First of all, I want to thank you for letting me interrupt your meeting. If it's one person I don't like to follow, it's Barbara Mikulski. She always… - Jimmy Carter

We had made the exciting discovery that our lives do not need to be limited to past experiences. The future could be challenging and fulfilling as well.

Now, this new law will obviously save people money, and it will also create jobs because consumers will have more of their paycheck to keep and to spend for goods that we produce. It's also going to save a lot of headaches next April, because 75 percent of all taxpayers will be able to take a standard deduction and compute their taxes on one side of one sheet of paper in one step. So, the multiple goals of economic strategy reinforce one another, they work together. The strategy is designed to cut unemployment to below 5 percent by 1981; to work with business and labor, together, to knock 2 percentage points off the inflation rate by the end of 1979; and by the higher revenues that growing employment will bring, to achieve a balanced budget in fiscal year 1981. Again, I want to stress two points about our economic policies because it's important for you and all Americans to understand. One point is that we aim to balance the budget in 1981 in a strong and healthy economy, with the revenues that come into the Government when people are employed and our industrial capacity is being used. It's not legitimate spending on human needs that causes Federal deficits. It's principally the inadequate revenues that come in from a sluggish economy that create those deficits. Understanding that is a very good move in the right direction. Cutting back programs that really help people is not the way to balance the budget. But even with adequate revenues, we'll still have to make some hard choices about how we spend the taxpayers' money. We can't afford to do everything. The other important point I want to make about the economy is that I'm inalterably opposed to fighting inflation by keeping unemployment high and factories idle. This has been done too much in the past. That approach has been proved in the last 8 years to be economically ineffective and morally bankrupt. If the economy should falter during the years ahead, I will not hesitate to propose the economic and budgetary measures needed to get the economy going again. And you can depend on that.

I normalized diplomatic relations with China in 1979. Since 1979, do you know how many times China has been at war with anybody? None. And we have stayed at war. (Carter said the United States is) the most warlike nation in the history of the world... How many miles of high-speed railroad do we have in this country?... We have wasted, I think, $3 trillion (military spending) ... China has not wasted a single penny on war, and that's why they're ahead of us. In almost every way... And I think the difference is if you take $3 trillion and put it in American infrastructure, you'd probably have $2 trillion left over. We'd have high-speed railroad. We'd have bridges that aren't collapsing. We'd have roads that are maintained properly. Our education system would be as good as that of, say, South Korea or Hong Kong.... I wasn't comparing my country adversely to China... I was just pointing that out because I happened to get a phone call last night.