 President Ronald Reagan. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. No, come on, please. You did that once already. Thank you. Mayor Pete Wilson, the longtime friends and the newcomers to that circle here tonight and all of you ladies and gentlemen I am very proud and very delighted to be here on this particular occasion I we were just talking over here I was saying I'm for the one real Westerner up here at the head table he sure is doodied up you know I was very worried and we were just we were just talking about it we were worried what did they really mean that casual Western so you can imagine my relief when I met Pete out there at the airport and saw it yep they did because I had a picture of myself standing up here this way in front of a bunch of people dressed like the lawyer from the East but I could only tell you after a year and a half in Washington somebody says casual Western to me that's what they're gonna get I'm sure that you know how important this election is or you wouldn't be here tonight the Senate has been called the most exclusive club in the world the hundred men and women there represent the 50 states and you know sometimes we forget or sometimes we're young enough that we just didn't know or weren't aware that that's exactly what the senators do represent but not too many years ago it was changed to popular election and that senators were actually chosen by state governments they are there to represent the interests in this Federation of sovereign states of their particular sovereign state as well as the national interests of the Federation in about 10 weeks Californians are going to choose between or which of two mass men is best able to represent the state one of them has held the highest elective office in this state that of governor he took office eight years ago in the middle of the fiscal year with a $500 million surplus in the state cash box the previous to that the state of California had returned the last surplus before that 500 million we couldn't return it because the administration had to leave in the middle of the fiscal year but the one previous to that we turned back 850 million dollars in the form of a rebate and I have often thought nothing ever delineated so clearly the difference between the two parties as the statement of a senator in the opposing party who stormed into my office one day when we were given back that 850 million and said he considered that giving that money back was a misuse of public funds well the new governor didn't give back the 500 million and now he seeks to move on to greener fields leaving the state a few billion dollars in the hole which is against the constitution of the state of California and it's a little frightening when you stop to think that if he were in Washington he wouldn't be dealing in millions he'd be dealing in billions now as an alternative we can choose a man who was a part of the California state legislature when California was climbing out of that fiscal swamp turning back to the people surpluses every time we got one as read rebates to the people he then became mayor of one of our great cities and that city is recognized nationwide as one of the best run communities in the United States will we make our choice based on campaign slogans or spot ads or will we the people of California do as Al Smith admonished once and look at the record is there any relationship between what the governor says he will do and what the governor has done I understand though that a senator from Massachusetts is going to come out here and campaign in his behalf that same senator from Massachusetts came out and campaigned for a relative of the president governor 16 years ago when I was running and he made a great point up and down the state that the people should watch out because I had never held public office before well you know he'd never held public office before he became a senator as a matter of fact he'd never held a job but let me try and tell you how important it is that we hold the slim lead that we have that slim majority in the United States Senate it's the first time that we have had a majority in one of the houses of Congress in decades and without that we couldn't achieve what has been achieved in the last year and a half and what has been achieved well I think one of the most historic changes in government a 180 degree turn from the historic pattern over the last decades of tax and tax and spend and spend and don't worry about the public debt we owe it to ourselves he when we took office it was at the end of two years of double-digit inflation 12.4 percent was the rate when we arrived the interest rate 21 and a half percent prime rate the rate of increase in government spending had touched 18 percent and two million workers in that last campaign year of 1980 had lost their jobs we were not quite to the middle of the fiscal year when we took office so the 81 budget was in place and there wasn't much we could do about that but we had to proceed immediately with the fiscal budget for 82 which would go into effect on October of 1981 that budget as you know under the pattern Washington budgets are proposed for a few years in advance the unemployment kept on increasing the recession of 1980 became the recession of 1981 yes the unemployment has increased but I remember campaigning in which I stood in communities and areas in which the unemployment rate at that time had reached as high as 20 percent and I called it a depression and I was immediately corrected by the incumbent who said it was a recession I don't know whether you recall but I told him that a deep recession was when your neighbor lost his job a depression was when you'd lost yours and relief would be when he lost his but the economic we proposed an economic recovery program almost the instant that we were there and it was a long and hard struggle if you remember and then just about this time of year a year ago we passed and I signed here in California our economic recovery program which reduced proposed government spending over the next three years by a hundred and thirty billion dollars and contained also the greatest tax cut single tax cut in the history of the United States now the program didn't go into effect until October of last year but by September the critics were already calling it a failure and hadn't started yet so they make it easier to identify they renamed it Reaganomics I don't think they were trying to honor me with that but if they were I just want them to know that I had already received a distinguished honor that they could in no way equal in the tiny village of ballet pourine in County Tipperary in Ireland where my great-grandfather left from to come to America they have named the pub after me see if you're for if you're for free enterprise the word gets around but our program started last October it continues to be phased in over a three-year period the second part of that the second phase was the tax cut that you all received on the 1st of July some failure 21 and a half percent interest rate is now 13 and a half 12 point the 12.4 percent inflation rate has been running at less than 6% for the last six months and after a decade of decline after a time when incomes went up some hundred and twenty odd percent but the actual real earnings of the American people kept going down and the standard of living kept going down personal income for July is that single month up 1% and if you wanted to annualize that it's gonna keep on doing that every month that's a 12 percent increase disposable disposable personal income after payment of income tax went up 2.1% in July the savings rate and in this country of ours for the last several years personal savings the very essential to having a capital pool for investment that industry can borrow from that savings has been less than that of our counterparts in the other industrial nations in the world but in June before the tax cut it had gone up to 7.3% it had been 6.9% in May it has been steadily down for the months and a long time before as I've said I'm interested to see what it'll be you don't get the figures as early on that one so we'll wait a few weeks before we know what it is for July housing starts were up 34% in July the permits for new housing were up 174,000 over June 90-day Treasury notes upon which we were paying 15.5% interest the government was paying just a couple of weeks ago are now down to less than 8% fraud and waste and we have a task force that's been in that and reporting to me every six months and the last report on their six months they had saved 5.8 billion dollars for us thousands of audits thousands of indictments and hundreds and hundreds of convictions and and last year's tax cut which as I say was to be phased in over a three-year period is still the largest tax cut in history in spite of what happened last week because over the three years the coming three years even with the bill that has just been passed the American people will get a tax cut in these three years of 335 billion dollars and accompanying that will be spending outlay reductions of 280 billion dollars there's one other thing that I want to mention federalism there is a program that we have been working with governors well some governors we've been working with mayors we've been working with city council members county officials state legislatures to work out a return to the 10th amendment to give back to the states the cities and the counties of this country the programs the powers the authority that were unjustly seized by the federal government in denial of the 10th amendment the constitution to put government as much as possible those functions that are proper back and those levels of government that are closest to the people now who would you like to have in California helping administer that switch back to that kind of federalism someone whose first great battle of history making proportions was against the med fly or someone who has served in a state legislature for years someone who is now served as a mayor of one of our major cities for years who knows the local problems and knows what the federal government should do if we're to have the kind of honest government efficient government that we should have for all of us throughout the nation the if ever there was a watchword that was appropriate it is in this election and that is Pete Wilson's opponent with regard to him that we should say pay attention to what he does not what he says I remember let me let me just give you a little example it wasn't too long ago that he stepped up to the 155 millimeter microphones and fired a salvo at Jim Watt and it was all about he single-handedly the governor of California was going to protect the coastline of California from the threat of oil well there are 520 federal or united states supervised oil wells off the coast of California outside the three-mile limit there are 3,000 state supervised and regulated oil wells inside the three-mile limit off the state of California and this summer alone the present governor of California has approved drilling permits for 20 more wells on the very edge of the Santa Barbara sanctuary what is the sanctuary well when we were in Sacramento as Pete knows we laid out some of the great scenic areas of California and drew lines out to the three-mile limit and said no matter what there will be no drilling inside these beautiful scenic areas and the Republican administration in Washington continued the line on out beyond the three-mile limit and said we will observe your sanctuaries but they're going to be 20 more they may not be in the sanctuary but you can throw a rock from any one of them into the sanctuary from where they're going to be drilled so as I say he talked a great war he hasn't exactly been fighting that war he this I can't tell you and you know I'm I'm a little at odds here this is the first time I've ever been a before dinner speaker but none of what we have achieved nothing nothing of what we have accomplished could have been done if we did not for one of this rare moments in history have that majority in the United States Senate I'd like to have a majority in the other house but in off-year elections history says that you don't usually gain in that off-year election anyway we're going to try very hard to gain but I can tell you this the senator who's coming out to campaign for Pete's opponent is a member of a very exclusive little group of a half a dozen senators who have set an all-time record in the history of the Senate for spending backed more spending than any other senators that have ever been there we know some of the things advocated by Pete's opponent and what he would stand for I haven't touched on another area but one of which I'm very proud when we took office the supposed voluntary military was a failure people were talking that we could not exist or having good defense without the draft now even though we have a registration and I am convinced that that is worth keeping I'm opposed to a peacetime draft and I'm even more so now because we don't need it we we found that half our airplanes couldn't fly in any given day for lack of spare parts we found that on any given day there were navy vessels that couldn't leave port either because they didn't have enough crew or they didn't have enough parts and we set out to do something about that now we've been accused of spending too much on military and cutting social reform programs too much and I know which side Pete's opponent would come down on on that and I know where Pete would come down from his experience as a legislation I think it should be recognized that when John F. Kennedy was president only 27 percent of his budget went for the social reforms to help the needy and the helpless in this country and 46 percent went for defense well in our budget for 1983 about 53 percent of our budget is going for the needy and the helpless and only 29 percent is going for defense and yet and he said that he'd been up on the East German border visiting the second armored cavalry regiment and he told me how great they looked and then he said that one of these fellas a 19 year old trooper followed him over to his helicopter and asked him if he could get a message to me and being an ambassador he allowed us how he could and the kids said well will you tell the president that we're proud to be here and we ain't scared a nothing I just thought you'd like to know about the attitude of those who are guarding our shores because they are the real freedom fighters it is by doing their job and doing it right that they can be a deterrent to war and our goal is peace and you've never gone into a war because you were too strong you go into them when the other fella thinks you aren't strong and we're going to convince them so you have a really a clear-cut choice here the more strength we have in the Senate the more we can gain allies over there in the in the house you send Pete Wilson San Diego find a way to get along without him you send Pete Wilson to Washington and just you can't send him don't send anybody and as I say I know I'm preaching to the choir because you wouldn't be here if you didn't feel that way but God bless you all and we're going to keep it up in Washington and we're going to keep the country turned around on this new course until we have reduced the percentage of gross national product that is being taken by the government and being spent by the government until once again government is back spending within its means and then my dream is the day we make the first payment I don't care what size it is on the national debt to prove to our kids that we're not going to dump it all on them just say Vicki keep keep if you will in your hearts I said I think the last time I was out here and maybe to many of you I don't know all the national anthems in the world but I do know this I don't know of any other that ends with a question does that star-spangled banner yet wave or the land of the free and the home of the brave and all we have to determine is you bet we've got the answer to that question thank you very much Mr. President we know that we have to excuse you let me express my great personal gratitude that I'll take this Western Belt home with you and just so that you won't forget please pay attention to the buckle it happens to be a brass med fly