Presidents -- United States -- Messages; United States -- Politics and government -- Sources
Now history calls us to press on, to complete efforts for an historic tax
reform providing new opportunity for all and ensuring that all pay their
fair share, but no more. We've come this far. Will you join me now, and
we'll walk this last mile together? You know my views on this. We cannot
and we will not accept tax reform that is a tax increase in disguise. True
reform must be an engine of productivity and growth, and that means a top
personal rate no higher than 35 percent. True reform must be truly fair,
and that means raising personal exemptions to $2,000. True reform means a
tax system that at long last is profamily, projobs, profuture, and
pro-America.
As we knock down the barriers to growth, we must redouble our efforts for
freer and fairer trade. We have already taken actions to counter unfair
trading practices and to pry open closed foreign markets. We will continue
to do so. We will also oppose legislation touted as providing protection
that in reality pits one American worker against another, one industry
against another, one community against another, and that raises prices for
us all. If the United States can trade with other nations on a level
playing field, we can outproduce, outcompete, and outsell anybody, anywhere
in the world.
The constant expansion of our economy and exports requires a sound and
stable dollar at home and reliable exchange rates around the world. We must
never again permit wild currency swings to cripple our farmers and other
exporters. Farmers, in particular, have suffered from past unwise
government policies. They must not be abandoned with problems they did not
create and cannot control. We've begun coordinating economic and monetary
policy among our major trading partners. But there's more to do, and
tonight I am directing Treasury Secretary Jim Baker to determine if the
nations of the world should convene to discuss the role and relationship of
our currencies.
Confident in our future and secure in our values, Americans are striving
forward to embrace the future. We see it not only in our recovery but in 3
straight years of falling crime rates, as families and communities band
together to fight pornography, drugs, and lawlessness and to give back to
their children the safe and, yes, innocent childhood they deserve. We see
it in the renaissance in education, the rising SAT scores for 3 years--last
year's increase, the greatest since 1963. It wasn't government and
Washington lobbies that turned education around; it was the American people
who, in reaching for excellence, knew to reach back to basics. We must
continue the advance by supporting discipline in our schools, vouchers that
give parents freedom of choice; and we must give back to our children their
lost right to acknowledge God in their classrooms.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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