As we move into the decade of the seventies, we have the greatest opportunity for progress at home of any people in world history.
Our gross national product will increase by $500 billion in the next 10 years. This increase alone is greater than the entire growth of the American economy from 1790 to 1950.
The critical question is not whether we will grow, but how we will use that growth.
The decade of the sixties was also a period of great growth economically. But in that same 10-year period we witnessed the greatest growth of crime, the greatest increase in inflation, the greatest social unrest in America in 100 years. Never has a nation seemed to have had more and enjoyed it less.
At heart, the issue is the effectiveness of government.
Ours has become--as it continues to be, and should remain--a society of large expectations. Government helped to generate these expectations. It undertook to meet them. Yet, increasingly, it proved unable to do so.
As a people, we had too many visions--and too little vision.
Now, as we enter the seventies, we should enter also a great age of reform of the institutions of American government.
Our purpose in this period should not be simply better management of the programs of the past. The time has come for a new quest--a quest not for a greater quantity of what we have, but for a new quality of life in America.
A major part of the substance for an unprecedented advance in this Nation’s approach to its problems and opportunities is contained in more than two score legislative proposals which I sent to the Congress last year and which still await enactment.