In discussing these great goals, I shall deal tonight only with matters on the domestic side of the Nation’s agenda.  I shall make a separate report to the Congress and the Nation next month on developments in foreign policy.

The first of these great goals is already before the Congress.

I urge that the unfinished business of the 91st Congress be made the first priority business of the 92d Congress.

Over the next 2 weeks, I will call upon Congress to take action on more than 35 pieces of proposed legislation on which action was not completed last year.

The most important is welfare reform.

The present welfare system has become a monstrous, consuming outrage—­an outrage against the community, against the taxpayer, and particularly against the children it is supposed to help.

We may honestly disagree, as we do, on what to do about it.  But we can all agree that we must meet the challenge, not by pouring more money into a bad program, but by abolishing the present welfare system and adopting a new one.

So let us place a floor under the income of every family with children in America—­and without those demeaning, soul-stifling affronts to human dignity that so blight the lives of welfare children today.  But let us also establish an effective work incentive and an effective work requirement.

Let us provide the means by which more can help themselves.  This shall be our goal.

Let us generously help those who are not able to help themselves.  But let us stop helping those who are able to help themselves but refuse to do so.

The second great goal is to achieve what Americans have not enjoyed since 1957—­full prosperity in peacetime.

The tide of inflation has turned.  The rise in the cost of living, which had been gathering dangerous momentum in the late sixties, was reduced last year.  Inflation will be further reduced this year.

But as we have moved from runaway inflation toward reasonable price stability and at the same time as we have been moving from a wartime economy to a peacetime economy, we have paid a price in increased unemployment.

We should take no comfort from the fact that the level of unemployment in this transition from a wartime to a peacetime economy is lower than in any peacetime year of the sixties.

This is not good enough for the man who is unemployed in the seventies.  We must do better for workers in peacetime and we will do better.

To achieve this, I will submit an expansionary budget this year—­one that will help stimulate the economy and thereby open up new job opportunities for millions of Americans.

It will be a full employment budget, a budget designed to be in balance if the economy were operating at its peak potential.  By spending as if we were at full employment, we will help to bring about full employment.

I ask the Congress to accept these expansionary policies—­to accept the concept of a full employment budget.  At the same time, I ask the Congress to cooperate in resisting expenditures that go beyond the limits of the full employment budget.  For as we wage a campaign to bring about a widely shared prosperity, we must not reignite the fires of inflation and so undermine that prosperity.