 Well, you're an orderly group. Good afternoon and welcome to the White House. It's an honor to share this time with you and to be able to speak through you to the millions of people whom you and your news organizations serve so well. And if you'll forgive me during lunch, I heard one overheard one or two references to my age. That's And it's true as of last week. I've been around for three quarters of a century and You've already known and many of you've quoted the fact that I said that's only 24 Celsius but I Have another description of it Also that if I'm ever in need of any transplants, I got parts. They don't make any more but age represents a certain fullness of human experience and brings its own advantages in the office I hold it helps to put into perspective Not just the issues of the day, but the March of the decades When we first came to Washington in 1981 Debate had been conditioned with a long liberal experiment that began in the 1930s The New Deal the great society the so-called war on poverty which we lost It had become a working assumption in this town that nothing of lasting value could be achieved Without a further expansion of government a further subsuming of the private lives of individuals and families into the vast programs of the Social and economic planners. I have often said that a government program once launched is the nearest thing to eternal life We'll ever see on this earth but I Had happened to have been around too long to become enthusiastic about government growth Of course, I remembered the government of the New Deal, but I remembered an earlier America as well in America an American which the essentially Private values of the individual the family and the community commanded the day Taxes during my formative years were low Indeed the 1920s saw dramatic tax cuts and Government regulation of the economy was slight As a result through much of that period the nation experienced buoyant good health and Through out most of the 20s the economy grew Astonishing technological progress took place including advances in the automobile radio and remarkable materials like plastics although the period is sometimes caricatured as a Time of cultural intolerance immigrants actually made tremendous advances in all walks of American life Joseph Kennedy son of an Irishman founded his family's fortune Sam Goldwyn a Jew from Eastern Europe started MGM and Incidentally all the stories about His mount of props are true But he was a great producer and organizer of course it would be undesirable to go back to that era Life then was simpler, but it was harder and yet one in the late 70s the liberal entertainment Her experiment I should say had last had won last won down When the ceaseless expansion of economic growth and weakness had ended our He wrote at our foreign policy. I believed it was time to return government to its few and legitimate duties Time to reassert private values and the importance of the family in our first term We cut taxes and we started to rebuild our defenses Today the economy has seen 38 months of growth and as freedom Movements in Nicaragua and elsewhere attest there is new hope for the cause of liberty around the world Now we must take the next steps Steps which I outlined in my state of the union address to end deficit spending We must meet the limits set forth in the Graham Rudman Hollings legislation As you know this legislation is being challenged in the courts But whatever the outcome we intend to go forward with our plan to bring the budget into balance by fiscal 1991 we must also give to the presidency a line item veto and pass a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution In defense we must remain strong Refusing to undo all the progress that we've made during the past five years And we must push forward with research and testing on the strategic defense initiative This initiative holds out perhaps the brightest hope of my lifetime the hope of making nuclear missiles obsolete a Pro-growth tax reform must be passed and in view of the plight of the poor especially the breakdown of the poor family We must engage in a thorough reform of our welfare system In our country today, there are neighborhoods where the American trade of self-reliance has been blotted out by government dependency There are city blocks where families of virtually no experience of fathers just of mothers Struggling alone in poverty to raise their children As I said in the state of the union address, we must reform welfare to provide real and lasting emancipation Because the success of welfare should be judged By how many of its recipients become independent of welfare In short in our agenda for the future It's our aim to apply to the challenges of the day the eternal values that have made our nation great Family self-reliance and individual freedom Together we can advance the cause of liberty and make America a land of unparalleled prosperity and dazzling technological progress There's a line in the movie back to the future that sort of sums it up where we're going. We don't need roads Thank you. No, I've got only a few minutes left But I can take a few questions and if you don't mind before your hands There's one someplace over there in the room that I'm going to call on there's a young man from McLearwater High School who had a date with me for an interview last July and then I don't know They started doing some cutting up over at Bethesda, and we had to cancel it. I think if Scott McQuig is here. We'll give him the first question We were wondering what your thoughts were when you were a teenager growing up in the 1920s What your thoughts were about the future and what advice you would give to young people today about the future They could possibly hold nuclear a war living in our space in a loss of natural resources What would your advice be to young people Well, my advice would be That you Stick to your dreams and determine that you're going to make them come true Yes, when I was growing up back in that period and I have to tell you I make no apology for our generation Very few generations in all history have presided over a transition And the generation of which I am a member has been one of those generations I can remember my first automobile ride up till then it was horse and buggy And I can remember when radio first came into being and things of this kind But from that within a single lifetime all the way to a man on the moon and the other things that we're doing out there It you will see things in your lifetime Greater than we've ever seen that we can't imagine But I don't think you will span quite a change That that we did No, when we were young and growing up In the 20s everything was going great. It was in the aftermath of World War one I was young enough to remember that war we remembered it and all in the horror of it And we believe the thing that must never be another such war that we'd fought the war to end wars So your dreams and your ambitions centered on where you wanted to go and what you wanted to do With your life then of course came that black October Friday 1929 and I was just entering college at the time and As I said here at our own table no one who didn't live through it can ever quite Imagine the experience of the Great Depression what it was like 25% of your workforce Unemployed and at that time there had never been any such things as unemployment insurance or welfare programs or anything The the nation was caught in an era where suddenly they had these great problems thrust upon them and had to do something almost of an emergency nature to take care of it, but we've come through that and come through another great war and I have to believe that the future Does look bright For our nation and for the world So keep your dreams. Don't give them up Market of energy has decided that a waste station or spent Would be very helpful for it's solid waste problem They picked our community as a location for it a citizen group of our committee I city government Well, we have a necessary problem And I know that you know everyone's going to say do it do it somebody else's backyard not not ours But I believe and I know that part of this is because in the beginning We didn't understand all the ramifications. So we did things carelessly not knowing we were being careless that resulted in ultimate tragedy Those who had to do with the beginning of the x-ray later died of The effects of that they did not know Things that were being done to them, but I would think today. We know we have this problem We know we have a technology that we've never had before and I think that we can guarantee That every precaution will be taken so that this will not become a hazard to anyone and we have to recognize that This must be disposed of and at the same time that I think our high technology goes forward that we will probably develop ways in which we Can do better than just throwing it away in a waste pile But I would have to say that we've got to have the confidence someplace along the line that we know enough now that we're not going to Make this hazardous threat to any section of the country, but some places are the ones that we're going to have to pick Because Where We're not going to let that kind of a setback or cutback come to the Coast Guard remember that part of the budget that we're presenting is based on not only Cutting of costs where we can but also in some additional revenue by way of not taxes But by way of things that we believe where there should be fees Rather than the taxpayers bearing a certain thing the beneficiaries of certain services fees and I can assure you we have no intention of gutting the Coast Guard and I have to tell you that There is among our my military aides now as a Coast Guard commander and She is not only the first member of the Coast Guard that's ever been a presidential military aid She's also the first woman that has ever been a military aid And the other day I was teasing her a little bit about something to do with the Navy and my having comes from a meeting with an admiral And I loved her answer She said in the Coast Guard we consider we're the unit around which the Navy gathers in times of emergency We're not gonna we're not gonna do that and a lot of this that you're hearing about the budget people are saying that We haven't even read the budget yet I think any of us would be concerned the other hand All we can do and I'm and I'm not going to really comment and detail on the evidence of that because we do have our observers who are coming back Senator Lugar and His aides and I will be meeting with them They should be getting in some time tonight as soon as I can for whatever evidence they have but I think that what we have to watch for is that In spite of all these charges there are there is at the same time the evidence of a two strong two-party system now in the islands and We certainly are accustomed to that We want to help in any way we can that once the election is over That the results of the election then go forward and that the two parties can come together To make sure the government works and that we can retain the historic relationship that we've had with the Philippine People and the Philippine Islands, but actually the election that is for the people of the Filipino Philippines to decide and not for us to interfere Some of the people Soviet Union Well, I think that we I don't I'm not technological gifted in that way. I haven't even been able to learn to use a pocket calculator yet, but I Do know that there are some things in high technology that we must guard and that we can cannot allow To be revealed to those who could where they would have a military Use and could be put to work that way and as long as we're still trying to Reduce arms in the world and when we get to the point that if we can get to it where we have an agreement and we begin to eliminate arms and know that this Might be some evidence that we can continue to exist in the world peacefully then we might be able to change our attitude but right now There is we've seen the results of some thievery of our high-tech secrets. I I think we have to use restraint and How available we make them? In 1980 you said in campaigning for the White House that there were not any Easy answers that there were simple ones after five years in the White House You feel the same way or has serving in the White House changed your view at all No, there there are there are simple answers to a great many things that we've made unnecessarily complicated But they're they're not easy as our effort to get this present budget Indicates right now with this budget and all the abuse that it's receiving and having signed it And I know how thick it is. I have to believe that a lot of the people that are criticizing it haven't read it But here is a budget that is almost a trillion dollars and The total cut of that budget that we're asking for is about two and three-quarter percent now don't tell me that there isn't any business or Household budget or anything else that can't find two and three-quarters percent fat That can be done away with but I do believe that For example, we've complicated the whole field of social reforms for the needy complicated it by a variety of programs Tried to keep too much management in the hands of Washington over this whole vast diversified country instead of giving much more ability to determine how the programs run at the local and state level and The result is that we've created problems when I made the crack in my remarks that poverty lost or poverty won in in our programs We've the whole system seems to have resulted now in people into the third and fourth generation of being on welfare and To me it is a simple answer To say let's evolve a welfare plan that is aimed at salvaging people and making it Unnecessary for them to be on welfare and then be able to boast at the end of each year how successful the program had been by how many fewer people Had to be there and I think of that as a as a simple answer Any one of us if we had a neighbor and had fallen in hard times or something. Yes, we'd help them We'd probably help with food and whatever was necessary But at the same time our main effort would be directed at how can we get them back on their feet? So we don't have to do continue doing this and I think that most of the people on welfare Want just that they would like nothing better than to be independent and out on their own but Again having created the programs and a gigantic series of bureaucracies to run them. I have a terrible feeling that sometimes the prime Order of the bureaucracy is preserve the bureaucracy perhaps by that statement which nobody else in American life has come along with in 50 years well, I Am quite sure that I don't know about you but knowing about the lighthouse press corps. I'm quite sure nobody'd ever let me forget it so But yes, if we can come up with a system That does that if we can come up with a system. We tried an experiment when I was governor in, California I know this is my last go around and I know you're getting impatient here and they've but We came up with and finally all we could get was permission from Washington for an experiment and that in only part of our state They wouldn't let us do it in the two big cities San Francisco and Los Angeles But we could do it 35 of our counties and it was a program simply To let able-bodied or make able-bodied welfare recipients work in return for their welfare grant I didn't cost an extra penny We then sent to these 35 counties into the communities there in a Request and we said submit to us a list of the things that you would be doing if you had the money and the manpower No boondoggles So we got back from each one of them lists of things that sounded pretty sensible that would be nice if somebody could do this for the the government or the the community and We okayed these and said you're going to have the money's already there and welfare and you're going to have the manpower and Then we ordered these welfare recipients that in each county to report for work at these These various projects, but they so we wouldn't conflict with minimum wage They only had to work 24 or 20 hours a week not 40 But the other 20 hours had to be spent in either looking for private employment or taking job training and improvement Then we assigned some people from our labor department gave them each a list of these people and they were to watch them And what they were doing and see how fast they could move them out of those jobs Into private enterprise jobs and in the midst of the 1973 74 recession We put 76,000 welfare recipients into private enterprise jobs through that program didn't cost an extra penny to anyone and The other gain that we made was we did find that in any great government program you know as Milton Friedman the economist said if you start paying people to be poor you're going to have a lot of poor people and We found that thousands of people who had gotten the order to report for work never showed up And we stopped their welfare checks and we never had a single complaint And the only thing I can conclude is that Some people were collecting under more than one name and when they had to show up in person They couldn't do it and they didn't dare complain then when we cut off their checks So the savings was double now I thought that was a kind of a simple solution and today as a result We've passed the word from Washington and any number of states are doing the same thing now within their states and in fact Governor Dutkakis Massachusetts was explaining how this worked in his state just the other day on television So I know I I think maybe from the tone of your voice I Feel the same way I was kind of sorry when I saw California do that it was talked about when I was there and as governor and Call me a prude if you want to but I just think that there's something a little bit undignified and appealing to People's desire to gamble of a state to raise its revenues and it ought to be able to raise them the legitimate way I I just I have to tell you I'm I don't I don't exactly like the idea of government engaging in in gambling Well, I have to leave I'm sorry. I know there were a lot more hands and I Oh Lord, I am really there's yours. It's going to be a short one Let me look into that. I never thought of it because you're absolutely right that the gypsies Were as persecuted as any people were by the Nazis in in World War two. They were Almost totally victims of the Holocaust. Let me look into that. I will I have to leave now. I'm sorry