Presidents -- United States -- Messages; United States -- Politics and government -- Sources
We must begin to scrutinize the overall effect of regulation in our
economy. Through deregulation of the airline industry we've increased
profits, cut prices for all Americans, and begun--for one of the few times
in the history of our Nation--to actually dismantle a major Federal
bureaucracy. This year, we must begin the effort to reform our regulatory
processes for the railroad, bus, and the trucking industries.
America has the greatest economic system in the world. Let's reduce
government interference and give it a chance to work.
I call on Congress to take other anti-inflation action--to expand our
exports to protect American jobs threatened by unfair trade, to conserve
energy, to increase production and to speed development of solar power, and
to reassess our Nation's technological superiority. American workers who
enlist in the fight against inflation deserve not just our gratitude, but
they deserve the protection of the real wage insurance proposal that I have
already made to the Congress.
To be successful, we must change our attitudes as well as our policies. We
cannot afford to live beyond our means. We cannot afford to create programs
that we can neither manage nor finance, or to waste our natural resources,
and we cannot tolerate mismanagement and fraud. Above all, we must meet the
challenges of inflation as a united people.
With the support of the American people, government in recent decades has
helped to dismantle racial barriers, has provided assistance for the
jobless and the retired, has fed the hungry, has protected the safety,
health, and bargaining rights of American workers, and has helped to
preserve our natural heritage.
But it's not enough to have created a lot of government programs. Now we
must make the good programs more effective and improve or weed out those
which are wasteful or unnecessary.
With the support of the Congress, we've begun to reorganize and to get
control of the bureaucracy. We are reforming the civil service system, so
that we can recognize and reward those who do a good job and correct or
remove those who do not.
This year, we must extend major reorganization efforts to education, to
economic development, and to the management of our natural resources. We
need to enact a sunshine [sunset] law that when government programs have
outlived their value, they will automatically be terminated.
There's no such thing as an effective and a noncontroversial reorganization
and reform. But we know that honest, effective government is essential to
restore public faith in our public action.
None of us can be satisfied when two-thirds of the American citizens chose
not to vote last year in a national election. Too many Americans feel
powerless against the influence of private lobbying groups and the
unbelievable flood of private campaign money which threatens our electoral
process.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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