William Weld says the “first order of business” he and Gary Johnson would have if voters send them to the White House is filing a balanced budget within their first 100 days, and “perhaps less.”

The 71-year-old Weld may best be known as a former two-term Republican governor of Massachusetts. But Weld carries the GOP flag no longer. Together with former New Mexico Gov. Johnson, the Libertarian Party’s presidential nominee, Weld is pitching his present party’s philosophy — what he calls fiscal responsibility and social inclusion — to voters as an alternative to what he says is the “monopoly” of the two-party system.

For the third-party candidates, there isn’t much time left to make a splash. The first presidential debate is less than two weeks away, and Johnson hasn’t hit the polling threshold required to get in. But Weld holds out hopes for the second debate and in the meantime, tells MarketWatch where the government can save money; why he believes “taxation is theft”; and why Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump aren’t serious about the budget.

Here is a condensed and edited interview with Weld, who said he uses MarketWatch six times a day to check stock prices and market conditions.

MarketWatch: Some of our readers, even though you’re familiar with us, may not be as familiar with you and with Gov. Johnson. So first, what’s your most basic pitch about how the Libertarian ticket offers something that Clinton and Trump do not?

Weld: First of all, we are fiscally responsible, meaning conservative, and socially inclusive, meaning liberal. And that is different than the other two parties: the Republicans are not socially inclusive and the Democrats are not fiscally conservative, by a long shot. Our combination of approaches speaks for about 60% of voters. So we offer voters a choice, which is what they really want. That’s point one.

Point two, we’re both two-term Republican governors who succeeded Democrats in Democratic states and immediately set the fiscal house in order by balancing the budget and cutting spending and cutting taxes. That’s what needs to be done in Washington, DC. So that would be Gary’s and my first order of business: to file a balanced budget within our first 100 days, perhaps less.

“ “I imagine if we’re not in the first debate we’ll be standing in a studio somewhere nearby, answering all the same questions ourselves in real time so people will have the opportunity to see what we would say in response to the questions.” ” — — Bill Weld

The only way you can do that is to have the political will to do that. You have to be able to zero out accounts in the federal government by zero-basing the budget, and that’s what we would do. What I mean by zero-basing is you examine each appropriation from last year and you see how it performed. What were the results? Not the input, which is simply the appropriation, but the outcomes.

Let’s say you had an account that was preventive health care — helping people stay healthy. It helped millions and millions and millions of people stay healthy and was a huge success in controlling health-care costs. You might want to multiply that appropriation by seven because it was so effective.

But if you have another, much larger appropriation that creates a bureaucracy that no one seems to be able to quite tell you what the bureaucracy does except that it’s somewhere between law enforcement and border control, that might be a candidate for elimination, as being duplicative. That’s where you get the big dollars. It’s not waste, fraud and abuse, which is what everyone always says. It’s ill-considered government programs and expenditures. And I think Gary and I are unique in having that experience and having done it.

Weld (L) and Gary Johnson (R) talk to a crowd of supporters at a rally on Aug. 6 in Salt Lake City. Getty Images

MarketWatch: Gov. Johnson was criticized for asking “What is Aleppo?” last week on MSNBC. I think that raised some flags for people and left them concerned that, is he ignorant about other issues? Can you speak to that?

Weld: I’ve heard Gov. Johnson talking with sophistication about what to do in Syria for the past three months. He just missed the place name.

Read: Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson asks: ‘And what is Aleppo?’

He’s been saying for months that it’s a mess because we armed the rebels; the rebels lost their arms and they wound up in the hands of ISIS. Gary, as a Libertarian, is somewhat less inclined towards regime-change military strikes than, for example, Secretary Clinton is. That’s a legitimate position and I think it’s the reason why Gary polls No. 1 among military personnel, both active and retired, and their families. Because military personnel understand the costs of wars.

We’ve been at war in one place or the other in the world most of the last 40 years. So that’s something that Gary and I are inclined to take a dim view of. I think many people if not most people agree with that.

MarketWatch: You’ve said that your opening position would be reducing the size of the federal government by 20%. Where would you start, and besides being balanced, what would your first budget actually look like?

Weld: We would go through the exercise of zero-basing the budget, as I did in Massachusetts. I had to meet a 14% budget gap my first month in office and did so without any difficulty, by simply ignoring the sacred cows and limiting myself and the budget to what seemed really necessary expenditures. That would be the exercise. It would not be 10% across the board. It would be a line-by-line analysis.

I’ve been around government a long time. I’ve never seen a layer of government that didn’t have 10% or 20% of excess spending in it, and the reason is that legislators love to be loved, they love to get re-elected, and the bigger the appropriations, the more they’re loved and the more they get re-elected.

That’s why the good lord invented the executive branch [laughs], to hold their feet to the fire, to veto what seems unnecessary and try and make it stick. That’s what happened in Massachusetts. We cut the budget in absolute dollars. I cut taxes 21 times. When I came into office, the state was flat on its back. There was a recession, and by the end of my first term, the unemployment rate had gone from the highest among the then-11 industrial states to the lowest. We got re-elected with 71% of the vote.

So it’s possible to be conservative about the budget and yet be rewarded by the voters. I think the voters do appreciate good stewardship of taxpayer dollars. One of my slogans, both in campaigning and in office is that there’s no such thing as government money, there’s only taxpayers’ money.

“ “I have personal experience that it’s not the end of the world when a base closes.” ” — — Bill Weld

MarketWatch: Do you have particular programs that stick out in your mind? Sometimes we hear about whole agencies closing.

Weld: Sure. I think the Pentagon itself has said it believes it has 20% too many bases. That’s kind of a sequel to the base realignment and closure commission of some years ago, chaired by my good friend Jim Courter of New Jersey. And that’s the Pentagon talking! And they go to Congress and say please, please help us rationalize this, and Congress won’t do it. Because the local congresspeople say no, no, you’re not touching this base.

I have personal experience that it’s not the end of the world when a base closes. Fort Devens, which was an Army base in Massachusetts, was closed under the last BRAC round. Paul Cellucci, my lieutenant governor and I, were very active in bringing industry in to that area. I was out at an event there this May, as a matter of fact, celebrating the 20th anniversary of Fort Devens becoming the Devens economic development area. There are more jobs there now than there were when it was an Army base! So it’s a complete success.

You just have to not roll over and play dead and be active about it. I do think that if you go by what the Pentagon itself says, that there are going to be savings in the military budget in terms of bases.

I also think that while in the military area we think it’s tremendously important for the United States to have a demonstrated military supremacy in both air power and naval power, because that’s what people around the world see and look at every day — and I travel a lot abroad, both with foreign policy forums and giving speeches and on business — I see people paying minute attention to the presence of the United States and the power of the United States.

In the Arab world for example, they’re terrified that the Fifth Fleet is going to leave Bahrain and go back to the Gulf of Mexico. Same in Asia. So I do think that’s important.

But it’s not necessarily the case that we have to be prepared to fight four simultaneous land wars in far-flung areas like Asia and Africa with boots on the ground. So there could be some personnel and equipment savings there, in the military.

Domestically, the Department of Homeland Security was a hodge-podge of 22 agencies when it was put together. I was quite familiar with that because a lot of those were in the Justice Department and the Treasury Department and I had dealt with all of them when I was assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division at Justice. I’m certain there could be consolidation and elimination savings there.

I feel probably the same thing about the Department of Commerce. To the extent that the Department of Commerce represents the government taking a position in the economy, trying to help big businesses, perhaps even at the expense of more entrepreneurial businesses, query whether that’s an activity we should be spending a lot of taxpayer dollars on in the first place. So there would be an examination of the rationale of various programs in the Commerce Department.

In the education area, I have been much involved in that, I put in high-stakes testing in Massachusetts. The result was test scores went way up. I think that charter schools and more school choice is a terrific thing to do. You don’t really need the federal government for that. So that’s a third agency where there should be an examination of the programs and the savings could be substantial.

MarketWatch: On the tax side, the platform calls for repealing the income tax and abolishing the IRS. So tell us how do you make up the revenue, and how can you possibly expect Congress and K Street to go along with that idea?

Weld: That proposal, as I understand it — the consumption tax — is called the fair tax. It has a “prebate” designed to make it easier for people at the lower income levels to live with it. Because it is on its face quite regressive, compared to the progressive income tax. It’s been filed the last 10 years and my understanding is it’s got the support of about 80 members of Congress. So it’s not just an idea that somebody in a Libertarian think tank dreamed up.

I myself have said that I might be inclined to take a good look at the Steve Forbes flat tax, from his 1996 campaign. I got fairly deeply into that. I think that actually works. You could run the government as presently constituted, at a level of 19% and if you wanted to do some real belt-tightening, you could go down as low as 17%. Of course for that, you would still need the IRS. But it would involve a lot of simplification of the tax code, which is one of its main purposes.

I think it’s worth a real close look, the flat-tax approach. The fat lady hasn’t sung yet in terms of what the end game would be here. And I take your point that Congress may have its own ideas. On the other hand, as an administration, we’re entitled and expected to advance our own platform, and the consumption-based tax, it takes some getting used to. But it would result in less tax revenue getting collected. I think that’s a good thing. There was a French anarchist called Proudhon, who said “property is theft.” He’s an anarchist. I sometimes say taxation is theft, because it is coercive. It’s theft by the government from the people, as far as it goes. Obviously you need some level of taxation, but I think anything that brings the level of taxation down is a good thing.

We agree with Thomas Jefferson that that government is best which governs least. It doesn’t mean you don’t have a safety net. It doesn’t mean you don’t have splendid programs, but the presumption is that the dollar belongs to the taxpayer who earned it.

MarketWatch: Does repealing the income tax include the corporate income tax?

Weld: Oh yeah. You probably know this: the corporate income tax doesn’t raise a hell of a lot of money compared to a lot of other taxes. So that sounds like a really big deal but it’s actually not. You’d have to get rid of both corporate and personal in order to be able to eliminate the IRS as a collection agency.

I will say one thing in favor of the IRS, is we have a much higher level of collection than, for example, some European countries where people keep two sets of books, and that enables us to do a lot of the things we do.

MarketWatch: You’ve been a strong proponent of free trade. That’s been a big issue in this campaign. What do you say though to the argument that it’s really just companies that benefit from it, not workers. Donald Trump has made this argument with Carrier, for example.

Weld: No, I think the United States always benefits from free trade because we have higher productivity per worker so we’re going to gain high-wage jobs. We may lose some low-wage jobs but the solution to that is to be more aggressive about worker retraining, resettlement programs, working as they are in Appalachia, losing coal jobs and steel jobs to introduce other types of industries, more entrepreneurial ones such as internet-based companies, environmental consulting. You pull up your socks and you go to work to address the limited negative consequences for the U.S. in certain geographic areas and certain industries of free trade, because they do exist. But they’re far outweighed by the positive benefits.

I think Mr. Trump’s call for a closed economy where we will re-erect high tariff walls like the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of the 1920s, which very quickly produced the Great Depression, are very ill-considered and typical of Mr. Trump’s either being ignorant of or ignoring the lessons of history.

MarketWatch: You’re not yet at the level in the polls you need for the first debate, which is coming up pretty soon. Gov. Johnson has said that it’d be “game over” if he doesn’t make it in. So is the plan to actually drop out if you don’t make 15%?

Weld: No, no. First of all, the Commission [on Presidential Debates] can do whatever they want. They don’t have to stick at 15%. Bernie Sanders says that’s too high, we say that’s too high. There was a commission three years ago, the Annenberg commission, that recommended that the debate commission drop the level to 10%. The commission’s also said it’s going to keep on polling after the first debate. So we could get in for the second debate if not for the first.

Seventy-six percent of people in the country, according to the USA Today poll, think that the third parties should be at the table. A substantial majority want Johnson-Weld at the table by name. I think the commission is more than entitled to give weight to that and I think they should, because their function is to be an educational organization. And frankly, they’re not legally permitted to pick favorites, i.e., Republican and Democrat over Libertarian, because they’re tax-exempt. They have to be non-partisan, not bipartisan.

I imagine if we’re not in the first debate we’ll be standing in a studio somewhere nearby, answering all the same questions ourselves in real time so people will have the opportunity to see what we would say in response to the questions. That may produce a certain amount of media interest in itself. The only disadvantage under which we labor is that our name recognition is not as high as the “R” and the “D” candidates. They have 100% name recognition. To the extent that the progression of the debates and perhaps even a point-counterpoint phenomenon between ourselves and debates, if that lifts our name recognition up to the 60%-70%-80% level, I think that would make us competitive on the merits with the major candidates because of certain advantages we have, namely experience and the mix of policy positions.

MarketWatch: You were critical there of Mr. Trump and I know you’ve said he’s not qualified to be president. How about Hillary Clinton? Recently the FBI said she was “careless” in handling classified information. Do these kinds of things give you pause about her qualifications?

Weld: They’re no day at the beach. The fact that the Huma Abedin emails, which were between her and Mrs. Clinton, were not disclosed by Mrs. Clinton, is an issue. The fact that Huma Abedin had three different jobs and she was on payroll of two Clinton organizations at the same time that she was serving for Mrs. Clinton as secretary of state and being the intermediary between those very two Clinton organizations and the secretary of state’s office — she has the status of what’s called a special government employee. But that’s supposed to be for technical experts, it’s not supposed to be to address a conflict of interest. So that’s an issue.

And the most significant issue is the budget. I think it’d be very difficult for Mrs. Clinton, having made all the promises she has made to interest groups, both in her acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, and throughout the campaign, to even make a show of caring about balancing the budget. She’s just going in the other direction.

When President Obama leaves office, the national debt is going to be $20 trillion. Half of that is President Obama’s. And that’s going to accelerate under a Hillary Clinton presidency. So those are my issues with the Democrats. The Democratic machine has been ridden hard for a long time and I think the two-party system at least in Washington has kind of outlived its usefulness as a monopoly.

MarketWatch: Since you said it would be difficult for Hillary Clinton to make a show of balancing the budget, do you think the same thing about Trump given what he’s proposed?

Weld: Oh, sure. He’s said he doesn’t care about entitlements. Anyone who says they’re not going near entitlements, and that includes both Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton — quite the contrary, they’re going to increase them. They’re not serious about balancing the budget.

Even more important is going through the exercise of zero-based budgeting, which I described earlier. That’s something Gary Johnson and I not only know how to do, we both have done it.