State of the Union AddressesJohnson, Lyndon B. (Lyndon Baines)
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State of the Union Addresses
Johnson, Lyndon B. (Lyndon Baines)
Presidents -- United States -- Messages; United States -- Politics and government -- Sources
We must provide hospital insurance for our older citizens financed by every
worker and his employer under Social Security, contributing no more than $1
a month during the employee's working career to protect him in his old age
in a dignified manner without cost to the Treasury, against the devastating
hardship of prolonged or repeated illness.
We must, as a part of a revised housing and urban renewal program, give
more help to those displaced by slum clearance, provide more housing for
our poor and our elderly, and seek as our ultimate goal in our free
enterprise system a decent home for every American family.
We must help obtain more modern mass transit within our communities as well
as low-cost transportation between them.
Above all, we must release $11 billion of tax reduction into the private
spending stream to create new jobs and new markets in every area of this
land. IV.
These programs are obviously not for the poor or the underprivileged alone.
Every American will benefit by the extension of social security to cover
the hospital costs of their aged parents. Every American community will
benefit from the construction or modernization of schools, libraries,
hospitals, and nursing homes, from the training of more nurses and from the
improvement of urban renewal in public transit. And every individual
American taxpayer and every corporate taxpayer will benefit from the
earliest possible passage of the pending tax bill from both the new
investment it will bring and the new jobs that it will create.
That tax bill has been thoroughly discussed for a year. Now we need action.
The new budget clearly allows it. Our taxpayers surely deserve it. Our
economy strongly demands it. And every month of delay dilutes its benefits
in 1964 for consumption, for investment, and for employment.
For until the bill is signed, its investment incentives cannot be deemed
certain, and the withholding rate cannot be reduced--and the most damaging
and devastating thing you can do to any businessman in America is to keep
him in doubt and to keep him guessing on what our tax policy is. And I say
that we should now reduce to 14 percent instead of 15 percent our
withholding rate.
I therefore urge the Congress to take final action on this bill by the
first of February, if at all possible. For however proud we may be of the
unprecedented progress of our free enterprise economy over the last 3
years, we should not and we cannot permit it to pause.
In 1963, for the first time in history, we crossed the 70 million job mark,
but we will soon need more than 75 million jobs. In 1963 our gross national
product reached the $600 billion level--$100 billion higher than when we
took office. But it easily could and it should be still $30 billion higher
today than it is.
Wages and profits and family income are also at their highest levels in
history--but I would remind you that 4 million workers and 13 percent of
our industrial capacity are still idle today.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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