State of the Union, 1964-01-08, L.B. Johnson

[no sound] Members of the House and Senate, my fellow Americans, I will be brief for our time is necessarily short and our agenda is already long. Last year's congressional session was the longest in peacetime history. And with that foundation, let us work together to make this year's session the best in the nation's history.

Let this session of Congress be known as the session which did more for civil rights than the last hundred sessions combined. As the session which enacted the most far reaching tax cut of our time. As the session which declared all-out war on human poverty and unemployment in these United States. As the session which finally recognized the health needs of all of our older citizens. As the session which reformed our tangled transportation and transit policies.

As the session which achieved the most effective, efficient foreign aid program ever. As the session which helped to build more homes and more schools and more libraries and more hospitals than any single session of Congress in the history of our republic. All this and more can and must be done. It can be done by this summer. And it can be done without any increase in spending.

In fact, under the budget that I shall shortly submit, it can be done with an actual reduction in federal expenditures and federal employment. We have in 1964 a unique opportunity and obligation to prove the success of our system, to disprove those cynics and critics at home and abroad who question our purpose and our competence. If we fail, if we fritter and fumble away our opportunity in needless, senseless quarrels between Democrats and Republicans, or between the House and the Senate, or between the South

and the North, or between the Congress and the administration, then history will rightfully judge us harshly. But if we succeed, if we can achieve these goals by forging in this country a greater sense of union, then and only then can we take full satisfaction in the state of the union. Here in the Congress you can demonstrate effective legislative leadership by discharging the public business with clarity and dispatch. Voting each important proposal up or voting it down, but at least bringing it to a fair and a final vote.

Let us carry forward the plans and programs of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, not because of our sorrow or sympathy, but because they are right. And in his memory today, I especially ask all members of my own political faith in this election year to put your country ahead of your party and to always debate principles never debate personalities. For my part, I pledge a progressive administration which is efficient and honest and frugal.

The budget to be submitted to the Congress shortly is in full accord with this pledge. It will cut our deficit in half. $10 billion to $4,009,000,000. It will be in proportion to our national output the smallest budget since 1951. It will call for a substantial reduction in federal employment.

A feat accomplished only once before in the last 10 years while maintaining the full strength of our combat defensive. It will call for the lowest number of civilian personnel in the Department of Defense since 1950. It will call for total expenditures of $97,900,000,000, compared to $98,400,000,000 for the current year, a reduction of more than $500,000,000. It will call for a new obligation authority of $103,800,000,000, a reduction of more than

$4,000,000,000 below last year's request of $107,900,000,000, but it is not a standstill budget for America cannot afford to stand still. Our population is growing. Our economy is more complex. Our people's needs are expanding. But by closing down obsolete installations, by curtailing less urgent programs, by cutting back where cutting back seems to be wise, by insisting on a dollar's worth or a dollar spent.

I am able to recommend in this reduced budget the most federal support in history for education. For health, for retraining the unemployed, and for helping the economically and the physically handicapped. This budget and this year's legislative program are designed to help each and every American citizen fulfill his basic hopes. His hopes for a fair chance to make good. His hopes for fair play from the law.

His hopes for a full time job on full time pay. His hopes for a decent home for his family in a decent community. His hopes for a good school for his children with good teachers. And his hopes for security when faced with sickness or unemployment or old age. Unfortunately, many Americans live on the outskirts of hope, some because of their poverty and some because of their color, and all too many because of both. Their task is to help replace their despair with opportunity. And this administration today here and now declares unconditional war on poverty in America.

And I urge this Congress and all Americans to join with me in that effort. It will not be a short or easy struggle. No single weapon or strategy will suffice. But we shall not rest until that war is won. The richest nation on earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it.

$1,000 invested in salvaging and unemployable youth today can return $40,000 or more in his lifetime. Poverty is a national problem requiring improved national organization and support. But this attack to be affected must also be organized at the state and the local level and must be supported and directed by state and local efforts. For the war against poverty will not be won here in Washington. It must be won in the field in every private home, in every public office, from the courthouse to the White House.

The program I shall propose will emphasize this cooperative approach to help that one fifth of all American families with incomes too small to even meet their basic needs. Our chief weapons in a more pinpointed attack will be better schools and better health and better homes and better training and better job opportunities to help more Americans, especially young Americans, escape from squalor and misery and unemployment roles where other citizens help to carry them. Very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty but the symptom. The cause may lie deeper in our failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to

develop their own capacities in a lack of education and training, in a lack of medical care and housing, in a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their children. But whatever the cause, our joint federal local effort must pursue poverty, pursue it wherever it exists in city slums and small towns, in sharecropper, shacks or in migrant worker camps, on Indian reservations, among whites, as well as Negro, among the young as well as the aged, in the boom towns and in the depressed areas. Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty but to cure it and above all to prevent. No single piece of legislation, however, is going to suffice.

We will launch a special effort in the chronically distressed areas of Appalachia. We must expand our small but our successful area redevelopment program. We must enact youth employment legislation to put jobless, aimless, hopeless youngsters to work on useful projects. We must distribute more food to the needy through a broader food stamp program. We must create a national service corps to help the economically handicapped of our own country as the Peace Corps now helps those abroad.

We must modernize our unemployment insurance and establish a high level commission on automation. If we have the brain power to invent these machines, we have the brain power to make certain that they are a boon and not a bane to humanity. We must extend the coverage of our minimum wage laws to more than two million workers now lacking this basic protection of purchasing power. We must, by including special school aid funds as part of our education program, improve the quality of teaching and training and counseling in our hardest-hit areas. We must build more libraries in every area and more hospitals and nursing homes under

the Hill Burton Act and train more nurses to staff them. 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 our 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. So of 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. 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 and libraries and hospitals and nursing homes from the training of more nurses and from the improvement of urban renewal and 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. In every month of delay dilutes its benefits in 1964 for consumption, for investment and for employment, for until the bill is signed its investments 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% instead of 15% our withholding rate. And 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 three 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 level in history. But I would remind you that 4 million workers and 13% of our industrial capacity are still idle today. We need a tax cut now to keep this country moving. For our goal is not merely to spread the work, our goal is to create more jobs. I believe the enactment of a 35 hour week would sharply increase costs, would invite inflation,

would impair our ability to compete and merely share instead of creating employment. And I am equally opposed to the 45 hour or 50 hour week in those industries where consistently excessive use of overtime causes increased unemployment. So therefore I recommend legislation authorizing the creation of a tri-parta industry committee to determine on an industry by industry basis as to where a higher penalty rate for overtime would increase job openings without unduly increasing costs and authorizing the establishment of such high rates.

Let me make one principle of this administration abundantly clear. All of these increased opportunities in employment and education and housing and in every field must be open to Americans of every color. As far as the writ of federal law will run, we must abolish not some but all racial discrimination. For this is not merely an economic issue, or a social, political or international issue. It is a moral issue and it must be met by the passage this session of the bill now pending in the House.

All members of the public should have equal access to facilities open to the public. All members of the public should be equally eligible for federal benefits that are financed by the public. All members of the public should have an equal chance to vote for public officials and to send their children to good public schools and to contribute their talents to the public good. Today, Americans of all races stand side by side in Berlin and in Vietnam. They died side by side in Korea, surely they can work and eat and travel side by side

in their own country. We must also lift by legislation the bars of discrimination against those who seek entry into our country, particularly those with much needed skills and those joining their families. In establishing preferences, a nation that was built by the immigrants of all lands can ask those who now seek admission, what can you do for our country? But we should not be asking in what country were you born?

For our ultimate goal is a world without war. A world made safe for diversity in which all men, goods and ideas can freely move across every border and every boundary. We must advance toward this goal in 1964 in at least ten different ways, not as partisans but as patriots. First, we must maintain and our reduced defense budget will maintain that margin of military safety and superiority, obtained through three years of steadily increasing both the quality and the quantity of our strategic, our conventional and our anti geurilla forces.

In 1964, we will be better prepared than ever before to defend the cause of freedom, whether it's threatened by outright aggression or by the infiltration practice by those in Hanoi and Havana, who ship arms and men across international borders to full man insurrection. And we must continue to use that strength as John Kennedy used it in the Cuban crisis and for the test band treaty to demonstrate both the futility of nuclear war and the possibilities of lasting peace. Second, we must take new steps and we shall make new proposals at Geneva toward the control

and the eventual abolition of arms. Even in the absence of agreement, we must not stockpile arms beyond our needs, or seek an excess of military power that could be provocative as well as wasteful. And it is in this spirit that in this fiscal year we are cutting back our production of enriched uranium by 25%. We are shutting down four plutonium piles. We are closing many non-essential military installations. And it is in this spirit that we today call on our adversaries to do the same. Third, we must make increased use of our food as an instrument of peace, making it available

by sale or trade or loan or donation to hungry people in all nations which tell us of their needs and accept proper conditions of distribution. Fourth, we must assure our preeminence in the peaceful exploration of outer space, focusing on an expedition to the moon in this decade, in cooperation with other powers if possible, alone if necessary. Fifth, we must expand world trade, having recognized in the act of 1962 that we must buy as well as sell, we now expect our trading partners to recognize that we must sell as

well as buy. We are willing to give them competitive access to our market, asking only that they do the same for us. Next we must continue through such measures as the interest equalization tax, as well as the cooperation of other nations, our recent progress toward balancing our international accounts. This administration must and will preserve the present goal value of the dollar. Seventh, we must become better neighbors with the free states of the Americas, working

with the councils of the OAS, with a stronger alliance for progress, and with all the men and women of this hemisphere who really believe in liberty and justice for all. Eighth, we must strengthen the ability of free nations everywhere to develop their independence and raise their standard of living, and thereby frustrate those who pray on poverty and chaos. To do this, the rich must help the poor, and we must do our part. We must achieve a more rigorous administration of our development assistance with larger roles for private investors, for other industrialized nations, and for international agencies and for the recipient nations themselves.

Ninth, we must strengthen our Atlantic and Pacific partnership, maintain our alliances and make the United Nations a more effective instrument for national independence and international order. And finally, we must develop with our allies, new means of bridging the gap between the East and the West, facing danger boldly wherever danger exists, but being equally bold in our search for new agreements which can enlarge the hopes of all while violating the interests of known. In short, I would say to the Congress that we must be constantly prepared for the worst

and constantly acting for the best. We must be strong enough to win any war, and we must be wise enough to prevent one. We shall neither act as aggressors nor tolerate acts of aggression. We intend to bury no one, and we do not intend to be buried. We can fight, if we must, as we have fought before.

But we pray that we will never have to fight again. My good friends and my fellow Americans in these last seven sorrowful weeks, we have learned anew that nothing is so enduring as fate, and nothing is so degrading as hate. John Kennedy was a victim of hate, but he was also a great builder of faith. Faith in our fellow Americans, whatever their creed, or their color, or their station in life, faith in the future of man, whatever his divisions and differences. This faith was echoed in all parts of the world, on every continent and in every land

to which Ms. Johnson and I traveled. We found faith and hope and love toward this land of America and toward our people. So I ask you now, in the Congress and in the country, to join with me in expressing and fulfilling that faith in working for a nation, a nation that is free from want and a world that is free from hate, a world of peace and justice and freedom and abundance for our time and for all time to come.