State of the Union AddressesNixon, Richard M. (Richard Milhous)
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State of the Union Addresses
Nixon, Richard M. (Richard Milhous)
Presidents -- United States -- Messages; United States -- Politics and government -- Sources
In discussing these great goals, I shall deal tonight only with matters on
the domestic side of the Nation's agenda. I shall make a separate report to
the Congress and the Nation next month on developments in foreign policy.
The first of these great goals is already before the Congress.
I urge that the unfinished business of the 91st Congress be made the first
priority business of the 92d Congress.
Over the next 2 weeks, I will call upon Congress to take action on more
than 35 pieces of proposed legislation on which action was not completed
last year.
The most important is welfare reform.
The present welfare system has become a monstrous, consuming outrage--an
outrage against the community, against the taxpayer, and particularly
against the children it is supposed to help.
We may honestly disagree, as we do, on what to do about it. But we can all
agree that we must meet the challenge, not by pouring more money into a bad
program, but by abolishing the present welfare system and adopting a new
one.
So let us place a floor under the income of every family with children in
America--and without those demeaning, soul-stifling affronts to human
dignity that so blight the lives of welfare children today. But let us also
establish an effective work incentive and an effective work requirement.
Let us provide the means by which more can help themselves. This shall be
our goal.
Let us generously help those who are not able to help themselves. But let
us stop helping those who are able to help themselves but refuse to do so.
The second great goal is to achieve what Americans have not enjoyed since
1957--full prosperity in peacetime.
The tide of inflation has turned. The rise in the cost of living, which had
been gathering dangerous momentum in the late sixties, was reduced last
year. Inflation will be further reduced this year.
But as we have moved from runaway inflation toward reasonable price
stability and at the same time as we have been moving from a wartime
economy to a peacetime economy, we have paid a price in increased
unemployment.
We should take no comfort from the fact that the level of unemployment in
this transition from a wartime to a peacetime economy is lower than in any
peacetime year of the sixties.
This is not good enough for the man who is unemployed in the seventies. We
must do better for workers in peacetime and we will do better.
To achieve this, I will submit an expansionary budget this year--one that
will help stimulate the economy and thereby open up new job opportunities
for millions of Americans.
It will be a full employment budget, a budget designed to be in balance if
the economy were operating at its peak potential. By spending as if we were
at full employment, we will help to bring about full employment.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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