In a special message last week, I recommended a number of important new measures that can make 1974 a year of truly significant advances for our schools and for the children they serve.  If the Congress will act on these proposals, more flexible funding will enable each Federal dollar to meet better the particular need of each particular school district.  Advance funding will give school authorities a chance to make each year’s plans, knowing ahead of time what Federal funds they are going to receive.  Special targeting will give special help to the truly disadvantaged among our people.  College students faced with rising costs for their education will be able to draw on an expanded program of loans and grants.  These advances are a needed investment in America’s most precious resource, our next generation.  And I urge the Congress to act on this legislation in 1974.

One measure of a truly free society is the vigor with which it protects the liberties of its individual citizens.  As technology has advanced in America, it has increasingly encroached on one of those liberties—­what I term the right of personal privacy.  Modern information systems, data banks, credit records, mailing list abuses, electronic snooping, the collection of personal data for one purpose that may be used for another—­all these have left millions of Americans deeply concerned by the privacy they cherish.

And the time has come, therefore, for a major initiative to define the nature and extent of the basic rights of privacy and to erect new safeguards to ensure that those rights are respected.

I shall launch such an effort this year at the highest levels of the Administration, and I look forward again to working with this Congress in establishing a new set of standards that respect the legitimate needs of society, but that also recognize personal privacy as a cardinal principle of American liberty.

Many of those in this Chamber tonight will recall that it was 3 years ago that I termed the Nation’s welfare system “a monstrous, consuming outrage—­an outrage against the community, against the taxpayer, and particularly against the children that it is supposed to help.”

That system is still an outrage.  By improving its administration, we have been able to reduce some of the abuses.  As a result, last year, for the first time in 18 years, there has been a halt in the growth of the welfare caseload.  But as a system, our welfare program still needs reform as urgently today as it did when I first proposed in 1969 that we completely replace it with a different system.

In these final 3 years of my Administration, I urge the Congress to join me in mounting a major new effort to replace the discredited present welfare system with one that works, one that is fair to those who need help or cannot help themselves, fair to the community, and fair to the taxpayer.  And let us have as our goal that there will be no Government program which makes it more profitable to go on welfare than to go to work.