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President[ Lyndon B. Johnson

         Date[ January 8, 1964

Mr. Speaker, Mr. President, 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.

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 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; and as the session which helped to

build more homes, more schools, 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 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. II.

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.

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--from $10 billion to $4,900 million. 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 defenses, 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 million--compared to $98,400

million for the current year, a reduction of more than $500 million. It

will call for new obligational authority of $103,800 million--a reduction

of more than $4 billion below last year's request of $107,900 million.

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 for 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. III.

Unfortunately, many Americans live on the outskirts of hope--some because

of their poverty, and some because of theft color, and all too many because

of both. Our task is to help replace their despair with opportunity.

This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on

poverty in America. 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. One thousand

dollars invested in salvaging an 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 effective, 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 rolls 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 Negroes, 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 it. 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 2 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, 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 or 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.

Above 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. IV.

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, libraries,

hospitals, and nursing homes, from the training of more nurses and from the

improvement of urban renewal in 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. And every month of delay dilutes its benefits

in 1964 for consumption, for investment, and for employment.

For until the bill is signed, its investment 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 percent instead of 15 percent our

withholding rate.

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 3

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 levels in

history--but I would remind you that 4 million workers and 13 percent of

our industrial capacity are still idle today.

We need a tax cut now to keep this country moving. V.

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. But I am equally opposed to

the 45- 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

tripartite 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

higher rates. VI.

Let me make one principle of this administration abundantly clear: All of

these increased opportunities--in employment, in education, in 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 Viet Nam.

They died side by side in Korea. Surely they can work and eat and travel

side by side in their own country. VII.

We must also lift by legislation the bars of discrimination against those

who seek entry into our country, particularly those who have 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?"

VIII.

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 10 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 3 years of

steadily increasing both the quality and the quantity of our strategic, our

conventional, and our antiguerilla forces. In 1964 we will be better

prepared than ever before to defend the cause of freedom, whether it is

threatened by outright aggression or by the infiltration practiced by those

in Hanoi and Havana, who ship arms and men across international borders to

foment insurrection. And we must continue to use that strength as John

Kennedy used it in the Cuban crisis and for the test ban 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.

It is in this spirit that in this fiscal year we are cutting back our

production of enriched uranium by 25 percent. We are shutting down four

plutonium piles. We are closing many nonessential 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 pre-eminence 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.

Sixth, 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 gold 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 prey 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 partnerships, maintain

our alliances and make the United Nations a more effective instrument for

national independence and international order.

Tenth, 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 none.

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. IX.

My good friends and my fellow Americans: In these last 7 sorrowful weeks,

we have learned anew that nothing is so enduring as faith, 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 Mrs. 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.

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