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State of the Union Address
Ronald Reagan
January 25, 1984

Mr. Speaker, Mr. President, distinguished Members of the Congress, honored guests, and fellow citizens: 

Once again, in keeping with time-honored tradition, I have come to report to you on the state of the Union, and I’m pleased to report that America is much improved, and there’s good reason to believe that improvement will continue through the days to come.

You and I have had some honest and open differences in the year past.  But they didn’t keep us from joining hands in bipartisan cooperation to stop a long decline that had drained this nation’s spirit and eroded its health.  There is renewed energy and optimism throughout the land.  America is back, standing tall, looking to the eighties with courage, confidence, and hope.

The problems we’re overcoming are not the heritage of one person, party, or even one generation.  It’s just the tendency of government to grow, for practices and programs to become the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this Earth.  And there’s always that well-intentioned chorus of voices saying, “With a little more power and a little more money, we could do so much for the people.”  For a time we forgot the American dream isn’t one of making government bigger; it’s keeping faith with the mighty spirit of free people under God.

As we came to the decade of the eighties, we faced the worst crisis in our postwar history.  In the seventies were years of rising problems and falling confidence.  There was a feeling government had grown beyond the consent of the governed.  Families felt helpless in the face of mounting inflation and the indignity of taxes that reduced reward for hard work, thrift, and risktaking.  All this was overlaid by an evergrowing web of rules and regulations.

On the international scene, we had an uncomfortable feeling that we’d lost the respect of friend and foe.  Some questioned whether we had the will to defend peace and freedom.  But America is too great for small dreams.  There was a hunger in the land for a spiritual revival; if you will, a crusade for renewal.  The American people said:  Let us look to the future with confidence, both at home and abroad.  Let us give freedom a chance.

Americans were ready to make a new beginning, and together we have done it.  We’re confronting our problems one by one.  Hope is alive tonight for millions of young families and senior citizens set free from unfair tax increases and crushing inflation.  Inflation has been beaten down from 12.4 to 3.2 percent, and that’s a great victory for all the people.  The prime rate has been cut almost in half, and we must work together to bring it down even more.

Together, we passed the first across-the-board tax reduction for everyone since the Kennedy tax cuts.  Next year, tax rates will be indexed so inflation can’t push people into higher brackets when they get cost-of-living pay raises.  Government must never again use inflation to profit at the people’s expense.