Presidents -- United States -- Messages; United States -- Politics and government -- Sources
At present our total national production is $255 billion a year. Our
working population and our output per worker are increasing. If our
productive power continues to increase at the same rate as it has increased
over the past 50 years, our total national production 50 years from now
will be nearly four times as much as it is today. Allowing for the expected
growth in population, this would mean that the real income of the average
family in the year 2000 A.D. would be about three times what it is today.
These are estimates of what we can do in the future, but we can reach these
heights only if we follow the right policies. We have learned by bitter
experience that progress is not automatic--that wrong policies lead to
depression and disaster. We cannot achieve these gains unless we have a
stable economy and avoid the catastrophes of boom and bust that have set us
back in the past.
These gains cannot be achieved unless our businessmen maintain their spirit
of initiative and enterprise and operate in a competitive economy. They
cannot be achieved unless our workingmen and women and their unions help to
increase productivity and obtain for labor a fair share of the benefits of
our economic system. They cannot be achieved unless we have a stable and
prosperous agriculture. They cannot be achieved unless we conserve and
develop our natural resources in the public interest. Our system will not
work unless our people are healthy, well-educated, and confident of the
future. It will not work unless all citizens can participate fully in our
national life.
In achieving these gains the Government has a special responsibility to
help create and maintain the conditions which will permit the growth we
know is possible. Foremost among these conditions is the need for a fair
distribution of our increasing prosperity among all the great groups of our
population who help to bring it about-labor, business, agriculture.
Businessmen must continue to have the incentives necessary for investment
and for the development of new lines of enterprise. In the future growth of
this country, lie possibilities for hundreds of thousands of new and
independent businesses. As our national production increases, as it doubles
and redoubles in the next 50 years, the number of independent and competing
enterprises should also increase. If the number does not increase, our
constantly growing economy will fall under the control of a few dominant
economic groups whose powers will be so great that they will be a challenge
to democratic institutions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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