 Mr. President, Mr. President, if you'd want you to talk to us, come talk to us now. Jim! How come you lost? How come you lost? Defenders won. Can you wait in the Senate, sir? Stick, make it a little stick. I think they then went on for their post-graduate. Yes, one of disappointment. Were you surprised? Were you surprised about it? What? Were you surprised about it? Well, I can't say it was totally surprised. No, I knew it was an uphill fight. What happened, Mr. President? Why do you think you didn't have the votes? Well, because maybe there are more people in the Congress that want to spend and want to save. How come? I'm hopeful with regard to the Senate tomorrow, but however it goes, I'm going to keep on doing what I said I would do to the people. And that is, I am going to veto any time there's an attempt to bust the budget. And I promise to curb spending and to maintain the national defense. I'm going to keep on trying. Mr. President, you had a delegation of people from the administration on the Hill yesterday trying to work out a compromise where you would lower the amount you were willing to accept. How much farther are you prepared to go to get an appropriation bill? Well, I think that's anything to talk about now. Although, yes, there were, obviously there were things in that bill I vetoed that I wanted. My own Caribbean initiative was in there. I dream of a day when maybe Washington gets smart enough to give a president the right of a line item veto. Mr. President, how serious a setback is this? This is one appropriations bill at the end of another budget year. Last year you were very frustrated by a budget process. How bad a setback is this one? Well, in the field of domestic spending, it busts the budget by about a billion dollars. You know, as some Democrats in the past have said, a billion a year and a billion there, it adds up. Mr. President, how much ground are you prepared to give, though, in order to get a supplemental bill? Well, I want the Caribbean initiative. They can put that in. What about for the elderly jobs, for the elderly and student loans? This one slipped by me. I have to believe in that program. And I gave them word that I would support that. And the President of the United States. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you, Dick Richards, Mrs. Orrin Hatch, Congressman Jim Hanson and Dan Marriott, and our State Chairman of the Republican Party, Chuck Akelo. It's good to be in Huppert. And it's good that all of you would come out here, particularly under these circumstances, for this meeting. You know, this is almost as big a crowd as an Osmond family reunion. Now, just out in back here before I came up, I was made a member of the Weber County Sheriff's Mounted Posse. I'm greatly honored. I'm also relieved. Because when they rode up, I thought maybe I would have done something wrong and it was going to get put in the slammer. I thought Tip O'Neill might have arranged to take me out of circulation for a while. But now, with this badge that they gave me, maybe I could stop some of the highway robbery that's going on in Washington. You know, it's always a pleasure to come here to your estate, but this morning I had an extra pleasure. You know that I've talked for a long time about Americans doing for themselves, about the private initiative, about citizens' groups doing so many things that government thinks only it can do. And I have just toured a cannery, part of the program of the Latter-day Saints. They have for meeting the needs of people who must depend on the rest of us in times, well, when times they need, they have to have help. And here were people working in this cannery, doing everything that has to be done, peeling of the tomatoes and the sorting for those for juice and those for canning and everything else, and they're all volunteers from the church. Tip is here. They, doing all of that, all of the things that it can, all of the produce is raised again by the volunteers from the church and picked by the volunteers from the church and then brought in and the church distributes this to people who truly have a need for it. No costly bureaucratic overhead and those who make this program possible work at the same time to help the needy among you become self-supporting while they care for them until that can take place. It's an idea that once characterized our nation. It's an idea that should be reborn nationwide. It holds the key to renewal of America in the years ahead. Now, I know that you're delighted that we have Mrs. Hatch with us today. Maybe you're wondering where the senator is. Well, we flew out here together yesterday afternoon and he was to be here and would be speaking to you now. But last evening, word came that the senator, the Senate might be short of votes to sustain the veto that I had made of a spending bill and a bill that I felt could begin to set a pattern for future budget busting. And without any hesitation, Oren climbed on a plane and went back to Washington where he was needed, so your senators are there where they voted. I regret to tell you that his trip proved fruitless. It would have required 31 votes to block the override of the veto. We got just 30 votes, so the veto was overridden. But I want to tell you something, they better practice at that because they're going to get a chance to do that every time they send an appropriation down that is over the budget. I'm going to veto it again. One of the reasons I came here today, I'm sure you know how essential it is for all that we're trying to do in Washington. And to tell you what Oren is doing, your senator and why you should send him back there. His proposal for a constitutional amendment to balance the budget is one of the most important bills to pass the Senate this year and I defy anyone to tell me why it doesn't make common sense that the federal government should start restricting its spending to be within the limits of its revenues. Traditionally, the Labor and Human Resources Committee is the big spending operation in Washington. Well, with Oren Hatch as chairman, that committee now has been responsible for 25% of the budget cuts that we got last year. In addition to that, he serves on the budget and judiciary committees and is a member of the select committee on small business. He was floor leader of the balanced budget amendment when it passed the Senate. I think he deserves a second term. Working closely with Jake Garn, working together as they do, no state has a better representation than Utah in the United States Senate. Now we've started to turn America to a different course. Do you want to continue on the course of reducing the size and cost and power of the government or do you want to go back to the course we've been on for the last 30 years of tax and spend that led us into the present economic trouble? I think I know your answer. 20 months ago, spending was out of control. It was increasing at a rate of 17% a year. We've cut that rate in half in these 20 months. Inflation had been double-digit back-to-back two years in a row. It was 12.4% 20 months ago. It's now 5.4% for so far this year since January. Do you know what that would mean to a family, say with an income of $15,000, a family of four? They have $1,000 more purchasing power, just from the reduction of inflation than they would have had if inflation had stayed at 12.4. Interest rates had reached the highest level in 100 years. The prime rate was 21.5%. This more than anything else brought on the present recession. The prime rate is now 13.5%. In Kansas yesterday, we were informed that one of the top half-dozen federal savings and loans organizations in the country, the capital federal savings and loan there, had just brought down its own interest rates to 12.75% for people who wanted to borrow from mortgages and investments, and this is well below the going rate. In Kentucky, 25 banks got together and made loans available at well below the ongoing rate or the present rate of interest for people who wanted to buy automobiles. 90-day treasury notes a few weeks ago were 15.5% interest that we were paying in those notes today. It is less than 8%. And with your votes, you helped bring that about. Don't stop now. In the House of Representatives, where we're still a minority, John Hansen and Dan Marriott have been instrumental in reducing this burden of government. They played a major role in getting our economic recovery program through the House last year. In all the previous recessions since World War II, the Democrat leadership has resorted to the quick fix, the artificial stimulants of government spending. And we've had only one balanced budget in 22 years. Our debt is more than a trillion dollars. And after each quick fix, it seemed that there would be a recovery, but in about two years there would be another recession, and it would be deeper and worse than before, with more unemployment and a higher inflation rate. Unemployment didn't just come upon us in this recession. Unemployment has actually been building in America for 15 years. It's averaged 7% or better for more than since 1976. I campaigned in 1980 in cities in this country where the unemployment rate was already 20%. In Detroit it was 18%. And I remember calling what we were seeing then a depression, and the then incumbent president corrected me publicly and said that there was a difference between a depression and a recession, and gave me one of the happier lines I had in the campaign because I replied that yes, I knew there was a difference. A recession was when your neighbor was unemployed, a depression was when you were unemployed, and recovery would come when he was unemployed. But the answer lies in a solid recovery that is based on reduced government spending, on a reduction of the percentage of the people's earnings that government is taking in taxes, and incentives to get the wheels of industry turning again. Now our opponents, when we launched that economic recovery program that these two congressmen helped so much with, as did Oran and Jake Garn, Oran Hatch and Jake Garn, our opponents said that the program was a failure, but they were a little ahead of themselves because the program didn't go into effect until last October, and they were saying this in July and August and September. Well the first phase went in in October, and already I've told you of the changes that have taken place in inflation and the interest rates and so forth. But there are others. Last month housing starts went up 34%. Four months in a row we've had the economic indicators that indicate whether you're coming out of a recession for four months in a row they've been going up and that hasn't happened for a long time. The real earnings of the people, discounting for inflation, the real earnings, are going up and have been going up now for the first time in a number of years. The rate of personal savings has gone up above 7%. We've been the lowest among the industrial savings in the ability of our people to save any of the money that they earn. What that means is billions of dollars over a period of time in the capital pool that can be called upon for investments so that when government has to borrow for the deficit that will still continue for a while, we won't be taking all of the money and making it impossible for business to expand and provide the jobs that we need. In spite of the recent tax reform, which was only an adjustment of the tax cut that was passed last year, you will be getting over the next three years $335 billion in additional tax cuts. This year, if it was averaged out, the average person has $400 more in tax savings because of that program than they had before last year. Even with this tax reform, that will go up to $788. And following that indexing is to come, which is going to make it impossible for government to profit from inflation by shoving people up into higher income tax brackets just because they get a cost of living pay raise. But the measure that we passed a few weeks ago, the project will cut the deficits over these same three years by $380 billion. We're canceling regulations that are unnecessary that have burdened the American people in business and industry with unwanted and unnecessary paperwork. So far, the task force that's doing that under George Bush has saved the people of this country 200 million man-hours of filling out government forms. So far, it has saved $6 billion. We have another task force that is working on fraud and waste. They have brought thousands of indictments. They have done thousands of audits. They have found thousands of people receiving government benefit checks who've been dead for seven years. They have saved so far in the last six months $5.8 billion. Brigham Young once said, the framers of the Constitution laid a foundation. And it was for after generations to rear a superstructure upon it. It was, he said, our progressive, graduate, and paying heed to the spiritual values that have always been the inner strength of America. Yes, Orrin Hatch, Jim Hanson, and Dan Marriott, Jake Garn, they all understand that. Orrin Hatch knows that it isn't someone in Washington that he represents. He's not beholden, as possibly his opponent is, to outside special interest groups or a labor hierarchy in the nation's capital far away. He is responsible to the workers and the ranchers and the people of this, his own state of Utah. And I can assure you, the people of Utah, that he has your best interest always in mind. There are other very important problems to be dealt with and I'll make it fast because it is beginning to get damp, isn't it? But these are things that perhaps don't have so much to do with the economy. They have to do with our role in the world in regard to peace. I just talked this morning by radio phone to the commander of our Marines. They are safely back on board the ship in the sixth fleet in the Mediterranean now after the great duty that they performed in Beirut. And I don't know how many of you noticed, but I was very proud. It was a multinational force. Other forces from other countries went ashore, as did ours, and that's fine. But ours was the only force that when it landed did not raise the American flag on foreign soil. It raised the flag of Lebanon, showing our intention that Lebanon must once again be an independent nation with its own government and in charge of its own affairs. But there are other matters that all of us up here must take up. The matter of prayer in schools, I don't think God should ever have been expelled. There is that balanced budget amendment that we must have. There is tuition tax credit for those parents who are sending their children perhaps to a church school or an independent school. At the same time, they pay the full burden for supporting the public school, and I think they should get some recognition of that fact and some relief for the fact that they are supporting two school systems. And there is another problem very close to my heart that more than a million unborn children every year are being denied the right to life. And I think it is time that we decide that unless and until someone can prove to us that the unborn are not truly living creatures then we morally should adopt the principle that they are until it can be proven otherwise. In their triumph yesterday and when the house overrode my veto, the leadership, Tip O'Neill and his cohorts went public with their statements that I was hard hearted and that they were standing in the way of my imposing on the poor and the needy and so forth. Well, what do they think that their inflation over these last 30 years has done to the poor? I know this, that our reduction of inflation has made a family at the poverty level have $400 more in purchasing power than they had before inflation went down. The best social reform program in the world is a job, and the best way to help the people of this country is to stop taking excessive percentages of their earnings away from them and to allow them not only to keep their earnings and to have a job to work at but to see that the dollar that they put in their savings is worth as much two or three years from now as it was when they put it in and not having 10 or 12 cents in value taken off every year by way of inflation. Well, these are some of the things we're trying to do and some of the things that I think so far we've been succeeding in doing, but let me make it plain. We couldn't do a single thing without your support and help. It is you, the people, and when they hear in Washington from you, the people, they heed what it is you want. Very simply, the policy of our administration is this government of ours was created to be a convenience for the people. Serving at the behest of the people, it was not supposed to be the master of the people, and we're going to get it back to being as convenient as we can and get rid of that master complex as quickly as we can. We owe that much to all of you for your having sent us there. God bless you and thank you very much. Thank you.