As we work to make the American dream real for all, we must also look to the condition of America’s families.  Struggling parents today worry how they will provide their children the advantages that their parents gave them.  In the welfare culture, the breakdown of the family, the most basic support system, has reached crisis proportions—­in female and child poverty, child abandonment, horrible crimes, and deteriorating schools.  After hundreds of billions of dollars in poverty programs, the plight of the poor grows more painful.  But the waste in dollars and cents pales before the most tragic loss:  the sinful waste of human spirit and potential.  We can ignore this terrible truth no longer.  As Franklin Roosevelt warned 51 years ago, standing before this Chamber, he said, “Welfare is a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.”  And we must now escape the spider’s web of dependency.

Tonight I am charging the White House Domestic Council to present me by December 1, 1986, an evaluation of programs and a strategy for immediate action to meet the financial, educational, social, and safety concerns of poor families.  I’m talking about real and lasting emancipation, because the success of welfare should be judged by how many of its recipients become independent of welfare.  Further, after seeing how devastating illness can destroy the financial security of the family, I am directing the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Dr. Otis Bowen, to report to me by year end with recommendations on how the private sector and government can work together to address the problems of affordable insurance for those whose life savings would otherwise be threatened when catastrophic illness strikes.

And tonight I want to speak directly to America’s younger generation, because you hold the destiny of our nation in your hands.  With all the temptations young people face, it sometimes seems the allure of the permissive society requires superhuman feats of self-control.  But the call of the future is too strong, the challenge too great to get lost in the blind alleyways of dissolution, drugs, and despair.  Never has there been a more exciting time to be alive, a time of rousing wonder and heroic achievement.  As they said in the film “Back to the Future,” “Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.”

Well, today physicists peering into the infinitely small realms of subatomic particles find reaffirmations of religious faith.  Astronomers build a space telescope that can see to the edge of the universe and possibly back to the moment of creation.  So, yes, this nation remains fully committed to America’s space program.  We’re going forward with our shuttle flights.  We’re going forward to build our space station.  And we are going forward with research on a new Orient Express that could, by the end of the next decade, take off from Dulles Airport, accelerate up to 25 times the speed of sound, attaining low Earth orbit or flying to Tokyo within 2 hours.  And the same technology transforming our lives can solve the greatest problem of the 20th century.  A security shield can one day render nuclear weapons obsolete and free mankind from the prison of nuclear terror.  America met one historic challenge and went to the Moon.  Now America must meet another:  to make our strategic defense real for all the citizens of planet Earth.