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.

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.