Now, this a good record, but it is not good enough--not when we still have an unemployment rate of 6 percent.
It is not enough to point out that this was the rate of the early peacetime years of the sixties, or that if the more than 2 million men released from the Armed Forces and defense-related industries were still in their wartime jobs, unemployment would be far lower.
Our goal in this country is full employment in peacetime. We intend to meet that goal, and we can.
The Congress has helped to meet that goal by passing our job-creating tax program last month.
The historic monetary agreements, agreements that we have reached with the major European nations, Canada, and Japan, will help meet it by providing new markets for American products, new jobs for American workers.
Our budget will help meet it by being expansionary without being inflationary--a job-producing budget that will help take up the gap as the economy expands to full employment.
Our program to raise farm income will help meet it by helping to revitalize rural America, by giving to America's farmers their fair share of America's increasing productivity.
We also will help meet our goal of full employment in peacetime with a set of major initiatives to stimulate more imaginative use of America's great capacity for technological advance, and to direct it toward improving the quality of life for every American.
In reaching the moon, we demonstrated what miracles American technology is capable of achieving. Now the time has come to move more deliberately toward making full use of that technology here on earth, of harnessing the wonders of science to the service of man.
I shall soon send to the Congress a special message proposing a new program of Federal partnership in technological research and development--with Federal incentives to increase private research, federally supported research on projects designed to improve our everyday lives in ways that will range from improving mass transit to developing new systems of emergency health care that could save thousands of lives annually.