Now, next month I’ll place two additional reforms before the Congress.  We’ve created a welfare monster that is a shocking indictment of our sense of priorities.  Our national welfare system consists of some 59 major programs and over 6,000 pages of Federal laws and regulations on which more than $132 billion was spent in 1985.  I will propose a new national welfare strategy, a program of welfare reform through State-sponsored, community-based demonstration projects.  This is the time to reform this outmoded social dinosaur and finally break the poverty trap.  Now, we will never abandon those who, through no fault of their own, must have our help.  But let us work to see how many can be freed from the dependency of welfare and made self-supporting, which the great majority of welfare recipients want more than anything else.  Next, let us remove a financial specter facing our older Americans:  the fear of an illness so expensive that it can result in having to make an intolerable choice between bankruptcy and death.  I will submit legislation shortly to help free the elderly from the fear of catastrophic illness.

Now let’s turn to the future.  It’s widely said that America is losing her competitive edge.  Well, that won’t happen if we act now.  How well prepared are we to enter the 21st century?  In my lifetime, America set the standard for the world.  It is now time to determine that we should enter the next century having achieved a level of excellence unsurpassed in history.  We will achieve this, first, by guaranteeing that government does everything possible to promote America’s ability to compete.  Second, we must act as individuals in a quest for excellence that will not be measured by new proposals or billions in new funding.  Rather, it involves an expenditure of American spirit and just plain American grit.  The Congress will soon receive my comprehensive proposals to enhance our competitiveness, including new science and technology centers and strong new funding for basic research.  The bill will include legal and regulatory reforms and weapons to fight unfair trade practices.  Competitiveness also means giving our farmers a shot at participating fairly and fully in a changing world market.

Preparing for the future must begin, as always, with our children.  We need to set for them new and more rigorous goals.  We must demand more of ourselves and our children by raising literacy levels dramatically by the year 2000.  Our children should master the basic concepts of math and science, and let’s insist that students not leave high school until they have studied and understood the basic documents of our national heritage.  There’s one more thing we can’t let up on:  Let’s redouble our personal efforts to provide for every child a safe and drug-free learning environment.  If our crusade against drugs succeeds with our children, we will defeat that scourge all over the country.

Finally, let’s stop suppressing the spiritual core of our national being.  Our nation could not have been conceived without divine help.  Why is it that we can build a nation with our prayers, but we can’t use a schoolroom for voluntary prayer?  The 100th Congress of the United States should be remembered as the one that ended the expulsion of God from America’s classrooms.