US Presidency
1961

In the coming months, I hope to let every citizen know what steps he can take without delay to protect his family in case of attack. I know that you will want to do no less. The addition of $ 207 million in Civil Defense appropriations brings our total new defense budget requests to $ 3.454 billion, and a total of $ 47 - 5 billion for the year. This is an increase in the defense budget of $ 6 billion since January, and has resulted in official estimates of a budget deficit of over $ 5 billion. The Secretary of the Treasury and other economic advisers assure me, however, that our economy has the capacity to bear this new request. We are recovering strongly from this year's recession. The increase in this last quarter of our year of our total national output was greater than that for any postwar period of initial recovery.