President Lyndon B. Johnson's
Annual Message to the Congress on the State of the Union
January 8, 1964
[ As delivered in person before a joint session ]
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 their 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, wc 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.
Source: Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States:
Lyndon B. Johnson, 1963-64. Volume I, entry 91, pp. 112-118. Washington,
D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1965.
Last Updated
June 6, 2007
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