby lift the sanctions imposed on the new government of
Rhodesia. Under those sanctions adopted by the U.N. we no longer buy chrome from Rhodesia.
Chrome is absolutely essential to the production of stainless steel. Rhodesia is the
principle source of chrome in all the world.

So how have we been making steel for these last several years? Simple. We buy it for
$58 a ton from the Soviet Union, which ignores the U.N. sanctions and buys it from Rhodesia
for $32 a ton.

The London DAILY TELEGRAPH published that bit of wholesale-retail shenanigans which
was in a report compiled from western diplomatic sources for the U.N. Sanctions Committee.

This is Ronald Reagan.

Thanks for listening.
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