Five years ago, there was no national program to preserve our environment.  Day by day, our air was getting dirtier, our water was getting more foul.

And 5 years ago, American agriculture was practically a depressed industry with 100,000 farm families abandoning the farm every year.

As we look at America today, we find ourselves challenged by new problems.  But we also find a record of progress to confound the professional criers of doom and prophets of despair.  We met the challenges we faced 5 years ago, and we will be equally confident of meeting those that we face today.

Let us see for a moment how we have met them.

After more than 10 years of military involvement, all of our troops have returned from Southeast Asia, and they have returned with honor.  And we can be proud of the fact that our courageous prisoners of war, for whom a dinner was held in Washington tonight, that they came home with their heads high, on their feet and not on their knees.

In our relations with the Soviet Union, we have turned away from a policy of confrontation to one of negotiation.  For the first time since World War II, the world’s two strongest powers are working together toward peace in the world.  With the People’s Republic of China after a generation of hostile isolation, we have begun a period of peaceful exchange and expanding trade.

Peace has returned to our cities, to our campuses.  The 17-year rise in crime has been stopped.  We can confidently say today that we are finally beginning to win the war against crime.  Right here in this Nation’s Capital—­which a few years ago was threatening to become the crime capital of the world—­the rate in crime has been cut in half.  A massive campaign against drug abuse has been organized.  And the rate of new heroin addiction, the most vicious threat of all, is decreasing rather than increasing.

For the first time in a generation, no young Americans are being drafted into the armed services of the United States.  And for the first time ever, we have organized a massive national effort to protect the environment.  Our air is getting cleaner, our water is getting purer, and our agriculture, which was depressed, is prospering.  Farm income is up 70 percent, farm production is setting all-time records, and the billions of dollars the taxpayers were paying in subsidies has been cut to nearly zero.

Overall, Americans are living more abundantly than ever before, today.  More than 2 1/2 million new jobs were created in the past year alone.  That is the biggest percentage increase in nearly 20 years.  People are earning more.  What they earn buys more, more than ever before in history.  In the past 5 years, the average American’s real spendable income—­that is, what you really can buy with your income, even after allowing for taxes and inflation—­has increased by 16 percent.

Despite this record of achievement, as we turn to the year ahead we hear once again the familiar voice of the perennial prophets of gloom telling us now that because of the need to fight inflation, because of the energy shortage, America may be headed for a recession.