I shall present to the Congress for 1961 a balanced budget.  In the area of defense, expenditures continue at the record peace-time levels of the last several years.  With a single exception, expenditures in every major category of Health, Education and Welfare will be equal or greater than last year.  In Space expenditures the amounts are practically doubled.  But the over-all guiding goal of this budget is national need-not response to specific group, local or political insistence.

Expenditure increases, other than those I have indicated, are largely accounted for by the increased cost of legislation previously enacted.[1]

[Footnote 1:  At this point the President interpolated the two paragraphs shown in brackets.]

[I repeat, this budget will be a balanced one.  Expenditures will be 79 billion 8 hundred million.  The amount of income over outgo, described in the budget as a Surplus, to be applied against our national debt, is 4 billion 2 hundred million.  Personally, I do not feel that any amount can be properly called a “Surplus” as long as the nation is in debt.  I prefer to think of such an item as “reduction on our children’s inherited mortgage.”  Once we have established such payments as normal practice, we can profitably make improvements in our tax structure and thereby truly reduce the heavy burdens of taxation.

[In any event, this one reduction will save taxpayers, each year, approximately 2 hundred million dollars in interest costs.]

This budget will help ease pressures in our credit and capital markets.  It will enhance the confidence of people all over the world in the strength of our economy and our currency and in our individual and collective ability to be fiscally responsible.

In the management of the huge public debt the Treasury is unfortunately not free of artificial barriers.  Its ability to deal with the difficult problems in this field has been weakened greatly by the unwillingness of the Congress to remove archaic restrictions.  The need for a freer hand in debt management is even more urgent today because the costs of the undesirable financing practices which the Treasury has been forced into are mounting.  Removal of this roadblock has high priority in my legislative recommendations.

Still another issue relates to civil rights.

In all our hopes and plans for a better world we all recognize that provincial and racial prejudices must be combatted.  In the long perspective of history, the right to vote has been one of the strongest pillars of a free society.  Our first duty is to protect this right against all encroachment.  In spite of constitutional guarantees, and notwithstanding much progress of recent years, bias still deprives some persons in this country of equal protection of the laws.

Early in your last session I recommended legislation which would help eliminate several practices discriminating against the basic rights of Americans.  The Civil Rights Commission has developed additional constructive recommendations.  I hope that these will be among the matters to be seriously considered in the current session.  I trust that Congress will thus signal to the world that our Government is striving for equality under law for all our people.