Ronald Reagan |
October 28, 1966
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Ronald Reagan
Republican candidate for Governor of California; President, Screen Actors Guild (1947-1952); Actor, Knute Rockne-All American, King's Row; Former television host, General Electric Theater and Death Valley Days
Thank you all very much for certainly a heartening and a very warm welcome. Thank you, Mr. President. I'm grateful for the high officials and appointees of our party, and those other elected officials of our party and our administration who are here today. And greetings to the Governor. I always have to add that because, for several months now, he's been taping everything I say. I'm glad to learn he is of an enquiring mind.
Public officials are elected for one purpose: to solve public problems. And you have a right to ask any candidate about his understanding of the problems facing us, his acceptance of responsibility for solving those problems, and whether he has a fresh approach or whether he just wants a crack at doing the same thing the other fellow's been doing, only he wants to do it himself. And you have a right to know where I stand and what I believe.
Unfortunately, political dialogue doesn't concern itself much in these modern times with legitimate debate of the candidate's true position. My own experience has revealed to me that no candidate can hope to engage in a political contest without being subjected to a certain amount of distortion as to his positions and his beliefs. But I wonder sometimes if we haven't reached one of those moments in time and history when we can no longer afford this kind of middle-aged juvenile delinquency.
During the months of this campaign, and contrary to what some would have you believe, I have tried to talk the issues. I have talked of the problems of this state, and I have made specific proposals with regard to their solution.
I have, for example, outlined a plan that I would propose, in government, for a three-man labor commission to implement our state labor policy and to fill the vacuum that now exists in that area where there are cases that cannot be referred to the federal level. I have proposed and promised a plan similar to the Missouri plan, to take the appointment of judges in California out of politics once and for all.
And while it is true that I am opposed to the theory called "Right to Work," I believe at the same time and have proposed that each union member has a right to the protection of his democratic rights within his union, and therefore there should be legislation giving him a secret ballot on all policy matters within that union.
I have promised to seek whatever legislation is necessary to limit governors of California henceforth to no more than two terms. And, if it wouldn't seem too partisan, I suggest that it's possible to keep that promise without waiting for the legislation.
I intend to seek legislation to reinterpret pre-emption as it has been interpreted recently with regard to the right of local communities to have ordinances for the protection of our citizens. And I would seek whatever is necessary to return to the local communities the right to have the ordinances they once had, so that the police - and I think here in California we have the finest that can be found anyplace in the world - but, so they could protect society and reinterpret this, instead of that fallacy that seems to be so prevalent today that society was organized to protect the criminal from society.
I have made in detail specific proposals with regard to the control of crime, as well as a recommendation to give more autonomy to local school districts with regard to supplementary texts - the right to have a choice; with regard to more flexibility in the curriculum; with regard to not having forced unification from the state level imposed on the local school districts - because I believe this bulwark of freedom will remain just that - a bulwark of freedom - if we keep control, as much as possible, in the hands of the local community and the parents.
Now, I have never (and you might be surprised to learn this) suggested that a tree is a tree, and urged the woodman not to spare the ax. There are few problems that are of more concern to more people or more difficult of solution than the preservation of the very nature of our state. Obviously we can't preserve every foot of the pastoral scene and continue to provide living space for a population increase that is double the national average. But we must oppose those who would fill and level and pave everything in the name of progress. At the same time, there are the views of those who would preserve inviolate completely, and those who would conserve some of our wilderness, still allowing for development for recreational use; and their differences must be reconciled, because there is a place for both.
Now, our party's platform recognizes this problem, and, as a matter of fact, it's part of the heritage of our party. Twenty-two of the 32 national parks in this country, three of the four in California, came into being under administrations of our party. Leadership is needed to form an effective regional body among the two California and three Nevada counties in the Tahoe Basin, to protect the beauty of the basin and the very purity of the lake itself, and this will require the cooperation of our state and our administration with the government of Nevada. It'll require also some control of our own highway department, which sometimes seems all too "guided" by the devotion to the principle of the shortest distance between two points. Right now at Lake Tahoe there was a threat of a four- or six-lane highway along the west shore of that lake, and I doubt if this can be accomplished without destroying a great deal of the sylvan beauty of that area.
Our redwoods are a problem, and, thanks to our public-spirited citizens in the past, we have preserved almost in toto the remaining groves of what can be called the truly virgin stands of big trees. We have some 115,000 acres in 28 state parks, scattered over 500 miles from the Oregon border south.
Now, it's true that I have opposed the present suggestions for the creation of a national park, because I believe, as these have been proposed, first of all they are unnecessary for the preservation of these redwoods which now are preserved in our park areas, but I believe they would be destructive to the economy of the area. As a matter of fact, a few years ago our state legislature made a proposal that if a national park should come into that redwood area it should envision being created without the taking of more privately-held land but should make use of the more than 50 percent of the area that is presently owned by the federal government, including also our own state-held land in those parks.
But now I believe a proposal for a national park has been made that, in principle, all of us should look at with the idea that this could solve that problem. If we have a national park in the area it should be for the right purpose. It should be to open up that area to tourism, to have the national promotion that would help and that would give this area more than the single principal economy it now has. And Congressman Don Clausen has made a proposal that envisions a national park bigger than either of those that have been proposed presently in Washington. It involves the trading and the exchanging of federal and state lands and parklands we now have; and it envisions a park that will preserve not only the redwoods but that will add into it open recreational areas, lagoons, streams, mountainside and many miles of rugged beach and ocean frontage. And while no one at this point can claim to have looked at the plan enough to endorse it completely in detail, I do believe this is the commonsense answer to the problem that confronts us, of preserving both the economy of an area, and preserving the great natural heritage that none of us want to see destroyed.
This entire problem of open space and recreation outdoors calls for imagination, and a willingness on the part of a state administration to innovate. For example, we should look at the possibilities of using tax incentives, because it's not just the area of great outdoor wilderness areas where people must pack up and move in and spend the time there; there is a shortage in all of our urban areas today, and as we continue to grow, for that kind of open space where someone can go in a few moments, for a short period from their home, just for a few hours, out on green grass beneath the trees, to have a picnic, to sit there and just be out in the quiet and the beauty of nature.
And I don't believe that it's always essential that this be accomplished by the acquisition of land by government. I believe there is a possibility of leasing; I believe there is a possibility not yet explored of using tax incentives to induce builders and make it economical and practical for them to design their tracts and their suburban areas and provide open spaces. Some are already doing it, but we could make it more possible for others to do it and to follow that pattern.
I believe that more consideration should be given to the freeway routes through our cities; and I believe that we should be allowed to have committees in our cities, including some of the great architects that we can muster, to present views to the highway commission, again contrary to "the straightest or the shortest distance between two points," views that will take into consideration the aesthetic values of the community in which we live. I just don't believe that anyone in Sacramento knows as well as the people in San Francisco where a freeway should go through San Francisco.
But now, when we talk conservation there's another kind of conservation I'd like to touch upon. I'd like to touch upon human conservation.
Here in this state of ours, in a nation that's obviously the most generous in all the world, I think we can lay claim to being the most generous people of that nation. We have a welfare program that is spending as much as Illinois and New York put together. It is rapidly becoming the biggest single expense item, almost touching on the biggest, which is education - as it well should be. And I'm sure that no one of us would want to change our approach to this; no one of us would want to deny all that we could possibly afford for those who, through age or disability, must depend on the rest of us.
There is another area, not so permanent, came into being, really, about three decades ago in the depths of the Depression. This is to help that individual who is temporarily unemployed, unable to provide for himself or his family. Programs to take care of these people and they were originally envisioned as helping him over a low spot and putting him back on his feet; perhaps giving him the training and the experience necessary to put him out there in a productive job. But someplace we have gotten off the track; someplace we have set out to perpetuate poverty instead of to remove it.
We have people in California who are the third or fourth generations of their families who are living on public subsistence. This is destructive to the soul of a human being, to his very moral fiber, and we should review this program and reappraise and reassess our goals. We should set out now to find out how did we get off the track and what can we do.
As a matter of fact, when you look at the figures, when you see that our population has increased in the last five years 18 percent but the number of recipients of welfare have increased 49 percent in California, and the cost of the program has gone up 100 percent. There is a kind of uneasy feeling that perhaps there's a chalk mark on our door and some people are coming to California not seeking opportunity, but they don't want to work; and if they're not going to work they'd rather not work here than not work someplace else. But whoever they are, they mustn't make us cynical about the vast majority, who, I'm sure, would prefer to be off the dole and out there taking care of themselves in a good job with a future.
Well, I think there's something can be done about this. First of all, I would turn to the administration of the program of welfare. Today we see again what happens when the authority is centered in the state capital and taken away from the local areas. Ask the people who are working at your county level with welfare; ask them how they're chained to typewriters with a blizzard of paperwork and hundreds of reports that must be made every month to Sacramento. Ask them about the more than a thousand separate forms they have to fill out. Ask them about the 22 handbooks and manuals that fill a five-foot shelf, that guide them in their work; and if they could read all of those books, they couldn't keep up with the authors in Sacramento because they made 1,655 changes in an 18-month period.
They themselves meet annually and they give their recommendations to the state. They ask over and over again for a removal of some of the red tape, the regulations that bind them in and harass them. They've pointed out that, actually, sometimes to process a one-dollar special claim, to put one dollar in the hands of a recipient, it costs ten dollars in administrative overhead and paperwork. And they have said this can be changed. They propose something called a Cal-Flex Plan, to give more flexibility and autonomy at the local level, and I think they should have this.
But now we go beyond that. Let's turn again to those people, the able-bodied, the people who, perhaps, with some help could be self-sustaining. And here, too, I've spoken in detail of this issue. A plan that I propose, for the reform that would bring the welfare department of our state, the State labor department, into cooperation with the Federal Job Retraining Program, with all of those many private and philanthropic organizations that are now engaged in human salvage and human training, and into cooperation with the private sector of the economy, because, in the last analysis, industry, and industry alone, has the jobs to give. And when they talk of a war on poverty, are they trying to make us forget that for 200 years the private sector of the economy has been fighting the most successful war on poverty the world has ever seen?
I propose something called JOB for Job Opportunities Board. This would be the amalgamation and perhaps it could take the form throughout the state in non-profit, private organizations or foundations. But I know that this will work, I have talked to industrialists about it. In short, what it envisions is this:
Let me first interject this. Right after the Watts disturbances, you'll recall that the governor pointed out that there were 50,000 jobs that could be performed in our public institutions - tax-supported institutions, hospitals, schools, public buildings, parks, and so forth - work not now being done, but useful work. And he said this work could be of rehabilitating help to the illiterate, the untrained, even the mentally retarded. And he said 50,000 jobs could be provided if we had the money, and he said if he could get a $250 million grant from the federal government, we could put those people to work. But you and I know that those grants from the federal government have their beginning in our pockets, and the money then goes through that circuitous route through the "puzzle palaces" on the Potomac, and comes back to us minus a carrying charge.
Well I suggest that we have the money already, and it takes no more than changing the title of a man's check from dole or welfare check to the respectability of a paycheck and assigning him to perform that service in return for that check. But then, then we come to this other part - JOB, Job Opportunities Board. And Welfare would screen, first of all would get from the private sector of the economy all the information for one central area, for data processing on the need throughout the state for job skills. There's no sense in having make-work programs of teaching someone to perform jobs and there's no demand for those jobs.
In reverse, Welfare would take these people from this work and from the welfare roll, screen them, and funnel them into the Job Retraining Program and into private jobs in industry. Now this is not just something I dreamed up - let me give the credit where it belongs. This is working and working successfully in one area of our state right now, thanks to the private sector of the economy and one man as a leader, H. C. McClellan of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce.
They went into the Watts area, almost while the smoke was still in the air after the riots, and they said and recognized 260 industrialists in a room like this, that they were the ones with the jobs. And they literally forced the cooperation of government with them, and today in the Watts area of Los Angeles they have put some 12,000 of the unemployed to work through job training programs out in industry, to such an extent that recently they were in there combing the area for 35 bus drivers, good paying jobs, and they couldn't find anyone qualified to take the job who was still unemployed.
Now this can work at a state level. In short, we can make welfare spending, welfare investing. We can invest in human beings, salvage them, teach them to help themselves. And then as we save money with a goal for that kind of welfare that in reality should be a goal to try and eliminate the need for a welfare program, we can transfer each dollar that's saved into education and begin to head off the potential recipient of welfare before he reaches that point by giving him a good start in life and the proper educational start.
I'm sure that some of you realize that, doing what I am, I must come to the moment when I look ahead and actually lay the groundwork for implementing my campaign proposals. Now don't translate this into a prediction of victory; while it's true that the polls give reason for optimism, "President" Tom Dewey has counseled against my getting carried away by the polls. No, it's just that the timing is such that one has to be ready before election day to be in motion the day after election day if the voters have so decided.
The Commonwealth Club study group in 1921 had much to do with what subsequently became the constitutional provisions for our state budget, and they provided wisely that if proposed expenditures exceed revenue, the governor shall recommend sources for getting that needed revenue. I have charged this administration with violating that constitutional provision. We have not had balanced budgets, and we have had fiscal gimmicks designed to hide the deficits, and, in addition, these gimmicks were, in truth, tax increases. These involved the advances of the collection of the sales tax. They stepped up and changed the bank and corporate tax. They changed the insurance tax. They eliminated the installment privilege of the state income tax. And each change - and there were others - added tens of millions of dollars each time to the state's revenue, mainly by borrowing from the future. And actually, the state expenditures have been increasing in these last eight years three times as much as the increase in population. Actually, our population increase is about three percent a year, our revenue increase is about seven percent a year, and our spending is increasing at the rate of ten percent a year. And no matter how you add it up, that comes out to going broke eventually.
Now this year's bookkeeping trick was to hide a $240 million deficit until after the election. In January we will be faced with this problem. We have borrowed from the future. Almost makes you think someone's not planning on being around in January. But the Constitution also wisely requires that all state agencies supply the governor and the governor-elect with any information deemed necessary in preparing the budget. And again, with no intention of appearing presumptuous or overconfident, I believe you're entitled to know what one candidate is thinking with respect to the budget.
First, I believe the cost of our state government can be cut by a governor who believes in economy. And this governor would call upon the unique experience and the knowledge of the legislative analyst Alan Post, who has regularly recommended areas where the proposed budget could be safely reduced without endangering essential services. The government of California is too costly, and, as I say, over the term of this administration it has been increasing unjustifiably so with regard to our population increase. The per capita tax load, state and local, is a hundred dollars higher than the national average. Our property taxes are double the national average and increasing twice as fast as our increase in personal income.
Now, cutting costs would be no easy task. For one thing, two-thirds of the total of the state expenditures are beyond the control of the legislature. A fiscally courageous governor could seek changes in constitutional provisions to give the elected representatives of the people more say in the spending and hopefully in the saving of the people's money. In the meantime, the governor could go to work and eliminate some of the layers of bureaucratic fat that characterize the present government structure.
To begin with, some of the administrative positions just don't have to be filled. And again, in the long range view, no business or government can run successfully on plans that look no more than twelve months ahead. We should switch to a program-type budget, relating cost to achievement with the departments and the programs forced to define their goals and engage in cost analysis.
And this brings me to the people who will be doing the fiscal planning and handling in the great affairs of our state government. First of all, the permanent employees, those career employees, those capable people who've made a career of public service, will have nothing to fear from the team I represent. In all too many cases, at present they are limited in their ability to serve because of appointees whose only qualification for the executive post to which they've been appointed, is a record of political service and political favoritism and this isn't good enough. Where of political favoritism, and I think it's hardly essential to even inquire as to their family ties or blood lines.
Now, I've already asked the help of leading citizens north and south, to seek out the best talent that's available on the campus, in industry and business, and among the professions. And we shall try to persuade employers in this state to grant leaves to some of their most capable people to allow them to serve, at least for awhile, in government, because the goal will be to bring modern business practice and efficiency to government. Now, on November 8, if "you know what" happens on November 9, I'll start a series of conferences with all who can and will put their knowledge to work for our state. Partisanship will end on November 8.
You're entitled to know that I have already put together the nucleus of an organization to bring these meetings about, and the guideline will be the elimination of unnecessary and traditional empire building at the expense of the people. I'll make regular reports to you on the progress during November and December, because what we'll be doing is the people's business, and the people have a right to know.
Now, the governor's concerned because I've never held public office - and he's never held any other kind of a job. But my experience in more than twenty years as an officer and six times president of a national labor union, my experience in business, has given me a confidence in the private sector of the economy - which probably does seem strange to the governor, who finds himself automatically turning to government for the answer to each problem. But you and I know how important it is at times to call on someone to solve a problem who hasn't learned all the things you can't do.
Now, if mistakes are made, they'll be mistakes that you're all familiar with - the normal mistakes that go with trying to reduce inefficiency and overhead, and increase productivity and profit. I frankly seek your help and your support. I've checked the Constitution because the governor did get me a little concerned about my right to be a candidate. I discovered that to be a governor of California, you must be a citizen, and I am. And then I discovered that you have to have lived in California five years. You can get on welfare in twenty-four hours, but it takes longer to be governor. I've lived here thirty (years). And then I discovered that you have to be twenty-five years of age, and of course I just get under the wire on that one. But nowhere in the Constitution does it say that in order to be a governor of California, you have to be a professional politician, and I am not.
I tell you now, no one holds a political IOU that can be submitted on November 9 for collection. I don't offer a "New Deal," but I do promise a "No Deal" government. Now I don't solicit your vote on the basis that I think I can go over there and run California by myself, but I ask your vote if you believe in yourself. If you believe, as I do, that the greatness of our state is dependent on our people. If you believe that there isn't anything we can't accomplish if we have a government that believes in the people's ability to plan their own lives and control their own destiny.
This is no time for schemes and schemers. This is a time for dreamers - practical dreamers of the kind who brought this state into being without an area redevelopment plan; practical dreamers of the kind who rebuilt this city after the fire without waiting for urban renewal. This is not only a practical dream, it's a dream that you and I can have if we want it badly enough, and it's a dream worthy of our generation. And if you and I join together with this dream, with a government that will turn to the people and ask the people for the answers to the problems, that will join in and say in some instances, "How can we get out of your way?" and in some instances, "How can we help?" - but a government that will believe in government of and by as well as for the people. Then you and I can start a prairie fire that will say to the people in forty-nine other states, "We don't need a big brother in the nation's capital or the state's capital. We can control our destiny. We can plan our own lives and run our own affairs."
Thank you.
Generously funded by:
Tom Campbell
Dee Dee Myers