Now history calls us to press on, to complete efforts for an historic tax reform providing new opportunity for all and ensuring that all pay their fair share, but no more.  We’ve come this far.  Will you join me now, and we’ll walk this last mile together?  You know my views on this.  We cannot and we will not accept tax reform that is a tax increase in disguise.  True reform must be an engine of productivity and growth, and that means a top personal rate no higher than 35 percent.  True reform must be truly fair, and that means raising personal exemptions to $2,000.  True reform means a tax system that at long last is profamily, projobs, profuture, and pro-America.

As we knock down the barriers to growth, we must redouble our efforts for freer and fairer trade.  We have already taken actions to counter unfair trading practices and to pry open closed foreign markets.  We will continue to do so.  We will also oppose legislation touted as providing protection that in reality pits one American worker against another, one industry against another, one community against another, and that raises prices for us all.  If the United States can trade with other nations on a level playing field, we can outproduce, outcompete, and outsell anybody, anywhere in the world.

The constant expansion of our economy and exports requires a sound and stable dollar at home and reliable exchange rates around the world.  We must never again permit wild currency swings to cripple our farmers and other exporters.  Farmers, in particular, have suffered from past unwise government policies.  They must not be abandoned with problems they did not create and cannot control.  We’ve begun coordinating economic and monetary policy among our major trading partners.  But there’s more to do, and tonight I am directing Treasury Secretary Jim Baker to determine if the nations of the world should convene to discuss the role and relationship of our currencies.

Confident in our future and secure in our values, Americans are striving forward to embrace the future.  We see it not only in our recovery but in 3 straight years of falling crime rates, as families and communities band together to fight pornography, drugs, and lawlessness and to give back to their children the safe and, yes, innocent childhood they deserve.  We see it in the renaissance in education, the rising sat scores for 3 years—­last year’s increase, the greatest since 1963.  It wasn’t government and Washington lobbies that turned education around; it was the American people who, in reaching for excellence, knew to reach back to basics.  We must continue the advance by supporting discipline in our schools, vouchers that give parents freedom of choice; and we must give back to our children their lost right to acknowledge God in their classrooms.

We are a nation of idealists, yet today there is a wound in our national conscience.  America will never be whole as long as the right to life granted by our Creator is denied to the unborn.  For the rest of my time, I shall do what I can to see that this wound is one day healed.