State of the Union AddressesRoosevelt, Franklin D. (Franklin Delano)
History
State of the Union Addresses
Roosevelt, Franklin D. (Franklin Delano)
Presidents -- United States -- Messages; United States -- Politics and government -- Sources
They include the perfecting of labor organization and a universal
ungrudging attitude by employers toward the labor movement, until there is
a minimum of interruption of production and employment because of disputes,
and acceptance by labor of the truth that the welfare of labor itself
depends on increased balanced out-put of goods.
To be immediately practical, while proceeding with a steady evolution in
the solving of these and like problems, we must wisely use
instrumentalities, like Federal investment, which are immediately available
to us.
Here, as elsewhere, time is the deciding factor in our choice of remedies.
Therefore, it does not seem logical to me, at the moment we seek to
increase production and consumption, for the Federal Government to consider
a drastic curtailment of its own investments.
The whole subject of government investing and government income is one
which may be approached in two different ways.
The first calls for the elimination of enough activities of government to
bring the expenses of government immediately into balance with income of
government. This school of thought maintains that because our national
income this year is only sixty billion dollars, ours is only a sixty
billion dollar country; that government must treat it as such; and that
without the help of government, it may some day, somehow, happen to become
an eighty billion dollar country.
If the Congress decides to accept this point of view, it will logically
have to reduce the present functions or activities of government by
one-third. Not only will the Congress have to accept the responsibility for
such reduction; but the Congress will have to determine which activities
are to be reduced.
Certain expenditures we cannot possibly reduce at this session, such as the
interest on the public debt. A few million dollars saved here or there in
the normal or in curtailed work of the old departments and commissions will
make no great saving in the Federal budget. Therefore, the Congress would
have to reduce drastically some of certain large items, very large items,
such as aids to agriculture and soil conservation, veterans' pensions,
flood control, highways, waterways and other public works, grants for
social and health security, Civilian Conservation Corps activities, relief
for the unemployed, or national defense itself.
The Congress alone has the power to do all this, as it is the appropriating
branch of the government.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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