Presidents -- United States -- Messages; United States -- Politics and government -- Sources
In the coming year, we will also act to improve the quality of life for
Americans by curbing the skyrocketing cost of health care that is becoming
an unbearable financial burden for so many. And we will submit legislation
to provide catastrophic illness insurance coverage for older Americans.
I will also shortly submit a comprehensive federalism proposal that will
continue our efforts to restore to States and local governments their roles
as dynamic laboratories of change in a creative society.
During the next several weeks, I will send to the Congress a series of
detailed proposals on these and other topics and look forward to working
with you on the development of these initiatives.
So far, now, I've concentrated mainly on the problems posed by the future.
But in almost every home and workplace in America, we're already witnessing
reason for great hope--the first flowering of the manmade miracles of high
technology, a field pioneered and still led by our country.
To many of us now, computers, silicon chips, data processing, cybernetics,
and all the other innovations of the dawning high technology age are as
mystifying as the workings of the combustion engine must have been when
that first Model T rattled down Main Street, U.S.A. But as surely as
America's pioneer spirit made us the industrial giant of the 20th century,
the same pioneer spirit today is opening up on another vast front of
opportunity, the frontier of high technology.
In conquering the frontier we cannot write off our traditional industries,
but we must develop the skills and industries that will make us a pioneer
of tomorrow. This administration is committed to keeping America the
technological leader of the world now and into the 21st century.
But let us turn briefly to the international arena. America's leadership in
the world came to us because of our own strength and because of the values
which guide us as a society: free elections, a free press, freedom of
religious choice, free trade unions, and above all, freedom for the
individual and rejection of the arbitrary power of the state. These values
are the bedrock of our strength. They unite us in a stewardship of peace
and freedom with our allies and friends in NATO, in Asia, in Latin America,
and elsewhere. They are also the values which in the recent past some among
us had begun to doubt and view with a cynical eye.
Fortunately, we and our allies have rediscovered the strength of our common
democratic values, and we're applying them as a cornerstone of a
comprehensive strategy for peace with freedom. In London last year, I
announced the commitment of the United States to developing the
infrastructure of democracy throughout the world. We intend to pursue this
democratic initiative vigorously. The future belongs not to governments and
ideologies which oppress their peoples, but to democratic systems of
self-government which encourage individual initiative and guarantee
personal freedom.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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