Our basic farm laws were written 27 years ago, in an emergency effort to
redress hardship caused by a world-wide depression. They were
continued--and their economic distortions intensified--during World War II
in order to provide incentives for production of food needed to sustain a
war-torn free world.
Today our farm problem is totally different. It is that of effectively
adjusting to the changes caused by a scientific revolution. When the
original farm laws were written, an hour's farm labor produced only one
fourth as much wheat as at present. Farm legislation is woefully
out-of-date, ineffective, and expensive.
For years we have gone on with an outmoded system which not only has failed
to protect farm income, but also has produced soaring, threatening
surpluses. Our farms have been left producing for war while America has
long been at peace.
Once again I urge Congress to enact legislation that will gear production
more closely to markets, make costly surpluses more manageable, provide
greater freedom in farm operations, and steadily achieve increased net farm
incomes.
Another issue that we must meet squarely is that of living within our
means. This requires restraint in expenditure, constant reassessment of
priorities, and the maintenance of stable prices.
We must prevent inflation. Here is an opponent of so many guises that it is
sometimes difficult to recognize. But our clear need is to stop continuous
and general price rises--a need that all of us can see and feel.
To prevent steadily rising costs and prices calls for stern self-discipline
by every citizen. No person, city, state, or organized group can afford to
evade the obligation to resist inflation, for every American pays its
crippling tax.
Inflation's ravages do not end at the water's edge. Increases in prices of
the goods we sell abroad threaten to drive us out of markets that once were
securely ours. Whether domestic prices, so high as to be noncompetitive,
result from demands for too-high profit margins or from increased labor
costs that outrun growth in productivity, the final result is seriously
damaging to the nation.
We must fight inflation as we would a fire that imperils our home. Only by
so doing can we prevent it from destroying our salaries, savings, pensions
and insurance, and from gnawing away the very roots of a free, healthy
economy and the nation's security.
One major method by which the Federal government can counter inflation and
rising prices is to insure that its expenditures are below its revenues.
The debt with which we are now confronted is about 290 billion dollars.
With interest charges alone now costing taxpayers about 9 1/2 billions, it
is clear that this debt growth must stop. You will be glad to know that
despite the unsettling influences of the recent steel strike, we estimate
that our accounts will show, on June 30, this year, a favorable balance of
approximately $200 million.
I shall present to the Congress for 1961 a balanced budget. In the area of
defense, expenditures continue at the record peace-time levels of the last
several years. With a single exception, expenditures in every major
category of Health, Education and Welfare will be equal or greater than
last year. In Space expenditures the amounts are practically doubled. But
the over-all guiding goal of this budget is national need-not response to
specific group, local or political insistence.
Expenditure increases, other than those I have indicated, are largely
accounted for by the increased cost of legislation previously enacted.[1]
[Footnote 1: At this point the President interpolated the two paragraphs
shown in brackets.]
[I repeat, this budget will be a balanced one. Expenditures will be 79
billion 8 hundred million. The amount of income over outgo, described
in the budget as a Surplus, to be applied against our national debt, is
4 billion 2 hundred million. Personally, I do not feel that any amount can
be properly called a "Surplus" as long as the nation is in debt. I prefer
to think of such an item as "reduction on our children's inherited
mortgage." Once we have established such payments as normal practice, we
can profitably make improvements in our tax structure and thereby truly
reduce the heavy burdens of taxation.
[In any event, this one reduction will save taxpayers, each year,
approximately 2 hundred million dollars in interest costs.]
This budget will help ease pressures in our credit and capital markets. It
will enhance the confidence of people all over the world in the strength of
our economy and our currency and in our individual and collective ability
to be fiscally responsible.
In the management of the huge public debt the Treasury is unfortunately not
free of artificial barriers. Its ability to deal with the difficult
problems in this field has been weakened greatly by the unwillingness of
the Congress to remove archaic restrictions. The need for a freer hand in
debt management is even more urgent today because the costs of the
undesirable financing practices which the Treasury has been forced into are
mounting. Removal of this roadblock has high priority in my legislative
recommendations.
Still another issue relates to civil rights.
In all our hopes and plans for a better world we all recognize that
provincial and racial prejudices must be combatted. In the long perspective
of history, the right to vote has been one of the strongest pillars of a
free society. Our first duty is to protect this right against all
encroachment. In spite of constitutional guarantees, and notwithstanding
much progress of recent years, bias still deprives some persons in this
country of equal protection of the laws.
Early in your last session I recommended legislation which would help
eliminate several practices discriminating against the basic rights of
Americans. The Civil Rights Commission has developed additional
constructive recommendations. I hope that these will be among the matters
to be seriously considered in the current session. I trust that Congress
will thus signal to the world that our Government is striving for equality
under law for all our people.
Each year and in many ways our nation continues to undergo profound change
and growth.
In the past 18 months we have hailed the entry of two more States of the
Union--Alaska and Hawaii. We salute these two western stars proudly.
Our vigorous expansion, which we all welcome as a sign of health and
vitality, is many-sided. We are, for example, witnessing explosive growth
in metropolitan areas.
By 1975 the metropolitan areas of the United States will occupy twice the
territory they do today. The roster of urban problems with which they must
cope is staggering. They involve water supply, cleaning the air, adjusting
local tax systems, providing for essential educational, cultural, and
social services, and destroying those conditions which breed delinquency
and crime.
In meeting these, we must, if we value our historic freedoms, keep within
the traditional framework of our Federal system with powers divided between
the national and state governments. The uniqueness of this system may
confound the casual observer, but it has worked effectively for nearly 200
years.
I do not doubt that our urban and other perplexing problems can be solved
in the traditional American method. In doing so we must realize that
nothing is really solved and ruinous tendencies are set in motion by
yielding to the deceptive bait of the "easy" Federal tax dollar.
Our educational system provides a ready example. All recognize the vital
necessity of having modern school plants, well-qualified and adequately
compensated teachers, and of using the best possible teaching techniques
and curricula.
We cannot be complacent about educating our youth.
But the route to better trained minds is not through the swift
administration of a Federal hypodermic or sustained financial transfusion.
The educational process, essentially a local and personal responsibility,
cannot be made to leap ahead by crash, centralized governmental action.
The Administration has proposed a carefully reasoned program for helping
eliminate current deficiencies. It is designed to stimulate classroom
construction, not by substitution of Federal dollars for state and local
funds, but by incentives to extend and encourage state and local efforts.
This approach rejects the notion of Federal domination or control. It is
workable, and should appeal to every American interested in advancement of
our educational system in the traditional American way. I urge the Congress
to take action upon it.
There is one other subject concerning which I renew a recommendation I made
in my State of the Union Message last January. I then advised the Congress
of my purpose to intensify our efforts to replace force with a rule of law
among nations. From many discussions abroad, I am convinced that purpose is
widely and deeply shared by other peoples and nations of the world.
In the same Message I stated that our efforts would include a reexamination
of our own relation to the International Court of Justice. The Court was
established by the United Nations to decide international legal disputes
between nations. In 1946 we accepted the Court's jurisdiction, but subject
to a reservation of the right to determine unilaterally whether a matter
lies essentially within domestic jurisdiction. There is pending before the
Senate, a Resolution which would repeal our present self-judging
reservation. I support that Resolution and urge its prompt passage. If this
is done, I intend to urge similar acceptance of the Court's jurisdiction by
every member of the United Nations.
Here perhaps it is not amiss for me to say to the Members of the Congress,
in this my final year of office, a word about the institutions we
respectively represent and the meaning which the relationships between our
two branches has for the days ahead.
I am not unique as a President in having worked with a Congress controlled
by the opposition party--except that no other President ever did it for
quite so long! Yet in both personal and official relationships we have
weathered the storms of the past five years. For this I am grateful.
My deep concern in the next twelve months, before my successor takes
office, is with our joint Congressional-Executive duty to our own and to
other nations. Acting upon the beliefs I have expressed here today, I shall
devote my full energies to the tasks at hand, whether these involve travel
for promoting greater world understanding, negotiations to reduce
international discord, or constant discussions and communications with the
Congress and the American people on issues both domestic and foreign.
In pursuit of these objectives, I look forward to, and shall dedicate
myself to, a close and constructive association with the Congress.
Every minute spent in irrelevant interbranch wrangling is precious time
taken from the intelligent initiation and adoption of coherent policies for
our national survival and progress.
We seek a common goal--brighter opportunity for our own citizens and a
world peace with justice for all.
Before us and our friends is the challenge of an ideology which, for more
than four decades, has trumpeted abroad its purpose of gaining ultimate
victory over all forms of government at variance with its own.
We realize that however much we repudiate the tenets of imperialistic
Communism, it represents a gigantic enterprise grimly pursued by leaders
who compel its subjects to subordinate their freedom of action and spirit
and personal desires for some hoped-for advantage in the future.
The Communists can present an array of material accomplishments over the
past fifteen years that lends a false persuasiveness to many of their
glittering promises to the uncommitted peoples.
The competition they provide is formidable.
But in our scale of values we place freedom first--our whole national
existence and development have been geared to that basic concept and are
responsible for the position of free world leadership to which we have
succeeded. It is the highest prize that any nation can possess; it is one
that Communism can never offer. And America's record of material
accomplishment in freedom is written not only in the unparalleled
prosperity of our own nation, but in the many billions we have devoted to
the reconstruction of Free World economics wrecked by World War II and in
the effective help of many more billions we have given in saving the
independence of many others threatened by outside domination. Assuredly we
have the capacity for handling the problems in the new era of the world's
history we are now entering.
But we must use that capacity intelligently and tirelessly, regardless of
personal sacrifice.
The fissure that divides our political planet is deep and wide.
We live, moreover, in a sea of semantic disorder in which old labels no
longer faithfully describe.