Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: July 20, 2025
Even today, though nearly 1 in 3 Soviet families is without running hot water and the average family spends 2 hours a day shopping for the basic necessities of life, their government still found the resources to transfer $75 billion in weapons to client states in the past 5 years clients like Syria, Vietnam, Cuba, Libya, Angola, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua.
This country and its leadership has a continuing and unique obligation to the men and women who served their nation in the armed forces and help maintain or restore peace in the world. My commitment to veterans, as evidenced by my record, is characterized by a conscientious and consistent emphasis in these general areas: First, we have worked to honor the Vietnam veteran.
And third, the developed nations must all assist other nations to avoid starvation in the short run and to move rapidly towards the ability to feed themselves. Every member of the world community now bears a direct responsibility to help bring our most basic human account into balance. I come now finally to Southeast Asia and to Vietnam in particular.
In the first 18 months after Korea, after the conflict broke out there, prices rose not 4.5 percent, but 11 percent. During those two periods we had OPA price control that the Congress gave us and War Labor Board wage controls. Since Vietnam we have not asked for those controls and we have tried to avoid imposing them.
During this same period the United States real defense spending declined. In my three budgets we not only arrested that dangerous decline, but we have established the positive trend which is essential to our ability to contribute to peace and stability in the world. The Vietnam war, both materially and psychologically, affected our overall defense posture.
I recommend to the Congress a surcharge of 6 percent on both corporate and individual income taxes to last for 2 years or for so long as the unusual expenditures associated with our efforts in Vietnam continue. I will promptly recommend an earlier termination date if a reduction in these expenditures permits it. This surcharge will raise revenues by some $4.5 billion in the first year.
We have already been able to increase our support for major social programs although we have heard a lot about not being able to do anything on the home front because of Vietnam; but we have been able in the last 5 years to increase our commitments for such things as health and education from $30 billion in 1964 to $68 billion in the coming fiscal year. That is more than double.
We will continue and improve our Nation's efforts to assist those who have served in the Armed Services in Vietnam through better job and training opportunities.
And let me be absolutely clear: The days may become months, and the months may become years, but we will stay as long as aggression commands us to battle. There may be some who do not want peace, whose ambitions stretch so far that war in Vietnam is but a welcome and convenient episode in an immense design to subdue history to their will.
The major immediate goal of our foreign policy is to bring an end to the war in Vietnam in a way that our generation will be remembered not so much as the generation that suffered in war, but more for the fact that we had the courage and character to win the kind of a just peace that the next generation was able to keep. We are making progress toward that goal.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking