Our economic success and our fiscal discipline now give us the opportunity to lift that burden from their shoulders, and we should take it.
Saving Social Security, Medicare, creating U.S. accounts, this is the right way to use the surplus. If we do so, if we do so, we will still have resources to meet critical needs and education and defense.
And I want to point out that this proposal is fiscally sound. Listen to this, if we set aside 60 percent of the surplus for Social Security and 16 percent for Medicare over the next 15 years, that savings will achieve the lowest level of publicly-held debt since right before World War I in 1917.
So with these four measures; saving Social Security, strengthening Medicare, establishing the USA accounts, supporting long-term care, we can begin to meet our generation's historic responsibility to establish true security for 21st century seniors.
Now, there are more children, from more diverse backgrounds, in our public schools that any time in our history. Their education must provide the knowledge and nurture the creativity that will allow our entire nation to thrive in the new economy.
Today we can say something we couldn't say six years ago. With tax credits and more affordable student loans, with more work-study grants and more Pell Grants, with education IRAs, the new HOPE Scholarship tax cut that more than five million Americans will receive this year, we have finally opened the doors of college to all Americans.
With our support, nearly every state has set higher academic standards for public schools and a voluntary national test is being developed to measure the progress of our students. With over $1 billion in discounts available this year, we are well on our way to our goal of connecting every classroom and library to the Internet.
Last fall, you passed our proposal to start hiring 100,000 new teachers to reduce class size in the early grades. Now I ask you to finish the job.
You know our children are doing better. SAT scores are up. Math scores have risen in nearly all grades. But there's a problem. While our fourth-graders out performed their peers in other countries in math and science, our eighth-graders are around average, and our 12th-graders rank near the bottom. We must do better.
Now each year the national government invests more than $15 billion in our public schools. I believe we must change the way we invest that money to support what works and to stop supporting what does not work.